Lauren Edwards
Spring 2008
Advanced Performance Art IRP
Orlan: Surgery, Monstrosity and Constructed Identity
Interpreting the work of radical French performance artist Orlan is a deeply convoluted act. Her work encompasses and incorporates a plethora of broad concepts, such as identity, gender, culture and race, and also tends to naturally contradict itself with the exploration of dualities—masculine and feminine, narcissism and self-disassociation, technology and the “natural” body. One of the many overarching themes throughout her portfolio is the relationship between women and patriarchal standards of beauty, whether the relationship is manifested in her radical surgical performances, her ‘Reincarnation’ through a series of mostly facial cosmetic surgeries (wherein she first appropriated the features of five idealized historical and mythological women as portrayed by male artists, and later began to transform herself into the ‘monstrous feminine’, the patriarchal definition of monstrosity), or in her more recent work with photo-manipulations, Self-Hybridization (altering her image on a less radical level to conform to standards of beauty in pre-Colonial Mayan culture). These performances are meant to supply the audience with a postmodern feminist discourse-parody of the patriarch-Other relationship in terms of standards of feminine beauty and behavior, and also to assert Orlan’s transcendent non-identification with her natural body in the technological age.
The issue of whether or not Orlan’s use of self-manipulation as a political tool is valid is highly debatable: by enacting cosmetic surgery and defying the natural materiality and mortality of the body, is Orlan really disrupting our concepts of patriarchal standards, or is she furthering the problem by reinforcing the malleability of the body, enforcing standards of beauty by appropriating and highlighting standards of ugliness or monstrosity, and implying that the implementation of cosmetic surgery is a medical/technological solution to a social problem?
It is important to note here that the nature of Orlan’s work and her manifesto is somewhat self-contradicting and ambiguous, and often it is difficult to determine what her ultimate goals are. Orlan states that she sees the natural body as obsolete: “She describes her body as ‘a sack or costume to be shed’, declaring that her work ‘is a struggle against: the innate, the inexorable, the programmed, Nature, DNA (which is our direct rival as…artists of representation) and God!’” However, her work continually seems to associate the alteration of her face with the alteration of her identity, equating her many surgeries with Reincarnation of the Self, labeling the surgeries “a woman-to-woman transsexual act”, and consistently reinforcing the “faciality” of identity, carried on by her Self-Hybridization series. By playing both the role of Patriarch (inflictor) and Other (inflicted) to reveal the hypocrisy of modern beauty standards and the practice of cosmetic surgery, she simultaneously reveals her own hypocrisies, cultural and evolutionary biases which must be considered when analyzing the validity of her work with self-transformation.
Orlan’s ‘Reincarnation’ and the additional surgeries that followed is a portrayal of the Other’s domination by the Patriarchy, Orlan’s objective performance of the roles of Patriarch and Other, and Orlan’s conscious imposition of patriarchal conditions on her Othered body all at once. Her surgical performances are rooted in complex cultural, literary, gendered and social themes, all highly interpretable (especially due to the artist’s vagueness in describing the goals of her work). The first six surgeries are a direct imposition of features taken from popular images of various mythical or historical women, chosen for their representations of Orlan’s ideal image of femininity, idealized feminine figures from the work of Western male artists. During these surgeries she is fully conscious, though she feels no pain
under a local anesthetic, and directs the entire operating room as a surreal and macabre performance, often involving dancers, music, vibrant colors and props, and costumes by world-famous fashion designers (fig. 1, fig. 2). She maintains as much control of the situation as is possible for somebody undergoing surgery, from what the doctors are wearing to the amount of pain her body feels to control over her interaction with her audience via satellite (fig. 3). Her later surgeries move towards a transformation into the “monstrous feminine”, the highlight of these surgeries being two silicon bumps implanted into her temples, giving her face an extraterrestrial eeriness (fig. 4).
Although Orlan’s work is highly complicated and incorporates a plethora of issues and references, for the sake of simplicity we can whittle her work with self-transformation down two three basic goals. Orlan’s main goal is to disrupt beauty standards imposed by the patriarchy on women while exploring and offering new alternative, radical forms of plastic surgery as a form of subversion for her female spectators. “By taking up the position of the monstrous feminine occluded from existing models of spectatorship,” writes Kate Ince, “Orlan challenges those models, and offers new possibilities of identification to her female spectators.” On a more specific scale, Orlan’s cosmetic performances are meant to reveal the hypocrisy and violence inherent in cosmetic surgery as it exists beneath our glamorized understandings of it. “Orlan is self-consciously exploring a means of identity transformation that is currently glamorized in our mediatized society without much reflection.” Beyond these goals, Orlan continually asserts that the natural body is obsolete, a call back to Donna Haraway’s cyborg myth, a goal which has caused a great deal of controversy among feminist philosophers. “In doing so,” writes Llewellyn Negrin in “Cosmetic Surgery and the Eclipse of Identity”, “she accepts uncritically the idea that technology can transcend all bodily limits and tends to downplay the fact that we are defined by certain inescapable biological constraints and processes, such as ageing and dying, which, though culturally mediated,
cannot be eliminated.”
