EMILIE HARVEY GALERIE (EN COLLABORATION AVEC PAT HEARN) NEW YORK USA - PENINE HART GALERIE NEW YORK USA - "ARS ELECTRONICA" LINZ AUTRICHE - "SACRIFICE" CIRQUE DIVERS LIÈGE BELGIQUE - INSTITUT SUPÉRIEUR D'ÉTUDES ARTISTIQUES PARIS FRANCE - "ART FUTURA" MUSÉE REINA SOFIA MADRID ESPAGNE - KUNSTEVEREIN DE SALSBURG AUTRICHE - CLUB LUV ZURICH SUISSE - ACADÉMIE DE L'ART DE BERLIN ALLEMAGNE - LITERATURAHAUS DE VIENNE AUTRICHE - ECOLE NATIONALE SUPÉRIEURE DE PARIS FRANCE - I.C.A. LONDRES ANGLETERRE - KUNSTHALLE DE KIEL ALLEMAGNE - N.G.B.K. BERLIN ALLEMAGNE - NEXUS CENTER ATLANTA USA - CHASSIE POST GALLERY ATLANTA USA - UNIVERITY EMORIG ATLANTA USA - GALLERIA D'ARTE MODERNA BOLOGNA ITALIE - ECOLE NATIONALE DE BEAUX ARTS DE DIJON FRANCE - CAMERAWORK SAN FRANCISCO USA - GALLERY SANDRA GERING NEW YORK USA - ECOLE NATIONALE DE BEAUX ARTS DE LYON FRANCE - CENTRE GEORGES POMPIDOU PARIS FRANCE - NEW YORK UNIVERSITY NEW YORK USA - UNIVERITY OF LEEDS GREAT BRITAIN - LE PARVIS IBOS PAU FRANCE - ECOLE DES BEAUX ARTS DE REUIL -MALMAISON FRANCE - GALERIE CORNÉLUS HERTZ BREMEN ALLEMAGNE - COLLÈGE INTERNATIONAL DE PHILOSOPHIE PARIS FRANCE - ECOLE NATIONALE DE BEAUX ARTS DE BOURGES FRANCE - "VIRTUAL FUTURES" UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK GREAT BRITAIN...
In French, interventional so means: "operation". I consider my intervention an integral part of my work. Excerpts of this text also appear in my videos, my photos and my reliquaries. My intervention and my series of operation-performances have several titles in common: "Carnal Art", "Identity Change", "Initiation Ritual", "This Is My Body, This Is My Software", "I Have Given My Body To Art", "Successfull Operation(s)", "Body/Status", "Identity Alterity", since there are several axes and several possible readings of this work.
A few prefatory remarks:
During my intervention you will see a video without sound. This video correspond to the unedited images of my seventh surgical operation-performance which took place in New York on November 21, 1993. These are rushes that were retsansmitted live by satellite to various sites around the world.
One could thus see me and ask me questions while the operation was taking place.
At the end of my intervention, the video will diffuse into images from preceding operations, a seven-minute montage for an installation shown at the Sidney Biennal, using four videos projected onto the ceiling.
A few words more on these images that you will probably see with difficult. Sorry to have to make you suffer, but know that I do not suffer--unlike you--when I watch these images.
Few images force us to close our eyes:
Death, suffering, the opening of the body, certain aspects of pornography (for certain people) or for others, birth.
Here the eyes become black holes in which the image is absorbed willingly or by force. These images plunge in and strike directly where it hurts, without passing through the abitual filters, as if the eyes no longer had any connections with the brain.
When watcing these images, I suggest that you do what you probably do when you watch the news on television. It is a question of not letting yourself be taken in by the images and of continuing to reflect about what is behind these images.
In the images that you will see, you will note that among the medical personnel and my team, there is a sign language interpreter for the deaf and hearing impaired. This person is there to remind us that we are all, at certain moments, deaf and hearing impaired.
