Interview with ORLAN
by Chiara Pussetti, Isabel Pires, and Helena Prado
Let's start with an unavoidable theme: your performances around plastic surgery between 1990 and 1993, which have become paradigmatic examples, appearing among others in various academic books dealing with cosmetic and skin surgery[1].
1) At the time of your Surgery-Performance, in the 1990s, plastic surgery was still little explored by the general public. Your "mission" as an artist was to make people think about the theme of body image construction, the malleable condition of the body and skin, and the possibilities of painless body transformation.
More than 20 years have passed since then: how do you perceive the social evolution of plastic surgery?
In your opinion, is it a question of practices to adapt to body beauty models, or of practices to enhance, or to go beyond the limits of one's own body, or to create an aesthetic that is not in line with the normative canons of beauty?
Surgery is not my job: I am an artist who has used surgery among many other media and techniques/technologies. All my work is to question the status of the body in society through all the cultural, traditional, religious and political pressures that are inscribed in bodies, in flesh, and especially in women's flesh.
I am the first artist to use cosmetic surgery to divert it from its habits of enhancement or resemblance to models that the dominant ideology of the moment proposes to us. I have tried to disrupt the habits in this field.
That is why I asked for two implants that are usually placed on the cheekbones on each side of the temples, because I did not want this operation to bring beauty but, on the contrary, monstrosity, the so-called "ugliness"; if I am described as a woman who has two bumps on her temples, without seeing me, one can imagine that I am an undesirable monster. When one sees me this can change, because those two a priori ugly bumps have become organs of seduction.
In France, at the time of this series of fully staged performances (decorated operating theatre, surgical team and my team dressed in costumes), cosmetic surgery was particularly decried, if not shamefully used, without declaring it, whereas in Brazil, the United States, Argentina, this practice was used shamelessly.
Currently, these prejudices persist because most people consider that it is a question of letting "Nature" do its work and thus undergo it. However, nature constantly shows us the example of transformation because between the head of a baby, then a pre-teenager, then a teenager, then an adult, then an old man or woman, then an almost dead person, the transformations undergone are enormous and often we no longer even recognize ourselves. For me it was important to tackle the mask of the innate.
As the philosopher Plessner[2] states, the human being is an organic being, naturally artificial, which prolongs his artificiality. Indeed, to undergo a face or a body for a whole life without having decided or wanted it, seems to me to be a heresy. On the other hand, society humiliates women in particular by showing them practically unattainable role models as an example to follow; it continues to humiliate them when they go through with cosmetic surgery, rudely pointing out to them that they have "pulled" their skin surgically. If they hadn't, they would have been called "old hides" or unbearable ugly.
I am not against surgery per se but against a certain normative use of surgery that is in line with the dictates of society. I am an artist who likes to live with the possibilities of her time and implement them with critical distance. In this particular case, to go beyond the innate limits of the body and create an aesthetic that is not in line with the canons of beauty, as you so aptly put it.
2) From an anthropological point of view, your work "Self-hybridations" puts the relativist perspective into practice in a very interesting way, in order to question the techniques of the body which, in other times or other places, may have seemed barbaric to the European eye. There is, however, little criticism of contemporary, Eurocentric body techniques.
How did the idea of "Self-hybridations" come about?
Among all my works, an African Self-Hybridization (a series that works from ethnographic documentation and my hybridized face) shows a seductive, happy and resplendent African woman wearing a huge labret. If we were to be put, here and now, such a labret, we would be described as an unwanted monster. On the other hand, in her tribe and at a given time, this labret is an instrument of seduction to make men get a hard-on.
Beauty is only a matter of dominant ideology, in a specific place and time. This is also what I wanted to demonstrate in my surgical operations-performances in which I was dressed in Paco Rabanne or in costumes made by me, as well as my team and the medical team. For me it was a question of completely transforming the operating room and the usual surgeons’ scrubs. The surgical drapes were sometimes fluorescent orange, sometimes acid green, sometimes bright blue, and therefore very different from the usual atmosphere of the operating room. Each surgery was based on a text such as Pouvoirs de l’horreur by Julia Kristeva (1980) or the works of Antonin Artaud that I was reading during the operation-performance.
I also gave orders to the video and the photo and was connected thanks to the rental of a satellite network (at that time the webcam did not exist), hence the name given to this series of operations "Omnipresence". I answered live questions from the public who were at the Sandra Gering Gallery in New York (which presented my work in progress, Omniprésence), also at the McLuhan Centre in Toronto, in Banff, and at the Centre Pompidou where there was a discussion organized between Gladys Fabre, Jean-Paul Fargier and others.
3) Your work "The Liberty Flayed" (2013) suggests a body without skin, while giving it the name "freedom".
How was this work created?
Would we be freer without skin? Is our skin, its color, features, textures or defects an imprisonment of the self?
Is this skinless body a way of visually representing an in-between (in/out, human/post-human, living/death, physical body/self)?
In response, I refer you to the Manifesto of the Liberty being Flayed, which I wrote[3]:
"The images you see are very important to me because it's a visual manifesto with several entrances.
This manifesto shows itself in the flayed form because for me the majority of artists are flayed: indeed, they are always in difficulty when it comes to creating, tearing their works and managing their imaginations financially.
