102 Op. cit. Cregan. 72 103 Op. cit..Martin. 82
historical source material the écorché is an image of the anatomised body, however one
entrenched within both artistic aesthetics and religious modes of representation. The anatomised body having been coded to operate as an implicitly sanctified site carries this through into images that carefully craft it as a familiar yet unfamiliar territory of preordained corporeal knowledge. Martin argues that it is through the process of bodily division that the body’s sacrality is made manifest, and as such, “It is the partitioned and mutilated body, whether criminal or saintly, that becomes associated with a register of sanctity.”104 As we have seen, through an analysis of
images of the body where its interior is rendered unveiled or exposed, its sanctity appears to be implicitly connected to gestures of sacrifice. In this instance what the source material that has been examined reveals is that this sacrifice can be of one’s own body in the name of furthering anatomical knowledge, or in the name of one’s faith in God. In both instances sacrifice is invested with the sacred and it is made apparent by a transgression of the body’s border and reliant on a cutting spectacle.
Whether by taking a knife, scissors or scalpel to flesh, entering into and opening up the body interior for view is always a precarious act. ORLAN was discussed in the introduction to this chapter with regards to her work Suture/Secularism (fig. 3), firstly as the work makes explicit cutting as a performative gesture, and secondly for its potent metaphor that recalls incisions made through the boundary of skin and into flesh. For ORLAN, the act of cutting presents itself as a crucial methodology of practice operating across the artist’s oeuvre.105 ORLAN’s examination of
the surgical metaphor and of performing anatomy draws on histories of the sacred, the uncanny and the abject body engrained within the dissective culture of the early modern period. Her practice recalls the public dissection theatres of early anatomical study, animating incisions into her own flesh as a spectacle that has both captivated and horrified audiences. In the context of this study, ORLAN’s practice can be considered a contemporaneous enactment of sacred anatomy activated through her own decisive cutting spectacle.
Following the adoption of her character ‘Saint ORLAN’ in 1971, the artist’s physical body has functioned as her primary material and her performances have juxtaposed potent Christian iconography with grotesque realism. ORLAN’s artistic notoriety is predominantly recalled in her live cosmetic surgeries. These dramatic performances graphically demonstrate the cutting open, displaying and remaking of the artist’s own body. Though the images that document her surgical operations can appear bloody and nihilistic, ORLAN adamantly distinguishes her practice from explorations of brutality or masochism. She emphasises that her performances are not intended for testing the thresholds of pain, rather that her ‘Carnal Art’ is more concerned “with the relationship between flesh and the word.” negotiating the materiality of the body across the
104 Martin goes on to state, “What is remarkable about this account of the conflation of Christian imagery with judicial torture is the manner in which the discourses of the saintly body intersect with that of the criminal through the process of their bodily partition.” Ibid. 100
105 Throughout this paper ‘ORLAN’ is written in capital letters, as stipulated by the artist. Across a number of scholarly texts both ‘ORLAN’ and ‘Orlan’ have been employed without explanation, however I have chosen to adhere to the artist’s preference in this instance. Published on her website, the artist describes the intention and meaning invested in the chosen identity ORLAN: “To change your name means to invent yourself. After a session of psychoanalysis, I realized that I was forgetting some letters of my family name as I signed my name "morte" (dead) on my checks. I wanted to reuse the syllables which produce a positive connotation while keeping the word "or" (gold), I then added "lan" and from that time I called myself ORLAN.” ORLAN, NetAgence, accessed July 19, 2013. www.orlan.eu.
discourses of art, medicine, science and biology.106 ORLAN’s explorations of flesh contextually
located within a surgical-come-artistic theatre, can be understood to embody Artaud’s aesthetic emphasis on visceral experience and taking hold of the whole anatomy, as proposed in The
Theatre and its Double. It is not the horror or revulsion evoked by cutting into the flesh that
aligns ORLAN’s work with Artaud’s explication of cruelty, rather this connection is better formed by understanding the degree of diligence, decisiveness, determination and irreversibility expressed throughout the artist’s surgical performances.
Beginning in 1990, the series of eight performances that comprise The Reincarnation of St
ORLAN reveal the artist’s directorial control over the surgical spectacle. Each operation focused
on remaking a physical feature of the artist’s face. The plan was for each section of the artist’s face to be remade in order to mirror a specifically isolated attribute selected from various iconic female representations within the history of western art. In what can be understood as a clear feminist critique of the male gaze imposed on the female form, ORLAN’s surgeries would include acquiring the chin of Botticelli’s Venus and the forehead of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa.107 It
is here that the symbolic cutting gesture is enacted with a double-edged blade, ORLAN fragments the idolised bodies synonymous with classical femininity and the representation of Western beauty. In doing so she extracts and isolates singular physiognomic characteristics, creating a series of uncanny fractured parts now decontextualised and rendered alien from the whole. It is then upon ORLAN’s face where the cutting gesture is enacted into flesh, thus revealing its doubled edge. Over the course of her surgical performances this cacophony of disconnected parts becomes disjointedly hinged together; the objective of each performed surgery is to transform her visage through an invasive cut and suture technique.