Her presence in the operating theater brings into play a language of the body.
At the end of the conference if there are still some people left in the hall, we can exchange ideas, have a discussion.
Some prehistory:
I am a multimedia artist, pluridisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary. I have always considere my woman-artist's body, privileged material for the construction of my work.
My work has always interrogated the status of the feminine body, via social pressures, those that are in the present or in the past. I have indicated ceratin of their inscriptions in the history of art.
The declension of the possible images of my body has dealt with the problem of identity and alterity.
The first works were done with the fabric of my trousseau:
* Installation and sculptures (Espace Lyonnais d'Art Contemporain).
* Locating the traces of sperm using badly done embroidery on the aforementioned fabric (One of the pieces* photo and text* was acquired by FNAC).
* Transvestism and strip-tease ("Occasional Strip-Tease With the Help of the Fabric of the Trousseau" is one of the works that was acquired by FNAC and is in the collection of the Nouveau Musée of Villeurbanne).
* I did a piece at the Musée S. Ludwig, Aix la Chapelle titled: "Documentary Study: the Head of Medusa".
This involved showing my sex (of which half my pubic hair was painted blue) through a large magnifying glass* and this, during my period. Video monitors showed the heads of those arriving, those viewing, and those leaving. Freud's text on the Head of Medusa was handed out at the exit, wich says: "At the sight of the vulva even the devil runs away".
* The measurements of streets and measurements of institution are carried out in a dress made with the fabric of my trousseau (Musée Saint-Pierre, Lyon; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris).
* I proposed to artists and art dealers to furnish me with paint (their sperm) while I supply the canvas (the fabric of my trousseau).
* The most important performances: The Draping, The Baroque", were done dressed up in my trousseau garb as a madonna (Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Halles de Skarbek, Brussels; Pinacothéque, Ravenna; Theater of Bologna; Arc Biennale, Paris). These slow-motion performances were constructed as an enfolding and unfurling. At the end, I unswaddled a bundle resembling a little child made of a forty meter ribbon of the same fabric. Inside was a painted bread sculpture with a blue crust and red crumb, wich I ate in public often to the point of vomiting.
* On the other hand, I have disrupted several feminist colloquims by presenting myself with a placard, "I am a man [une homme] and a woman [un femme]"
* "The Kiss of the Artist" (1) FIAC 1976 (note that the original French "baiser", here translated with "kiss", means both "to kiss" or "to fuck"), played out two texts: Facing a Society of Mothers and Merchants" and "Art and Prostitution".
* I have worked for twenty years on Judeo-Christian and baroque iconography using my body and my image wich I love a great deal.
The present performance was begun May 30, 1990 in Newcastle, England. It is the logical development of my preceding works, but in a more much radical form.
This performance has two titles:
The first, "The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan", alludes to the character that was gradually created by appropriating the religious images of madonnas, virgin, saints.
The second title, "Image-New Images", winks at Hindu gods and goddesses who change appearances to carry out new deeds and exploits--(for me it is about shifting referents, passing from Judeo-Christian religious iconography to Greek mythology)--something that I do after all my operations.
On the other hand, this title alludes to the said new images--i.e., new technologies--because I make myself into a new image in order to produce new images.
We could say that this performance is a command performance. In fact, English curators, having seen one of my performances at the Centre Georges Pompidou, during a demnstration about the Fluxus movement and Happenings in June 1989, came to see me to invite mee to participate in their festival, to do a piece on the theme: "Art and Life in the Nineties".
With this opporutnity, I found the means to say loudly and clearly all that I thought was negative about artistic production in the Eighties.
I therefore decide to do an anti-performance, as a counterpoint to what was taking place in the panorama of contemporary art.
During these years, the majority of artists (I'm not saying all) had become completely adapted to the society and hyperadapted to the laws of the market.
Often my students at the Ecole Nationale in Dijon asked me for recipes for selling and for joining certain galleries in certain networks.