As parodies of beauty
standards and the roles women play in their own self-transformations, several elements of social satire are incorporated into Orlan’s surgical performances. One the most consistent of these elements throughout her portfolio is the continual assumption of the dual role of both Patriarch and Other. In her Saint Orlan persona, she takes up the role of Saint both as a symbol of the Christian Patriarchy and as the ultimate defender of the oppressed Other, simultaneously creating a double-persona 
in the black virgin (fig. 5) and white virgin (fig. 6), representing the new, autonomous woman and the traditional, passive, patriarch-ideal woman respectively. 
Self-Hybridization (fig. 7, fig. 8) carries on much in the same way as her cosmetic surgeries, wherein Orlan is inflicting change and pain upon herself to “expose the pain caused by heedless capitulation to the male desire for a sculpted body”, suggesting the complicity of the woman in her own mutilation.
Orlan’s performances challenge the patriarchal imperative to control the body, since she consents to becoming the object of surgery even while remaining a conscious participant or subject of the process. In this way, she exposes the unacknowledged suffering that comes with any attempt to achieve the images of women as portrayed in advertising by fashion models. Orlan’s opened body exposes her audience to the body’s passivity and receptivity to pain and wounding, and also, in this case, its complicity in the wounding.
Orlan also uses the gore, violence and surreality of her cosmetic surgeries to highlight the “secret world” of cosmetic surgery and the inherent, hidden violence it inflicts on women (metaphorically and literally). Alyda Faber writes, “Her practice of self-directed violence creates a spectacle that violates the viewer and establishes her body as a ‘site of public debate’.”
In addition, Orlan vamps the technological and commercial aspects of her work in a satire of the commodification and commercialization of women’s bodies. “Each performance is videotaped, photographed, and some have been telecast live, thereby making public what has traditionally been kept an extremely private event,” writes Michelle Hirschhorn.
Not only does [Orlan] grant us visual access to the procedure, but through refusal to undergo general anaesthesia, she becomes an active participant heself. In so doing, she adds a third term, during, to the rigid binarism of ‘before’ and ‘after’, and thereby poses a direct challenge to the myth of magical transformation performed on helpless women by the omnipotent medical establishment.
When her long periods of recovery (also documented to undermine the “quarantine” patients are usually confined to following a procedure and revealing the brutalization surgery inflicts on the body) (fig. 9) are over, her surgeries, instead of creating a homogenous, socially acceptable visage of beauty, result in unideal outcomes (fig. 10) that challenge beauty standards either ironically (an unsettling, unresolved conglomeration of ideal features) or directly (features of the “monstrous feminine”, continued in Self-Hybridization). Orlan also raises funds for future surgeries by selling her byp
roducts (“reliquaries” sold for as much as 10,000 francs) in an ironic parody of the commodification of the female body (fig. 11).
Enacting herself (and literally rearranging her body/self) through technologies of representation as well as medical technology, Orlan produces herself as posthuman: her body/self is experienced (both by herself and by her audience) through technology.
As I have explained, Orlan’s surgical parodies are an attempt to expose the hypocrisy and destructiveness of the surgical attainment of normative beauty standards in today’s society and assert the obsolescence of the natural body by becoming complicit in her own mutilation, commodification, and domination for the sake of grotesque satire. “I have given my body to art,” Orlan has stated, and indeed she has: by choosing her own body as a medium of self-representation and as a means for making a political statement, she has made her own body the “site of public debate”. The question is, does Orlan succeed in disrupting our concepts of patriarchal standards of feminine beauty? Does she offer a valid, accessible opinion of the body in terms of identity by offering a radical parody of aesthetic surgery, or is she simply reinforcing standards of beauty by becoming the epitome of standards of ugliness and monstrosity? In addition, could Orlan’s surgeries be further destructive by implying the patriarchal idea that women’s bodies are infinitely alterable and Othered through her assertion that technology is transcendent of the natural body?
Orlan’s work has sparked worlds of controversy among her audience, on the feminist front in the debate over the ethics of cosmetic surgery and in various other controversial discussions. Her work is most often met with a mixture of fascination and repulsion, and Orlan admits that allowing her body to be the “site of public debate” often puts her in a difficult position. Orlan’s work is offensive as a violent spectacle and a direct insult to those who have taken part in the system of beauty and aesthetic surgeries. As Michelle Hirschhorn writes:
Seen from this perspective, Orlan’s actions are thus perceived as deliberate acts of disfigurement which she inflicts upon herself, and so pose a threat to our own hidden fears of disfigurement…Is it possible, then, to assume that a large degree of the aggression which is informed by this type of interpretation, and the accusations which charge Orlan with self-loathing, are perhaps a denial, or a projection onto her, of our own self-loathing?
Because Orlan’s work is ambiguous and highly interpretable, it is difficult to say whether or not her work functions as a political tool or a form of discourse. As parody, her work has the freedom to be indefinite and radical simultaneously. As discourse, it does not. However, despite the incongruities and philosophical socio-ethical conflicts Orlan’s work with self-transformation projects, as a truly unique and rare enacted example of new possibilities for feminine subversion of patriarchal standardization, her portfolio will doubtless remain at the forefront of the debate on new forms of postmodern feminist identity and cosmetic surgery in years to come.
