Volume 3,
Number 1 (January 2006)
Orlan and the
Work of Art in the Age of Hyper-mechanical Organic Reproduction.1
Kubilay Akman
(Mimar Sinan
Fine Arts University, Istanbul, Turkey).
I. Introduction
The French performance artist Orlan has risen to an
extraordinary position in the contemporary art world. Her motto:
“art is a dirty job, but someone has to do it” is given incredible
meaning in the surgeries she has carried out on her body to make
art. In these artistic performances or “Carnal Art,” she transforms
her body and her face in an enactment of a critique of the beauty
concept which she feels is embedded in male power and its
construction of female-subjects in modern Western societies. In
order to better understand Orlan’s artistic philosophy and her
artistic production I wish to discuss concepts from both the Western
and the Eastern intellectual worlds.
This paper functions as a series of interconnected
probes into the work of a Western artist (Orlan), a Western
philosopher (Baudrillard) and an Eastern concept (suret).2
Examining Orlan’s art takes me into a discussion of two central
concepts in Baudrillard’s thought: seduction and simulation. At
first glance we may see Orlan’s art as an example of exactly the
kinds of excesses we would expect from the merger of flesh and
technology in contemporary society. However, as Nicholas Zurbrugg
has argued, some contemporary artists (he refers to Stelarc but it
is also true of Orlan), use technology to “reinforce the impact of
installation art and performance art exploring and manifesting
individual identity”.3
I also wish to point to the usefulness of the concept “suret” in
deepening our probe into correspondences between Orlan’s art and
Baudrillard’s thought. In the end we find that these probes help us
to take tentative steps toward new understandings of old questions
once raised by Walter Benjamin.
II. Surgery For
An Individual Aesthetic Conception
Orlan’s deconstructions of the “beauty concept” are made
at the time when many women are turning to aesthetic surgery to move
closer to standardized beauty as defined by popular culture. Orlan’s
surgery’s have also been understood as art by important voices in
the art world for several years. The critical target of her Carnal
Art, according to Rose is “the hypocrisy of the way society has
traditionally split the female image into Madonna and whore”.4
Rose says that Orlan, whatever the shock value of her art, is a
genuine artist, deadly serious in her elaborately calculated
performances which take place in “the theater of operation”. What is
to stop us from understanding Orlan’s actions as pathological
behaviour or simply as “non-art”? Rose argues that there are two
essential criteria (intentionality and transformation) which
distinguish art from non-art and that both are present in Orlan’s
Carnal Art. According to this view, Orlan’s confrontational works
are aesthetic actions which force us to reconsider the boundary that
separates “normality” from madness, and art from non-art.5
In Orlan’s case, the operating room is her “studio” and her body is
not only the medium and material she uses for her work, it is also
her work itself and a metaphor of resistance against the stereotypes
of aesthetic authority.
Orlan challenges both the notion that the body is unchangeable and
the idea that any changes must conform to the standardized style.
Orlan claims: “I am a woman to woman transsexual act” but her
surgical transformations are far from a sex change operation as they
are not permanent.
Yet, her efforts may be viewed as a contribution
to postmodern feminist theories of identity as she enacts the representation of the celebration of identity as fragmented,
multiple and fluctuating. For Orlan, plastic surgery, used outside
of the context of popular culture, is a way for her to maintain
control of her body. Her project could be considered as an example
of a feminist utopia where the utopia is built on the body.6
Orlan’s decision to turn surgery into art followed an
operation for an extra uterine pregnancy under a local anesthetic
where she played both roles of observer and patient. Her present
operation/performances are directed by the artist and involve music,
poetry and dance. Videos of the surgeries are for sale in the art
market as are samples of her flesh and blood drained off during the
“body sculpting” process. In the “theatre of operation” members of
an audience may also play a role as interactive participants. The
role of the audience is an uneasy one as the surgeons insert needles
into Orlan’s skin, slice open her lips, or may sever an ear from the
rest of her face while Orlan remains silent. Importantly, what Orlan
is doing, and what may make the audience so uneasy, is her effort to
embody the objectification of the so-called “subject” in a very real
way – transcending the border between subject and object. It might
even be read as an important contribution to an old problem in
Western philosophy – one remembers Goethe: “All theory… is gray!”7
III. Body: Object of Salvation
The soul has been the location of salvation for both
religious and secular ideologies. Today, as Baudrillard reminds us,
the body (specifically the female body of fashion, advertisements,
and mass culture) becomes the object of salvation through hygienic,
therapeutic and dietary obsessions.8
In contemporary societies a kind of discourse predominates where the
body has manifested its independence from the soul. Baudrillard
argues that contemporary structures of “production/ consumption”
encourage the subject into a “dual practice, linked to a split (but
profoundly interdependent) representation of his/her own body:
representation of the body as capital and as fetish (or consumer
object)”.9
Rather than being denied, the body becomes the location of