I was at the other side of the spectrum from this attitude.
Art that interests me has much in common with--belongs to--resistance. It must challenge our a prioris, disrupt our thoughts; it is outside our norms, outside the law, against bourgeois order; it is not there to cradle us, to reinforce our comfort, to serve up again what we already know. It must take risks, at the risk of not being immediately accepted or acceptable. It is deviamt and in itself a social project.
Art can, art must change the world, it's its only justification.
We've too often seen in galleries that follow (even aticipate) the institutional choice, very pretty products, neat and ready for sale, totally fabricated, empty and hollow; or at best clever!... Well produced, nicely turned out.
Art is not decoration for apartments, since we already have stuff for that: aquariums, plants, curtains and furniture...
My work emerged during the seventies--(I should specify that I was twenty-three--I was born May 30, 1947--and that my first street performances were done in 1965 when I was eighteen)--when art was engaged with the social, the political, the ideology; a period when artists were very invested intellectually, conceptually and sometimes physically in their work.
During this time, I had already used surgery at a performance simposium that I organized in Lyon for five years. I had to be operated on urgently: my body was a sick body that suddenly needed attention. I decided to make the most of this new adventure by turning the situation on itself, by considering life an aesthetically recuperable phenomenon: I had photography and video brought into the operating room and the videos and the photographs were shown as if it had been a planned performance.
Being operated on is beyond the frivolous and this experience was very intense: I was certain that one day, somehow, I would work again with surgery.
I wanted to take up again these tropes and ingredients of my work to elaborate a performance without being false to myself, a performance in continuity with previous steps and approaches.
A performance facing the future, using up.to.date techniques. One of my favorite mottos is "Remember the Future".
A performance radical for myself and beyond myself...
It was upon reading a text by Eugénie Lemoine Luccioni, a Lacanian psychoanalyst, that the idea of putting this into action came to me (a passage from reading to the carrying out of the act).
At the beginning of all my performance-operations, I read this excerpt from her book, The Dress:
"Skin is deceveing...in life, one only has one's skin...there is a bad exchange in human relations because one never is what one has...I have the skin of an angel but I am a jackal...the skin of a crocodile but I am a poodle, the skin of a black person but I am a white, the skin of a woman, but I am a man; I never have the skin of what I am. There is no exception to the rule because I am never what I have".
Reading this text I thought that in our time we have begun to have the means of closing this gap; in particular with the help of surgery...that it was thus becoming possible to match up the internal image to the external image.
I say that I am doing a woman-woman transexualism by alluding to transexuals: a man who feels himself to be a woman wants others to see: woman.
We could summarize this by saying that it is a problem of communication.
One can consider my work as classical self portraiture even if initially it is conceived with the aid of computers. But what can one say when it comes to permanently inscribing this work in the flesh? I will speak of a "carnal art", in part to differentiate myself from corporeal art to which nevertheless it belongs.
My work and its ideas incarnated in my flesh pose questions about the status of the body in our society and its evolution in future generations via new technologies and upcoming genetic manipulations.
My body has become a site of public debate that poses crucial question for our time.
At the inception of this performance, I constructed my selfportrait by mixing, hybridizing, with the help of a computer, representations of goddesses of Greek mythology: chosen not because of beauty that they are supposed to represent (seen from afar) but for their histories.
Briefly:
Diana was chosen because she is insubordinated to the gods and men; because she is active, even agressive, because she leads a group.
Mona Lisa as beacon character in the history of art, as reference point because she is not beautiful according to present standards of beauty, because there is some "man" under this woman. We now know it to be the selfportrait of Leonardo Da Vinci himself that hides under that of la Joconde (which brings us back to an identity problem).
After mixing my own image with these images, I reworked the whole as any painter does, until the final portrait emerged and it was possible to stop and sign it.
I do not want to resemble Botticelli's Venus.
