Orlan uses her body as canvas, plastic surgery as medium.
By: Ilene Dube
When Orlan enters the room, everyone pays attention.
The French artist has hair like an upswept black-and-white cookie. On one side of her head, the hair is platinum white, jet black on the other, and up it froths like a tuft of cotton candy.
She wears large round black eyeglasses with wide yellow side pieces, and her eye shadow is color-coordinated. From her neck on a thin cord hangs a glass bubble with a slightly smaller bubble to one side, perfectly asymmetric. Orlan even the one-word name attracts notice, like the 1970s minimalist designer Zoran who rejected the curlicues of extra appellation. It’s not an accident that the name is gender-free.
Orlan certainly doesn’t look her 60 years, although it’s questionable whether this is the result of plastic surgery. During the 1990s, Orlan made headlines when she had a series of nine plastic surgeries as performance art. She rejected anesthesia so she could remain conscious and direct the proceedings, from the designer attire worn by the surgeons to the props of plastic grapes and lobsters, camera operators and communication with the world outside the operating room. The artist had the operations broadcast live by satellite in several major cities, including New York, Toronto and Paris, so she could interact with audiences.
The surgeries were not intended to make her appear more beautiful or youthful, but were conducted as art; she claims to be the first to use surgery as a medium.
"I have given my body to art," she has said.
On each side of her forehead, just above the eyebrows, she has blister-like bumps, covered over with a shimmery, sparkly substance. These are silicon implants that would ordinarily be used to give the appearance of prominent cheekbones. Other than this, Orlan looks like an earthling.
She says the pain of the epidural injection before her plastic surgeries is no worse than the pain at the dentist, and besides, women must endure pain every time they give birth. Orlan claims to be giving birth to a new persona at each surgery. (The project was titled The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan.) In some cases she has taken on the chin of Botticelli’s Venus in the "Birth of Venus," the nose of Francois Pascal Simon Gerard’s Psyche in "The First Kiss of Eros" and the forehead of Leonardo da Vinci’s "Mona Lisa," among others.
The point of the surgeries is not to comment on plastic surgery, says the artist, but to make a statement about the standards of beauty imposed on women.
Orlan recently gave a talk, "This is My Body, This is My Software," as part of Favorite Elements: Works by Orlan, on view through April 13 in the Mabel Smith Douglass Library on the Rutgers University campus. The exhibit is coordinated with a new wave of feminist art sweeping the country, from the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art to the Brooklyn Museum.
A book leaning up against the podium, Unhuman Culture by Daniel Cottom, on which she appears on the cover, is proof that she is not just done up for today’s lecture; this is how she looks every day, whether waiting for her luggage at an airport carousel, taking a taxi or making a drop at the dry cleaners. When in New York, Los Angeles and Paris, where she keeps residences, she might not stand out.
With the help of a translator, Orlan spoke in both French and English and a combination of the two. "I would like to speak in English today but my batteries are not working," she began. "These batteries are microprocessors in my implants, and when they work well they enable me to speak all the languages of the world."
The artist whose photographs of herself draped in white linen or black animal skin that strategically expose her right breast while she holds a cross in each hand, fill the gallery’s walls told the audience her upbringing was not religious. "My parents were libertarian… anarchist… nudists," she said. Her father spoke Esperanto.
From a young age, Orlan studied art history to see how women were presented, as well as in advertising and the press. "The body is political," she said. When she was 17, she invented her first performance piece, walking at an exceedingly slow pace during rush hour in her home town, Saint-Etienne. She would wear "MesuRages" on linen her mother had saved for her trousseau.
"The French consider the baroque to be in bad taste, and I wanted to explore bad taste as I’ve explored beauty," she continued. So in 1976, she created "The Kiss of the Artist," a photograph of her torso turned into a slot machine. She took this to French fairs and fruit and vegetable markets, sitting behind it with a life-size image of herself as the Madonna alongside. For every person who deposited coins in the slot she would, while perched on a pedestal, award a kiss. "It was sexy, maybe," she says, although it led to her being dismissed from a job and losing her studio. ("The Kiss of the Artist" is on view in Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles through July 16.)
