Surgery as performance art: ‘The Reincarnation of Saint ORLAN’
Does sainthood require bodily sacrifice? Maybe, maybe not, but it certainly does if you ask Orlan, the French multi-media artist who shot to fame after getting nine consecutive surgeries as part of her performance artwork, The Reincarnation of Saint ORLAN. Inspired by an emergency surgery she’d had in 1978 when presented with the knife edge of life or death after an ectopic pregnancy, Orlan took a film crew with her to the operating table. Everything she felt and filmed that day inspired her art and surgical transformation, which she calls “a struggle against the innate”.
Her work often seemed to want to dismantle long-held religious and societal ideals about women’s bodies, using her own to exercise autonomy, surgically enhancing herself in a way that didn’t cater to a certain gaze. However, the element of pain involved presents a slight tension in her messaging because she often decries the physical way women conform to these ideals but contentedly does the same in her work. To that end, she told the Guardian: “Pain is an anachronism. I have great confidence in morphine.”
In 1990, she began working on her own reincarnation, picking various elements of famous paintings and making them a permanent feature of herself. Her forehead was altered to mimic the Mona Lisa, her chin to Botticelli’s Venus, and her mouth to Boucher’s Europa. She is also forever adorned with a pair of small horns that are nestled in her forehead.
She’d lie awake for every procedure on the operating table, often quite cheerful about the whole thing. In her “Carnal Art” manifesto, she writes: “Carnal art is not interested in the plastic surgery result, but in the process of surgery: the spectacle and the discourse of the modified body.”
She seamlessly fulfilled the spectacle element by recording her surgeries and beaming videos of them to galleries across the world. It became a bizarre medical theatre involving poetry readings and music. Designers like Issey Miyake and Paco Rabanne all flocked to make her clothes to wear throughout her surgeries. Orlan somehow convincing a board-certified surgeon to allow for said theatrics during major surgery is the best testament to the persuasive quality of her work.
When pressed on what inspires these surgeries, Orlan is insistent that it’s a political gesture: “It was an act for the woman I was, I am, I will be, and all women, to claim their freedom, which was denied to them.” Beauty was never the goal, and adopting the ideals of Western art wasn’t done in the hopes of embodying them.
“My goal was to be different, strong; to sculpt my own body to reinvent the self,” she explained. “It’s all about being different and creating a clash with society because of that.”