I do not want to resemble the Europa of Gustave Moureau--who is not my favourite painter. I chose the Europa of this painter because she figures min an unfinished painting, just like so many of his paintings.
I do not want to resemble Gérard's Psyche.
I do not want to resemble Mona Lisa, as one says and continues to say in certain newspapers and television programs despite what I have said in numerous occasions!
(The media resonance from which I cannot escape, be it televisual or written press, is wont to make claims the meaning of which will be felt in ten years.
I propose that the resulting media images in galleries and museums form an integral part of my work since, whatever their reductive tendencies may be, they allow me to see my impact on a public I'm addressing, a public that isn't necessarily part of the micro-milieu of art).
These representation of feminine personnages have served me as fabric of inspiration and are there deep underneath in a symbolic manner and in this way their images can resurface in works that I produce, with regard to their histories.
Then, with this computer generated work, I went to see the surgeons, asking them to bring me as close as possible to this image.
At first finding a surgeon was a difficult thing. After many rejections, I found one, a cautious one who proceeded to go ahead a step at a time, which allowed me to understand where I was going and to understand what it was possible to make happen in an operating room (2), what the limit were, what my limits were, how I would react, how my body would react: and thus to learn better how to orchestrate the entirety of these operations.
Each operation was like a rite of passage.
As a plastic artist I wanted to intevene in the surgical aesthetic, wich is cold and stereotyped, and to confront it with others: the decor is transformed, the surgical team and my team wear clothing conceived by established fashion designers, by myself, or by young, up-and-coming stylists (Paco Rabanne, Franck Sorbier, Miyake, Lan Vu--an American stylist and his assistants).
Each operation has its own style. This ranges from the carnivalesque--(which is not for me a pejorative word; the word carnival originally means carne vauf)--to high tech, passing through the baroque, etc.
For I think there are as many pressures on women's bodies as there are on the body--on the physicality--of works of art.
Our era hates the flesh; and works of art cannot enter certain networks and certain galleries except according to prestablished mods. Among others, the parodic style, the grotesque, and the ironic are irritating, judged to be in bad taste and often scorned.
I read the texts as long as possible during the operation, even when they are operating on my face, wich gave during the last operations the impression of an autopsied coprse that continues to speak, as it detached from its body.
Each performance-operation is built on a philosophical, psychoanalytical, or literary text (Egénie Lemoine Luccioni, Michel Serres, Sanscrit Hindu texts, Alphonse Allais, Antonin Artaud, Elisabeth Betuel, Fiebig, Raphael Cuir...)
The operating room becomes my studio from wich I am conscious of producing images, making a film, a video, photos, and objects that will later be exhibited; these works attempt to vorious degrees to be autonomous. I try to inscribe again in substance the same ideas that presided in the elaboration of the performances--from wich they issue-- so that the quality of this materiality reveals the essence of this ideas.
In the plastic work, it is less a question of equaling the transition to action and the violence of the act, as iti is a bringing to light the elements of construction of a thought, which affords itself the freedom of transgression of the taboo act. That is to say, like any artist, to have to take off from a position, from a social project and/or an artistic problematic, and to have to find and put to work a plastic solution.
I'm on my ninth performance-operation.
The first six were performed in Europe with two French surgeon, dr Kamel Chérif Zahar, dr Bernard Cornette de Saint-Cyr, and a Belgian surgeon, dr Pierre Quin.
The seventh operation (the most important one) as welle as the eighth and the ninth, were performed by dr Marjorie Cramer, a feminist plastic surgeon in New York.
The seventh performance-operation, wich took place on November 21, 1993 was based on the concept of Omnipresence.
It was broadcast live by satellite from the Sandra Gehring Gallery in New York, to the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, to the McLuhan Center in Toronto, to the Multi-Media Center in Banff, and a dozen other sites with which we were in contact by means of interactive transmission.
Spectators could thus participate in the operation from several countries around the world and in addition, ask questions to which I responded live when the operating procedure permitted.