deliberate economic and psychic investment. As such, beauty is now
an absolute, the religious imperative of capitalism:
Being beautiful is no longer an effect of nature or a supplement to
moral qualities. It is the basic, imperative quality of those who
take the same care of their faces and figures as they do of their
souls. It is a sign, at the level of the body, that one is a member
of the elect, just as success is such a sign in business. And,
indeed, in their respective magazines, beauty and success are
accorded the same mystical foundation: for women, it is sensitivity,
exploring and evoking ‘from the inside’ all the parts of the body;
for the entrepreneur, it is the adequate intuition of all the
possibilities of the market. A sign of election and salvation: the
Protestant ethic is not far away here. And it is true that beauty is
such an absolute imperative only because it is a form of capital.10
Within the system the mass media idealize a standardized conception
of beauty through advertisements and programmatic content. The image
of fashion models haunts the self image of women. Every woman
participates in this game at least to some extent and it is the
mainstay of the of the multi-billion dollar cosmetic, dietary, and
hygiene industries. For some the role of the fashion model is to
attempt to create a new female version of perfection for all to
desire. According to Baudrillard’s thought however:
...the fashion model’s body is no longer an object of desire, but a
functional object, a forum of signs in which fashion and the erotic
are mingled. It is no longer a synthesis of gestures, even if
fashion photography puts all its artistry into re-creating gesture
and naturalness by a process of simulation. It is no longer strictly
speaking, a body, but a shape.11
Faced with the popularity of the mediated beauty concept, feminists
experience great difficulty articulating alternative models of
beauty. Some people have even tried to change the rules of the game
and give sovereignty back to the soul, but Orlan prefers to play the
game by its own rules. If the media society defines salvation in
terms of the body, and understands alternatives only in the body,
Orlan opens a discussion in the body as well. For Orlan, her
surgeries – her performances – her Carnal Art, are an innovative
communication strategy. If it is the language of the body that must
today dominate, then she will use her body to communicate. Orlan
deploys the same kinds of surgical operations the aesthetic surgeons
do on women seeking the ideal, but with the goal of creating very
different outcomes. Orlan is of course prohibited from communicating
with the majority of women as the channels of power allow her to
access only a minority. Given her choice of artistic venues and
formats, one wonders though if Orlan really wants to communicate
widely with other women – is she looking for social or individual
salvation? She seems to have achieved an individual salvation in
many respects and in the end, this may be the only kind achievable
for her. It remains uncertain if she is advocating her art as
something for the wider populace to emulate.
IV. Orlan’s Seduction
Everyone seduces and is seduced. Orlan seduces the
media, contemporary art audiences, some art historians, some
feminists, curators, sociologists and social scientists. She may
well be one of the most seductive women of the late 20th Century! It
is unlikely however, that images of her body in the theatre of
operation will be pinned up beside those of Marilyn Monroe. Many
women use their appearance in a strategy of seduction. Seduction has
long been the source of woman’s power in social relations and a
“mastery over the symbolic universe”.12
Baudrillard reminds us that it is seduction which prevents women
from truly being dominated. Masculine power comes from production:
All that is produced, be it the production of woman as female, falls
within the register of masculine power. The only and irresistible,
power of femininity is the inverse power of seduction. In itself it
is null, seduction has no power of its own, only that of annulling
the power of production. But it always annuls the latter.13
The common understanding of seduction in modern society
is that for a woman to seduce a man she would first transform her
external appearance. Orlan goes beyond external appearances to
demonstrate that all parts of the body can be external and subject
for transformation. She seduces us with her lung, liver, and
intestines as well as her external appearance within older meanings
of the word. Orlan seeks to deconstruct political discourses
involved in established meaning based discourses on the body,
replacing them with a primacy of vision. This is once again
reminiscent of Baudrillard:
What truly displaces discourse, ‘seduces’ it in the literal sense,
and renders it seductive, is its very appearance, its inflections,
its nuances, the circulation (whether allegory and senseless, or
ritualized and meticulous) of signs at its surface. It is this that
effaces meaning and is seductive, while a discourse’s meaning has
never seduced anyone.14
Seduction is always a game with traps and one of deception which
lies in wait for us and allows us to confuse it with reality. This
has potentially a great power.15
In the world of hyper-reality, we are all, says
Baudrillard, transsexuals. We have lost sexuality by overproducing
it. This rests well within Baudrillard’s overall evaluation of
society as “trans” (transeconomic, transpolitical, etc.), and leads
us to another correspondence between Baudrillard’s thought and
Orlan’s art. In Orlan’s understanding her art is that of a woman
performing a transsexual act with herself. For me, her art is a
transaesthetic expression as well in that she performs, in a highly
individual style, what Baudrillard says of our entire society.
