Orlan and the She-Devil

Watching the She-Devil’s surgical transformation from large and ungainly brunette to petite, graceful blonde calls to mind the artist ORLAN, whose use of plastic surgery in the real world, upon her own body, shocked the art world when it began in the 1990s. Since then, she has undergone a series of plastic surgeries that have transformed her face and body. ORLAN says, “To me what we call beauty is the result of ideological, social, political and religious pressures exerted on the body and which is different depending on the historical and geographical context.”

ORLAN has said that “not to talk about feminism would mean that I wouldn’t respect myself.” Even her early work was feminist in nature. In 1977, she made a scandalous art piece called “The Artist’s Kiss” where she “stationed herself outside the Grand Palais, site of FIAC, the French art fair, next to a life- size photo of her torso transformed into a slot machine that she identified as an automatic kiss- vending object. Customers who inserted five francs in the slot between the breasts could watch the coin descend to the crotch, at which point the live artist jumped off her pedestal to reward the purchaser with a real kiss.”

Shown here in wig, she compares herself to the Bride of Frankenstein—a being that was created by a man, for a man's pleasure, because of a man’s God complex. Through her work, she states that female beauty has been constructed for the pleasure of men. Originally, she intended to model herself into a being composed of Venus, Diana, Europa, Psyche and Mona Lisa. As the decades have progressed she has embraced her work’s ability to elucidate of the man-made construction of beauty. Her surgeries have grown more extreme as she has moved beyond the classically beautiful to embrace the grotesque.

The character of Ruth, the She-Devil, is depicted in painfully gory plastic surgery scenes. ORLAN also exposes the environment of the operating room. She uses the environment to create artwork. She uses local anesthesia so that she is awake during her surgeries and makes photographs, videos, and other artworks from the performances. She wears costumes, music plays and poetry is read. Often these performances are live and fed to international audiences in real time.




http://www.orlan.net/

1 Lan Vu, « ORLAN on beauty », Beauty Streams, april 2010
2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQ1Ph-Pprj4&feature=player_embedded
3 http://www.english.ucsb.edu/faculty/ecook/courses/eng114em/whoisorlan.htm