It was about among other things de-sacralizing the surgical act and making a private act transparent, public.
By the same token, in the gallery, the photographic installation rested on two ideas:
To shaw what normally is held secret, and to astablish a comparison between the self portrait made by the computing machine and the self portrait made by the body-machine.
In order to do this, I placed forty-one metal diptychs in the gallery, corresponding to forty days of exhibition (3), plus one for the final image: on the bottom half of each diptychs was a photo of a computer screen showing a face made with the help of a morphing software. I exposed the "space between", in other words, an image of the exact, unretouched space conceived as the intersection of my face and the portrait of my reference personnages.On the top half of each diptychs, each day we affixed with magnets the image du jour, therefore that of a face first of all bandaged, the multi-coloured: from blue to yellow passing through red and sufficiently swollen. Each metal plate was dated.
On the last day the installation was complete and by dint of that the exhibition was over.
During the last three operations, the largest implants possible for my anatomy were put in, and two more (normally used to enhance the cheeks) were inserted at each temple to create two bumps.
The next operation will probably take place in Japan, to construct a very large nose; the largest nose technically possible (in relation to my anatomy) and ethically acceptable for a surgeon of this country.
This operation will only take place in three or four years as time is neede to find the technical and financial infrastructures and to develop the project as a whole.
But also, because the greatest risk I run is that this very radical, very shocking performance could eclips all the plastic work that comes out of it. Furthermore, my present objective is to produce and to show the works that have come out of the preceding operations, making known the processes of construction of this performance and taking up with the largest possible public the questions they raise.
My work is not against cosmetic surgery, but against the standards of beauty, against the dictates of a dominant ideology that impress themselves more and more on feminine flesh...and masculine flesh.
Cosmetic surgery is one of the sites in which man's power over the body of woman can inscribe itself most strongly.
I would not have been able to obtain from the male surgeons what I obtained from my female surgeon; the former wanted, I think, to keep me "cute".
Feminists reproach me for promoting cosmetic surgery. In fact, although I am a feminist, I am not cosmetic surgery, and I can explain this: in the past we had a life expectancy of forty to fifty years. Today, it has jumped to seventy to eighty (and is constantly going up).
We all have a feeling of strangeness in front of a mirror; this often becomes more acute as we age. For some people this becomes unbearable and the use of cosmetic surgery is very positive in this case.
Obviously, cosmetic surgery ought not to become compulsory! Here again, social pressure must not prevail over individual desires.
Cosmetic or not, surgery is not natural, but taking antibiotics in order not to die of infection is not any more natural! It is a phenomenon of our century, one of many possibilities, a choice.
I am the first artist to use surgery as medium and to alter the purpose of cosmetic surgery: to look better, to look young. "I is an other" ("Je est un autre"). I am at the forefront of confrontation.
Like the Australian artist, Stelarc, I think that the body is obsolete. It not longer is adequate for the current situation. We mutate at the rate of cockroaches, but we are cockroaches whose memories are in computers, who pilot planes and drive cars that we have conceived, although our bodies are not conceived for these speeds.
We are at the threshold of a world for which we are neither mentally nor physically ready.
Psychoanalysis and religion agree in saying: "One must not attack the body", "One must accept oneself". These are primitive, ancestral, anachronistic concepts. We think that the sky will fall on our heads if we touch the body!
Nevertheless, many people have had organ grafts, a good number of crash victims' faces have been reconstructed. And how many more straightened or bobbed noses are out there enjoying the air without physical or psycological problems?
Are we still convinced that we must bend ourselves to the decisions of Nature, this lottery of genes ditributed by chance.
My work is a struggle against: the innate, the inexorable, the programmed, Nature, DNA (wich is our direct rival as far as artists of representation), and God!
My work is blasphemous.
It is an endeavor to move the bars of the cage, a radical and uncomfortable endeavor!