Orlan may seem an extreme case, but have we not learned from
Baudrillard many times that it is by looking at extreme cases we
learn much about our society?
Orlan has transcended the borders of woman and even the
borders of sexuality in Carnal Art. This is another way to be
transsexual, different than the psychosexual and symbolic meaning of
the word. However the result is that she is in a transsexual
position where she meets others and here she completes the
separation between notions and practices. Orlan’s artistic
self-reflection process is thus opened as have been her internal
organs. Her artistic practice mixes the techniques used in actual
transsexual operations with the concept of transsexuality.
V. Mocking Parodies
Orlan’s artistic production can be understood as a
parody of the practice of the ancient Greek artist Zeuxis who chose
the best parts of different women and combined them to obtain the
ideal image of woman (as often is the case with the digitalized
images of models we see in magazines today). Orlan also selects
different features from famous Renaissance and post-Renaissance
representations of “ideal” beauty and has these applied to her body.
Using computer-generated images, and the skill of surgeons, she
combines the nose of a famous sculpture of Diana, the mouth
of Boucher’s Europa, the chin of Botticelli’s Venus,
the eyes of Gerome’s Psyche and the forehead of Leonardo’s
Mona Lisa. The operating rooms are decorated with enlarged
reproductions of the related details of these works. In her
deconstruction of Western art history she selects these female
prototypes for reasons involving history and mythology:
She chose Diana because the goddess was an aggressive adventuress
and did not submit to men; Psyche because of her need for love and
spiritual beauty; Europa because she looked to another continent,
permitting herself to be carried away into an unknown future. Venus
is part of the Orlan myth because of her connection to fertility and
creativity, and the Mona Lisa because of her androgyny – the legend
being that the painting actually represents a man, perhaps Leonardo
himself.16
Orlan says that, “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”.17
Orlan is not naive in her enterprise. Her use of Western
art history as parody and her simultaneous refusal of this art
historical inheritance fuses humor with horror. Her work is
paradoxical as it belongs to the Western art tradition while
displaying antipathy towards it. A similar tendency can be witnessed
in the works of American photographer Joel Peter Witkin18
and modern American author Chuck Palahniuk19
who struggle against the main principles of Western culture. It is
very interesting that one of Palahniuk’s novels, Invisible
Monsters, is about the transformation and mutilation of body and
face, surgery operations, and related identity problems.20
Orlan’s art could be analyzed with its similarities to
the other performance artists like Bob Flanagan21,
Yves Klein22,
Chris Burden23
and Marina Abramovic24.
However, two important points separate her from the others. First,
among these is pain. Orlan does not suffer from pain due to the use
of anesthesia while these other performance artists feel pain – and
in masochistic terms we can say they desire it. The second
difference is that that Orlan’s art is a profoundly imagined and
calculated totality. She builds her work of art through her whole
life. This is work that is not spontaneous or aggressive – to the
contrary, it is a work of art that is very consciously organized
after detailed planning. When it is finished she does not walk away
from it, she wears it and lives it.
Even without pain art is a matter of life and death for
Orlan despite her tranquility about the operations. There is always
the element of risk as she is face to face the possibility of
infection and death. Orlan sacrifices and spends her body day to day
for art and the body is not an endless resource. Perhaps this is an
intimate kind of postmodern potlatch.25
What is spent and gifted is the body and what is gained is the
artistic pleasure. At the same time as Orlan presents her Carnal
Art, she is reflecting upon the new/revolutionary level that art has
attained. While practicing her theory of Carnal Art, she undertakes
the mission of representation of these practices.