In 1979 she had to undergo emergency surgery for an ectopic pregnancy, and managed to pull together a video crew in the operating theater, thus "giving birth" to her eventual medium.
She quotes the Lacanian psychoanalyst Eugénie Lemoine-Luccioni: "I have the skin… of a crocodile but I am a poodle, the skin of a black person but I am white, the skin of a woman but I am a man; I never have the skin of what I am… I am never what I have."
"But with surgery we can bridge this gap," she says.
As for the pain she must undergo for her art, "Christianity proposes suffering to atone. Pain is a form of redemption and purification." Besides, "We live in a wonderful era of pain management. We’re lucky."
After her public talk, Orlan admitted she’s undergone psychoanalysis "and it has helped a lot… I can do crazy things without being crazy."
Also on view here are more recent works from the artist’s series Self-Hybridizations, in which she uses computer-generated photographs to transform her face into Pre-Columbian, African and Native American figures. Orlan plans to have two more surgeries, according to Ricki Zinni Sablove in the catalog accompanying the exhibit: "One to enhance her faculties, and one in which her body will simply be opened and closed."
Banner Year for Feminist Art
Judith Brodsky and Dr. Ferris Olin, organizers of the Orlan exhibit, are co-directors of the Institute for Women and Art at Rutgers, recently formed to promote the work of women artists. Last year the project mounted the inaugural exhibition, How American Women Artists Invented Postmodernism: 1970-1975 at the Mason Gross Galleries, which will travel to the Hunterdon Museum of Art April 8 to June 3.
Co-sponsoring Favorite Elements is the Feminist Art Project, a national initiative coordinated by Dr. Olin and Ms. Brodsky celebrating the Feminist Art Movement. Indeed the movement is in full bloom with the WACK! exhibit (traveling to New York’s P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in 2008); a recent two-day symposium on feminist art at New York’s Museum of Modern Art; the opening of Global Feminisms at the Brooklyn Museum, with its permanent installation of Judy Chicago’s 1979 work, The Dinner PartyDangerous Beauty, at the Chelsea Art Museum in New York, through April 21, with an installation by Orlan.
"…Feminism is not a style, or a formal approach. It is a philosophy, an attitude and a political instrument," writes Roberta Smith in The New York Times, reviewing Global Feminisms. "It is more important than Pop, Minimalism or Conceptual art because it is by its very nature bigger than they are, more far-reaching and life affecting… the word feminism will be around as long as it is necessary for women to put a name on the sense of assertiveness, confidence and equality that, unnamed, has always been granted men."
Rutgers also has established WAAND, Women Artists Archives National Directory, conceived by Ms. Brodsky and Dr. Olin to ensure that contemporary women artists are not erased from history. "It’s a way to get access to artists papers memos, scrapbooks, sketchbooks, diaries, newsclips since 1945, and to remind artists to organize their papers to counter erasure of women in art history," says Dr. Olin, who with Ms. Brodsky has done more for women in art than can be done justice in this space.
The "F" word for feminism is no longer offputting, Dr. Olin says, with all this renewed interest in women in the arts. "We’re now at a point to have a historical perspective and it’s come back shining."
Favorite Elements: Works by Orlan is on view in the Mabel Smith Douglass Library Galleries, 8 Chapel Drive, Douglass College Campus-Rutgers, New Brunswick, through April 13 (it is part of the Mary H. Dana Women Artists Series, the oldest continuously running venue for women visual artists in the U.S.). Gallery hours: Mon.-Thurs., 8 a.m.-11 p.m., Fri. 8 a.m.-9 p.m., Sat. 10 a.m.-6 p.m., Sun. noon-11 p.m. For information, call (732) 932-9407, ext. 13. Orlan on the Web: www.orlan.netfeministartproject.rutgers.eduwaand.rutgers.edu. Institute for Women and Art: iwa.rutgers.edu