Throughout these operations ORLAN reads aloud selected texts by French philosopher Michel Serres and the Lacanian psychoanalyst Eugénie Lemoine-Luccioni; text and flesh are once again intertwined through the anatomised body in the context of theatre. General anaesthetic is forgone, allowing ORLAN to continue her recital of texts whilst surgeons cut through skin and into the visceral fascia of her face. The cuts applied to her body can be considered as acute, controlled and decisive, reflecting Artaud’s understanding of cruelty as strictness, as opposed to a cutting gesture that can be repressively inflicted or intentionally sadistic. Unlike Marina Abramovic’s infamous surrender of her own body in Rhythm 0 (1974), ORLAN, though she does not literally handle the scalpel, remains in control of the knife applied to her flesh. This agency over the knife recalls both the anatomist who prioritised tactile interaction, as well as the self-flaying écorchés examined earlier in this chapter. The artist is complicit and willing in her own dissection: throughout the performances it’s as if ORLAN’s body becomes the animate corpse.
106 Orlan quoted in ‘Psychic Weight’ by Dominic Johnson. See Simon Donger, Simon Shepard and ORLAN, ed. Orlan: A
Hybrid of Body Artworks (Oxon: Routledge, 2010), 90. Dominic Johnson understands Orlan’s rejection of pain within the
context of her performances as a metaphor for the “lived relation between pleasure and pain”, suggesting that the desire for pleasure is often to deny or derail the affect of pain. Johnson quotes Orlan: “I affirm it again today, I refuse pain. My work is about pleasure and sensuousness, it does not leave any place to suffering. The reincarnation of St ORLAN is not the story of a martyr but of a character that dissolves.” Ibid. 85
107 Other surgical operations were intended to realise the following facial attributes: the nose of Diana the Huntress (Unknown sculptor c. 16th century, School of Fontainbleau); the mouth of Europa from François Boucher’s The Rape of
Europa (c.1732-1734); the eyes of Psyche from François Gérard’s Cupid and Psyche (1798). See Ince, Kate. Orlan: Millenial Female. Edited by Joanne B. Eicher, Dress, Body, Culture (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 6.
In this respect one can recall the previous discussion of Martin’s scholarship, who proposed that the presence of an anatomising gaze that occurs through the visual coding of the body, in turn rendering it as a site for the production of knowledge. Martin’s notion of the anatomising gaze offered up by the Vesalian écorchés is palpably applicable to ORLAN, “the corpse, in an act of animated compliance that marks it also as an agent, seems to not only sanction its own
destruction, but also to actually desire it”.108
This is no better demonstrated than in the work Omnipresence (fig. 20), the title given to the seventh surgery of the performances staged as part of The Reincarnation of St ORLAN. It is of particular interest given that the entire surgical procedure was broadcast live via satellite to galleries and art institutions across North America, Canada and Europe. These included Sandra Gering gallery, New York; the Centre George Pompidou, Paris; and the Banff Centre, Calgary.109
Throughout the surgical procedure the artist remains lucid, responsive and able to reply to questions posed by viewers at the various live feed locations. In Omnipresence there is a notable absence of any reference to a lifeless body or the passive supine corpse. The titling of the surgery alone suggests an occupation, a presence exerted in which ORLAN remains a willing and active participant in the manipulation of her own flesh. This consciousness achieved through localised anaesthetic reflects the active control ORLAN asserts over her own body under the knife.110
Within the surgical space, like that of the anatomy theatre, exists a power dynamic where control is exerted by the surgeon or anatomist over the submissive body subject. ORLAN’s inversion of this power dynamic recalls the self-flaying image of the écorché in which the body is represented as a complicit and willing participant in its own dissection. Through ORLAN’s governance of the cutting gesture applied to her own body, she evokes the slippage previously discussed and expressed by Martin between anatomist and corpse, agent and patient. A series of dual embodiments emblematic of life and death.
Throughout the period of ORLAN’s surgical performances, the operating room is presented as a dramatic pastiche of the Baroque and carnival. This aesthetic has played an important role in denying her surgical works any sense of clinical neutrality. Recalling the earlier analysis of the Bolognese Archiginnasio theatre, it became apparent that every architectural facet was ornamentally encoded with celestial and theological meaning. ORLAN carries this currency of decorative symbolism into her own operating room. There are opulent marble urns filled with fruits that appear as excessive classical finishes, but also as ripened offerings gifted to a deity or placed at a sacred site. ORLAN and her team of surgeons and videographers have also worn costumes designed by contemporary fashion designers Paco Rabanne, Issey Miyake and Walter