In her Carnal Art Manifesto, Orlan ironically
states that Carnal Art is a self-portrait in the classical sense,
yet realized through the technology of its time. It is an
inscription in flesh lying between figuration and disfiguration that
our age now makes possible. According to Orlan the body should
become a “modified ready-made”. Here the pain is not a means of
redemption or purification as in other Body Art. There is not a
wish to achieve a final “plastic” result, but rather Carnal Art
seeks to modify the body and engage in public debate including a
challenge to the Christian tradition and its body-politics. Orlan
transforms her body into language and with her own words she is
reversing the Christian principle of “the word made flesh”, as in
her work, the flesh is made word. Only her voice remains unchanged.
She judges the famous “you shall give birth in pain” as
anachronistic nonsense. In her Carnal Art performances local
anesthetics and multiple analgesics defeat pain. In her words: “long
live morphine!”
When the artist watches her body cut open, all the way
down to her entrails, she reaches a new version of the “mirror
stage”. Carnal Art’s purpose is to problematize the status of the
body and the ethical questions posed by it. In the most general
sense, this critique also applies to the male body, although Orlan’s
interest is confined, in her work, to her own female body:
Carnal Art loves the baroque and parody; the grotesque, and the
other such styles that have been left behind, because Art opposes
the social pressures that are exerted upon both human body and the
corpus of art. Carnal art is anti-formalist and anti-conformist.26
Following Orlan’s Manifesto we might add that Carnal Art
could be considered as an anti-authoritarian political discourse
because it rejects authority, domination, and codes of the power as
a kind of bio-opposition. In the final analysis, Orlan’s body is
reformed and transformed depending on her own choosing, not by
simply following traditions or fashion. This is perhaps one of the
higher levels of human freedom one can attain in relation to one’s
own body (an ironic goal in relation to twentieth century feminism’s
struggles for women’s control of their own bodies). Carnal Art could
never become a social liberation project as it operates as a guide
to personal freedom, self-control, emancipation and liberation of
only the artist. However, it could be connected to the social
politics in some aspects through a critical version of feminist
theory and movement. In an age when political reason has become
highly totalitarian, the discourse of Carnal Art has many
anti-totalitarian commonalties with the thought of contemporary
theorists including Lyotard, Deleuze, Foucault and Baudrillard.
VI. Welcome to the Desert of Suret?
When we examine the “Carnal Art” of Orlan, the “theater
of operation” or “body sculpting” we frequently encounter words such
as: face, image, appearance, view, reflection, form, feature, way,
style, copy, text, picture, photography, etc. We discuss and
consider her performance art and the recreation her body through
these words. For Western scholars it may come as a surprise to learn
that there is an Eastern word that covers all the meanings of these
words: “suret”. In Turkish dictionaries we see that this word
originally comes from Arabic and has the meanings of appearance,
view, form, shape, face, feature, way, style, copy of a picture or a
text, a duplicate, the apparent aspect of existence in Islamic
philosophy, and in some contexts picture/painting and photography.27
This word which is less often used in Turkish, has no single
equivalent in the English language.
We can agree that Orlan’s transformations involve her
face, which changes continually, before everything. The face is
usually understood as identical to identity generally, and
changeable (slowly), only by time. For Orlan the face changes
quickly – her work is a text in inter-textual relations with other
texts from history and the modern world. She decides her appearance
and view – these are the basic elements of her aesthetic discourse,
through her own way and style. On the one hand she copies paintings
from art history while producing her work, on the other she
reproduces or duplicates herself through photographs and videos.
Suret, in the context of Orlan’s work, is an important explanatory
concept – the kind of concept her work demands.
Walter Benjamin discussed the transformation of artwork
in the age of mechanical reproduction. Today it seems we are in the
age of hyper-mechanical organic reproduction. The artist reproduces
her art in an organic way while using both mechanical and digital
reproduction techniques. This is however, a reproduction that
eliminates the difference between the original and the copy and
again we return to Baudrillard. The power of the concept of suret
comes from the fact that it is located in a sphere where
Baudrillard’s concepts of simulation and seduction are also to be
found – but it goes further for those of us in the East. Suret is a state of simulation enhanced
with a seductive dimension. Perhaps it is even more fascinating with
its Eastern, mystical seductiveness. I think now of the tale
referenced by Baudrillard in explaining his concept of seduction:
suret too is like the redness on the edge of the tail of fox.28 Another meaning of suret, according to Islamic philosophy, is the
apparent, perceivable aspect of existence. In this view, everything
is suret and we can never be cognizant of its precise essence. On
the surface, to some, it may seem like an Oriental version of the
“Matrix philosophy”. But the problem is more complicated.
