ORLAN (Saint-Étienne, France, 1947).
"Disfiguration-Refiguration, Pre-Columbian Self-hybridizations, No. 21, 1999.
Photograph. Copy 3/7.
Work reproduced on the artist's website.
With a bump on the frame.
Signed, dated, justified and titled on the back.
Size: 90 x 57 cm; 125 x 94 cm (frame).
Orlan is known for intervening her own body, carrying out different aesthetic operations on herself. In this particular case, the piece preserves this idea of body modification and manipulation, however, in this work, the artist goes a step further. She not only questions her own identity, but also appropriates another culture. To do so, she makes use of an iconography associated with different pre-Columbian vestiges, such as the necklace, the shape of the hairstyle, the facial tattoos, and even the physiognomy of the nose, which is reminiscent of some profiles found in Aztec reliefs.
ORLAN's career as a performance artist began in 1964, when he performed Marches au ralenti (slow motion walks) in his hometown of Saint-Étienne. During these performances, he walked as slowly as possible between two central parts of the city. In 1965, ORLAN produced MesuRages, in which he used his own body as a measuring instrument. With his "ORLAN-body" as a unit of measurement, he assessed how many people could fit into a given architectural space. This was the first time he used his body in a performance piece. ORLAN reused this concept in several subsequent projects. Between 1964 and 1966, ORLAN produced Vintages, a series of black and white photographic works. She destroyed the original negatives of these pieces and today only one copy of each photograph remains. In this series, she posed nude in various yoga-like positions. One of the most famous images from this series is ORLAN accouche d'elle m'aime.Between 1967 and 1975, ORLAN produced a body of work entitled Tableaux Vivants. He based them on the works of baroque artists such as El Greco and Gericault. He used inmates as models, wore exaggerated imitation baroque costumes and was inspired by Caravaggesque stereotypes. In 1971, ORLAN "christened itself" Sainte-ORLAN, adorning itself in black corrugated vinyl and white faux leather. Colour photographs of Sainte-ORLAN were subsequently incorporated into photo-collages, videos and films tracing a fictitious hagiography. During the 1977 FIAC International Contemporary Art Fair in Paris, ORLAN performed the controversial performance piece The Artist's Kiss (Le baiser de l'artiste). Outside the Grand Palais in Paris, a life-size photo of his torso was turned into a slot machine. Spectators could watch the coin inserted into the torso descend into a groin before receiving a kiss from the artist.ORLAN founded the International Performance Symposium in Lyon. In 1982, he collaborated with artist Frédéric Develay to create the first online contemporary art magazine, Art-Accès-Revue, on the French precursor of the Internet, the Minitel. In 1990, ORLAN initiated the Reincarnation of Sainte-ORLAN. This is a series of plastic surgeries through which the artist transformed herself into elements of famous paintings and sculptures of women. As part of her manifesto "Carnal Art", these works were filmed and shown in institutions around the world, such as the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Sandra Gehring Gallery in New York. ORLAN's goal in these surgeries is to acquire the ideal of female beauty as depicted by male artists. When the surgeries are completed, she will have the chin of Botticelli's Venus, the nose of Jean-Léon Gérôme's Psyche, the lips of François Boucher's Europe, the eyes of Diana (and the forehead of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa. ORLAN chose these characters, "not because of the canons of beauty they represent... but because of the stories associated with them".