I based one of my operation on a text By Antonin Artaud who dreamed of a body without organs. This text mentions the names of poets of his time. Then it enumerates how many times these poets must have defecated, urinated, how many hours were needed to sleep, to eat, to wash, and concludes that this is totally disproportionate to the fifty or so pages of magical production (as he calls the creative act).
A few words about pain. I try to make this work as unmasochistic as possible, but there is a price to pay: the anesthetic shots are not pleasant (I prefer to drink a good wine with friends rather that to be operated upon).. Nevertheless, everyone is familiar with this: it's like at the dentist, you make a face for a few seconds. And as I have not paid my tribute to nature, in experiencing the pains of childbirth, I consider myself happy.
After the operatios, it is more or less uncomfortable, more or less painful. I therefore take analgesics.
As my friend the French artist, Ben Vautier, would say "Art is a dirty job but somebody's got to do it".
In fact, it is really my audience who hurts when they watch me and these images on video.
I compare myself to a high-level athlete. There is the training, the moment of the performance where one must go beyond one's limits--which is not done without effort (not pian)-- and then there is the recuperation. Like a sportsman who makes a solitary crossing of the Atlantic, we often do crazy things without necessarily being crazy.
"I have given my body to Art". After my death it will not therefore be given to science but to a museum. It will be the centerpiece of an installation with video.
When the operations are finished, I will sollicit an advertising agency to come up with a name, a first name, and an artist's name; next I will contract a lawyer to petition the Republic to accept my new identities with my new face. It is a performance that inscribes itself into the social fabric, a performance that challenges the legislation, that moves towards a total change of identity (should this prove impossible, in any event, the attempt and the pleading of the case by the attorney will form part of the work). To conclude, and before responding to your questions, I would like to read an excerpt of a text of Michel Serres, which serves as framework in constructing the sixth surgical operation.
The text is engraved on bullet-proof glass, 12 cm. thick, with dimension 0.9x1m. In the center of each glass plate is a circular receptacle containing 20 grams of my flesh preserved in a special liquid. It is then encased in a welded metal frame, giving an impression of inviolability.
The idea of these series is to produce the most reliquaries possible, all presented in the same manner, always with the same text but each time translated into another language until there is no more flesh to put in the center of the reliquary.
"The current tattooed monster, ambidextrous, hermaphroditic and mulatto, what can it makes us see, now, under its skin? Yes, blood and flesh. Science speaks of organs, functions, of cells and molecules, only to admit at last that it's high time we stopped speaking of life in laboratories: but science never mentions the flesh, which, quite rightly, signifies the conflation, here and now, an a specific cite of the bidy, of muscles and blood, skin and hair, bones, nerves and diverse functions, that inextricably binds that which pertinent knowledge analyzes".
The second part of this text was not used for the reliquaries but was also read during the operation.
"Now already for a while many spectators will have left the auditorium, tired out by ineffectual theatrical effects, irritated at the turn from comedy to tragedy, having come to laugh and deceived at having been to think; there will be some even--knowledgable specialists no doubt-- who will have understood on their own terms, that each portion of their knowledge resembles the coat of the Harlequin, since each one works at the intersection of many other sciences and at the interference point of almost all of them. Thus their academy--its encyclopedic institution-- formally rejoins the comedy of art".
NOTES
1) We use "kiss" here to translate the French baiser but it should be noted that the verb can mean both "to kiss" or "to fuck" (trans.).
2) We translate ce que l'on pouvait arriver à faire bourger as "what it was possible to make happen" yet the sense has more to do with disruptive, innovative, and subversive acts that form the statements of Orlan's work (trans.).
3) The word exposition in French can refer in this instance both to the duration of the gallery exhibition as well as to the development, in a photographic sense (i.e., it is being documented photographically), of the temporal, physical transformation that takes place in the forty days following the operations (trans.).
ORLAN 1994
Translation Michel Moos and Tanya Ausburg, Atlanta USA April 1995