Orlan: Offensive Acts

ORLAN Offensive Acts Carey Lovelace ne Sunday November morning last fall a hundred or so artists, critics, and dealers gathered in Soho in the Sandra Gering Gallery to munch muffins and sip champagne before preparing to watch a minor surgical operation. It was the controversial one in which the French artist Orlan is undergoing a series of plastic surgery operations presented as performances: the overall face-change as an art work. We were about to view Operation Number Seven. Although Orlan, at forty-six, is about face-lift age, nips and tucks are not the goal of The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan (1990- ). Instead, she is attempting to facially achieve a computer-synthesized "ideal" based on features taken from women in famous artworks (Botticelli's Venus, Leonardo's Mona Lisa, Boucher's Europa, a School of Fontainebleau Diana, and Ger6me's Psyche). At the Sandra Gering Gallery, a thirty-six-inch TV set was switched on to reveal the operating room, located elsewhere in New York City, the image beamed to us live via satellite. After some artful preparations, the surgical moment arrived: Orlan, lying down, is injected by a long needle under her scalp. (Camera zooms in.) But this is no simulacrum of an operation, it is the real thing. Soon, the surgeon is sawing away, methodically scraping out flesh from below the hairline. The gallery empties of a third of its audience. After forty-five minutes, the monitor is finally turned offthat 's all for now, announces gallery owner Gering, smiling, to the few hardy souls who remain. Because of its subject matter, because of the particular social moment, which happened to be rife with discussion of the suppression of women by the male backlash, it was first assumed that Orlan's plastic surgery epic was a feminist polemic dramatizing the unimaginable lengths women will go to achieve an ideal of beauty defined by men. However, after some contact with the piece, one began to realize, slowly, uneasily, that this was not the case. In fact, after hearing a few words from Orlan it became clear that not only is she not againstsurgical interventions to alter appearance, she seems veritably positive on the subject: "In future times we'll change U 13 our bodies as easily as our hair color," she proclaims. At the same time, from her bold demeanor, she clearly seems a feminist. What then? The thought comes that what we are witnessing may be a sensationalist attempt to grab headlines, seizing on one of the few things left capable of causing shock. However, since Orlan, through what promises to be a long series of operations, is vulnerable to disfigurement, even death, and organizing the events themselves demands planning and commitment, this too seems unlikely. Then comes the final possibility, the most horrible one, that in watching this artist direct her own body being cut up on video we are witnessing, as Barbara Rose put it in a 1993 Art in America article, "illustrated psychopathology . No doubt there is an extremist character to Orlan's aestho-medical quest. But The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan fascinates: you stand in the middle of a taboo and watch it being broken, you can chart your reactions to the process. In this regard, it is an authentic attempt to expand the perimeters of performance, a revolutionary work located squarely in one branch of the modernist tradition, raising questions about the relationship of identity to the body, of life to art. Still, wrapped in a discourse laden with assumptions and concerns that are intrinsically French ("My Skin, the Text, and the Languages" was the ponderous title of one Reincarnation-related exhibition in New York), it does not translate easily. It grows out of themes that Orlan has developed over thirty years of performance, themes that involve the imagery of Catholicism, a Duchampian methodology, an idiosyncratic feminism. Specifically, it evolves out of her work with a campy alterego , Saint Orlan, a transgressive saint in flowing robes who seems to have stepped out of a Baroque painting. It is this play of identities, involving a conflated and everunstable relationship between artist and role, that is the starting point for this ultimate "change of...