I wanted to make self-portraits in flayed form in 3D video depicting myself without skin, because when you can't see the color of the skin, racism can't take place, since you can't see if the skin is black, white, yellow or red...
On the other hand, I am a feminist and it was important to create a self-portrait showing a heavy, thick, solid body, different from the stereotypes that are usually shown on the catwalks and in magazines, as models we should necessarily look alike. However, beauty is determined by the dominant ideology at a geographical and historical point.
The basic element of this portrait is a reference to anatomical plates but turned towards our times and towards a cyborg image with acid green prostheses. I must specify that each of the prostheses is an element similar to those I have on my temples: they are part of me or are accessories that I used during my performances.
I made this flayed in slow motion take the position of the Statue of Liberty because freedom and liberties are absolutely essential to any individual but especially to artists who use the representation of the body. This is where religious and/or political censorship always manifests itself and if one can no longer show a body, a naked body, its sex, its sexuality, there is no possible expression for these artists.
Currently, Facebook is looking for the slightest piece of breast to blur it and all artistic nudes (or not) to delete them and/or close the blogs on which they appear. We're in an era similar to the time when Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel was being covered and hidden. Strangely enough, those who censor the most, do so in the name and under the guise of religion. Yet, if we consider that God created human beings, we are masterpieces and to show their bodies and/or sexuality is necessarily a tribute to his masterpieces. »
4) Your recent work "ORLAN'oide" sends us into the future. We can't help but think that, if today it looks like scientific fiction, in 20 years from now (as happened with cosmetic surgery) hybrid bodies will be an integral part of our daily lives and robotic and artificial intelligence technologies will be accessible to all.
How do you see the idea of biohacking becoming part of our daily life?
Do you think it reflects the beginnings of a post-human future or on the contrary is it part of an intrinsically human order?
Does the experience of the robotic body exist?
I don't think of it as a post human, but rather as an alter human. To put it even more precisely, one could say human, because everything that is invented and developed refers to the idea of a natural quality and therefore to the human being; let us understand it as a natural way of developing, reinventing, building, deconstructing and rebuilding ourselves, and let us stop conceiving nature as a finite object devoid of all ingenuity and transformation.
As for the hybridity you mention, our bodies are already hybrid. If fools who believe in the superiority of the "white race" were to study their own DNA, they would see that they have genes of all kinds and in particular genes related to an African ancestry common to all humanity. A man and a woman hybridize and hybridize their child by conceiving one.
As long as robots are made of metal or plastic, there will be a problem because our bodies are flesh and I am all of that flesh. I am a body, my body, just a body, all of me a body and it is my body that thinks.
I made a Petition against death[4], because I think, like Laurent Alexandre, of the death of death[5], and that death is a disease inscribed in our biological clock which can be changed. Some species of whales live up to 320 years, some giant sequoias live up to 4000 years or more, and many other species live much longer than human beings, so humanity has drawn the short straw. Therefore, the practice of biohacking will in my opinion be used more and more.
I am neither a technophile nor a technophobe. When I was a teenager, in my wildest dreams, I couldn't imagine that I would have in my pocket an Android that would allow me to communicate with the whole world and send images, have a GPS and be able to ask questions that would be answered. So I think we're absolutely unable to imagine what's going to happen in twenty or thirty years with artificial intelligence, robotics, genetics, medical...
For a very long time I have been interested in new technologies - with the use of the Minitel (as soon as it came out), the photocopier, the Graf 9 graphic palette; then with works such as Bumpload[6], or an exhibition such as Striptease from cells to bone[7] or Striptease of cells in nanoconsequences (where I worked with my microbiota), and then augmented reality, 3D video, robotics, artificial intelligence. I love my time and question it in different ways.
This article is supported by the project EXCEL. The Pursuit of Excellence. Biotechnologies, enhancement and body capital in Portugal (PTDC/SOC-ANT/30572/2017), www.excelproject.eu, which has received funding from the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), under the grant agreement nº PTDC/SOC-ANT/30572/2017 and it is coordinated at the ICS by PI Chiara Pussetti. Universidade de Lisboa, Instituto de Ciências Sociais, Av. Professor Aníbal de Bettencourt 9, 1600-189 Lisboa, Portugal.
We would like to sincerely thank ORLAN and her assistants, for giving us the opportunity to publish this interview and the photos. We also are grateful to Miguel Barbosa for his review of the English version.
Translation from french to english: Helena Prado
[1] Meredtih Jones. 2008. Skintight: an anatomy of cosmetic surgery. Oxford. Berg.
Claudia Benthien. 2002. Skin: On the Cultural Border Between Self and World (European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism). Columbia University Press.
Sara Ahmed & Jackie Stacey. 2001. Thinking Through the Skin (Transformations). Routledge.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmuth_Plessner.
[3] ORLAN « Manifeste en autoportrait écorché / No baby no baby no / Pétition contre la mort / Pour la poésie « dite » ». Inter no 133 (2019) : 26–29. Online: https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/inter/2019-n133-inter04885/91860ac/.
[4] https://www.orlan.eu/petition/
[5] Laurent Alexandre, controversial author of La Mort de la mort : comment la technomédecine va bouleverser l'humanité, Jean-Claude Lattès, 2011, 425 p.
[6] http://www.orlan.eu/portfolio/bumpload/
[7] http://www.orlan.eu/portfolio/orlan-strip-tease-des-cellules-jusqua-los-2/