Many thousands of women undergo plastic surgery to alter their looks, but when Orlan does it, it’s called art. Alex Dodd reports
`In the future we will change our bodies as easily as we change our hair colour,” says radical French performance artist Orlan, currently in Johannesburg. She is participating in a conference at the University of the Witwatersrand entitled Histories of the Present.
Others have uttered equally glib prophecies, but Orlan is a woman who puts her money where her mouth is – or, more aptly, her face where the scalpel is. Although she engaged in fairly eyebrow-raising performance art before 1990, she came under the international spotlight with a project entitled The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan.
This was her attempt, through multiple public reconstructive surgery events, to turn her face into a “morphed” amalgam of selected features from old master paintings – Botticelli’s Venus, Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa …
One is tempted to ask what differentiates her from hundreds of women in Johannesburg’s northern suburbs who are able to put off their inevitable confrontations with mortality. Simple answer: she does her thing in public, and she calls it art. She is acclaimed by theorists worldwide for asking meaningful questions about the status of the human body in late 20th-century society.
And, of course, there are her horns. One of Orlan’s famed operations saw the surgical installation of implants centimetres above her eyebrows. Although she intended them to be clearly distinguishable as horns (probably a kind of play on the demonising and vilification she has experienced), her surgeon’s restraint has resulted in them looking more like small fleshy humps beneath her temples. Some call it pathological, she calls it “carnal art”.
“What I want,” she told Femina magazine, “is for women to escape from the pressure of the body image. The most important thing in our epoch, and specifically for women, is that our bodies don’t need to suffer. We can give birth without pain. Pain is an old problem and it doesn’t interest me. The deal I make with my surgeon is that there will be no pain.
“Women must stop thinking they have to suffer. An open body is associated with pain, death, torture, sickness. In most people’s imagination, it’s an unthinkable horror. I’m aware that I’m not suffering, though my body is. But I’m so relaxed that I make drawings with the blood from my body.”
Orlan’s blood drawings are nothing compared to her live performances on the operating table, which are networked live by satellite and reach a world-wide audience.
Dressed in garments by minimalist designer Issey Miyake, she lies on the slab chatting about her friends, champagne, Graeco-Roman iconography … as the surgeon repeatedly injects her face and slips the scalpel into her flesh to cut away sections of her skin.
Clocks on the walls of the operating “theatre” show the times in New York, Toronto, Paris, Toyko where the operation is being relayed, and messages and faxes pour in from as far afield as Latvia.
The theatre gowns are designed by the king of glitz, Paco Rabanne. There are bowls draped with black and green grapes. In one operation Orlan has a model of a crayfish on her left breast. Paramedics double as cameramen.
It was Orlan’s messing with notions of representation – the human face as a changeable mask – that attracted the organisers of this week’s “qualitative methods” conference at Wits to her.
“What she is doing has powerful political ramifications,” says psychology masters student Derek Hook. “It’s a collapsing of the divisions between rationality and apparent pathology.” In any other forum her acts might appear crazed, he says, but because she calls them art and makes points about representation, they become in a sense excusable.
Orlan’s next big plan is to enlarge her nose. She intends to find a surgeon in Japan who will give her “the largest nose technically possible and ethically acceptable for a surgeon in this country”.
Barring the effects of time, humanity has largely conceived of the body as immutable. But, as this century lurches towards the next, that assumption is being undermined in all kinds of ways. Genetic engineering is probably most threatening to that old idea of the body as the pure and perfect temple of the soul.
These days men can become women. With the aid of science, people can make themselves look younger, slimmer, sexier. With her horns and her egg- like head, Orlan is turning our aspiration to normal, consensual notions of beauty upside down. Not everybody wants to look like actress Uma Thurman, she seems to be saying. If you want to look like Cruella de Ville, go for it.
This is just one of the challenging issues that’s currently being tackled at Histories of the Present at the Wits Theatre. The aim of this cross- disciplinary cultural conference – the fourth in a series that’s gathering major momentum – is to bring together critical, political or radical work in the social sciences with similar work in the humanities and arts.
Apart from destabilising commonplace understandings, normalities and subjectivities, the conference aims to investigate questions of critical method and political practice in post- apartheid South Africa.
Other subjects up for discussion include: cyborg culture and the politics of visual transgression; the history of the new South Africa according to Madam & Eve; constructions of South African insanity; and Bafana Bafana and sporting icons.