VII. An Historical Meeting: Simulation and Suret
Suret, given its meaning in Turkish, comes quite close
to simulation, but it is quite possible that these two words have
never before met. This is an historical meeting as one concept comes
from history, and the other one is very explanatory for the extreme
social situations of our age; one of them is purely Eastern while
the other has been defined in the West; one of them includes certain
religious meanings while the other belongs to a post-religious (or
transreligious) age. Despite the different contexts both point to
similar hyper-real conditions – the very conditions under which
Orlan’s artistic discourse takes place.
Baudrillard reminds us that simulation is opposed to
representation. According to the latter the sign and the real are
equivalent. However simulation starts from the radical negation of
the sign as value, from the sign as reversion and death sentence of
every reference and envelops the edifice of representation as itself
a simulacrum:
This would be the successive phases of the image: it is the
reflection of a basic reality. It masks and perverts a basic
reality. It masks the absence of a basic reality. It bears no
relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum.29
Today the simulation process in societies reaches its last phase.
The problem is not the reflection, perversion or masking of any
reality. The simulacra have no relation with an outside reality –
it is the contemporary reality itself. There is no longer
separation between copy and original. Social phenomena are becoming
more and more every day like the reproduction of a digital file.
In many aspects suret also indicates the termination of
differences between original and copy, reality and image, essence
and appearance. According to its philosophical meanings everything
perceived is suret. And it includes the sense of duplicates or
copies like clones. Orlan’s Carnal Art can be understood as the
place of correspondence of these two concepts. While producing her
surets she is immersed in a simulation process. Which face is
Orlan’s and which one is the copy? Her simulacra have lost their
“connections” for a some time now.
Despite all
the similarities between suret and simulation the concept of suret
has an extraordinary correspondance in Orlan’s situation and cannot
be replaced by the concept of simulation alone. In spite of the
philosophical power of the concept of simulation we need suret to
bridge the gulf between West and East in three ways: 1) Suret is a
word that in some contexts indicates human face which has
obvious implications in relation to Orlan’s art; 2) Sometimes, in
its socio-cultural relations in Turkey, the meaning of suret
includes references to art, especially painting or photography; and
3) According to Islamic philosophy, suret is the apparent aspect
of the divine existence. Therefore suret directs us to a new
field of thought which compliments and extends simulation. For an
Eastern thinker to properly contemplate and understand Orlan’s
Western challenge to the West, and to the East, the concept of suret
is invaluable. Suret is an important bridging concept between
Eastern and Western art and nowhere moreso than in efforts to
understand Orlan’s continuous creation of new faces. A face may
exist as a simulation but simulation has not the meaning of face
which suret includes.30
VIII. Conclusion
Orlan’s Carnal Art is revolutionary not only because of
what she does to her body, but in pointing us to new concepts with
which to understand art and our contemporary.31
In this effort, the shadow of Jean Baudrillard cannot be ignored and
I hope that further links between Baudrillard’s thought and that of
the East may follow. Art never emerges in a transcendental area
where it is disconnected from the social, economic, political and
environmental problems of the age. Always, beyond a relation of
determination, there are interactive dealings between art and
multiple other s
ocial fields. In analyzing Orlan’s (or any other
artist’s work) we should not omit these connections. Art obtains its
meaning
only in historical, cultural and social contexts – a context which
today is transdisciplinary. A sociological approach, for example, is
insufficient without contributions from other fields and today, even
multiple languages. In sub-fields such as the sociology of arts,
working across disciplines and entire cultural systems, we need new
notions for new understandings and suret is certainly one of these.
Such are the demands of international transdisciplinarity.32
It helps us to point to a consciousness of a time Walter Benjamin
never knew, probably would not like, but would certainly recognize.
As we continue to try to understand contemporary art, especially
that of Orlan, the concept of suret, alongside of Baudrillard’s
concepts of seduction and simulation, takes us some distance. If the
simultaneous use of concepts from East and West makes the art of
Orlan more enigmatic and unintelligible, well, that too is an
important task of thought.33
Orland certainly provokes thought
–
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