page 1 – ‘Orlan is a French multimedia and performance artist whose performances over the last decade have consisted of cosmetic surgery. In 1990 she took the term ‘operating theatre’ literally and embarked on a project entitled ‘The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan’, which has consisted of performing – remaining conscious throughout, photographing, filming and broadcasting – a series of operations to totally remodel her face and body, and thus her identity.’
page 2 – ‘It was in 1971 that Orlan adopted the persona of Saint Orlan, and much of her work of the 1970’s and 1980’s drew extensively on biblical and Catholic personae and on other religious iconography, and was set up in churches. The attitudes to institutional religion struck in these installations and performances – from ornate pastiche to pointedly disrespectful parody – tapped and exploited a rich source, the conflict-ridden store of imagery in Catholic art history in which sexuality and religion coincide. Religion imagery has also abounded in the staging of Orlan’s operations, and it is difficult to ignore the parallel between religious martyrdom and the suffering (although Orlan argues it otherwise) inflicted by surgery undergone for aesthetic reasons.’
page 6 – ‘The first official instalment of Orlan’s surgical self-reinvention took place on 30 May 1990. It was the beginning of a planned sequence of operations, each of which was to focus on a specific feature of Orlan’s face. There was no one model for Orlan’s self-remodelling: each feature is surgically resculpted to match a specific feature of a different great icon in the history of Western art: the nose of a famous unattributed School of Fontainebleau sculpture of Diana, the mouth of Boucher’s Europa, the forehead of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, the chin of Botticelli’s Venus and the eyes of Gerard’s Psyche. Pastiche or parody of the fetishistic fragmentation of the female body by male artists is clearly intended.’
page 8 – ‘Her multimedia and performance work has been a consistent and probing investigation of human identity – gender identity, but also cultural, national, personal, and bodily identity – in an age where identity has become the most important question.’
page 12 – ‘A commentary indicating derision for the institution of marriage is evident in Orlan’s decision to turn the very materials intended for the private ‘sacrosanct’ spaces of her marital home to use in the public and visible arena of an art gallery.’
page 13 – ‘After adapting the persona of Saint Orlan in 1971, Orlan started to perform saintliness by exhibiting and having herself photographed draped in billowing robes made of fabrics such as black vinyl and white leatherette. According to the critic Barbara Rose, the incarnation of Saint Orlan ‘focused on the hypocrisy of the way society has traditionally split the female image into madonna and whore.’ (Rose, 1993, 84)
page 21 – ‘A party atmosphere prevails in the operating theatre while Orlan’s surgery is going on. Gone is the hushed sobriety we associate with this hi-tech clinical cell; in its place, in addition to the extraordinary costumes worn by Orlan and the medical personal… Props such as baskets laden with exotic fruit and the crosses and devil’s fork brandished by Orlan from her supine position on the operating table carry the connotations of high art and religious painting into this weirdly hybrid and cultural space.’
page 22 – ‘Jeremy Scott produced a first collection in October 1996 that included medical imagery – silhouettes made of hospital sheets – and a second in March 1997 called ‘Body Modicfication‘.’
page 23 – ‘W< paid homage to Orlan in one of his defiles by making up his models with bumps on their foreheads like those surgically acquired by Orlan in ‘Omnipresence’ 1998. The aesthetic preferences shown by this idea were very obvious in his Spring/Summer 1998 collection ‘A fetish for Beauty’ which included a section called ‘Birds from Outer Space’. Bandaged heads, goggles for eyes and mouth and monstrous masks featured among these designs, adding up to an aesthetic of mutilation and monstrosity, advertised by the slogans ‘I Scare Myself. Humans are Monsters are Humans. I’m deranged. Who are today’s freaks? Mutilate- radiate – fascinate.’
page 27 – ‘In the dress and fashion industry the object is most often the female body… Body and dress function as an opposition which brings more familiar sets of binary oppositions to mind – depth/ surface, nature/ culture foremost amongst them. If the body, at least prior to the advent of recent feminist theory which has stressed its discursivity and its constructedness, is often though of as a (natural) object, dress is, by contrast, studied for its signifying properties, and if conceived of as a system, fir its semiotics. Dress is social and cultural, even superficial: in the words of the German philosopher and sociologist Georg Simmel, it is the superfluity of adornment which ‘allows the mere having of the person to become a visible quality of its being.’
page 28 – ‘Piercing, tattooing, scarification and cosmetic surgery make up a group of practices which all involve the skin, and have all risen to prominence in the West in the 1990’s. They are a subset of a larger group of activities that includes transsexualism, bodybuilding and rarer practices such as waist training… now known by the umbrella term ‘body modification’. – Linda Grant, ‘Written on the body’.
page 28 – ‘In all these body modification activities, it is the skin which is being worked on. The skin has become a site of investigation and an element in the dress of the people whose bodies have been scarred, pierced or tattooed.’ Dave Boothroyd – ‘Rewriting the Skin’.
page 33 – ‘fellow – psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu, whose concept of the ‘Moi – pear’ (‘I-skin’ or ego-skin), posits a coincidence of the child’s developing ego during the early stages of it’s development to represent itself as as an ego containing psychic contents on the basic of its experience of the body’s surface. Anzieu’s concept of the ‘Moi-peau’ radicalises the importance of the projection of bodily surfaces to the formation of the ego seen in Freud’s ‘Bodily Ego’ and in Lacan’s concept of ‘the imaginary’. As with Emmanuel Levinas’s work on the skin, the incorporation of the skin as an organ of sensibility into ego-formation suggests the ego is a more sensitive and more fragile entity then it is often considered to be’.
page 34 – ‘What Orlan is doing when she places her body into a specificity of performances and rebels against the passivity and chastity of an objectified subject of classical art history.’
page 34 – ‘What Orlan is doing when she places her body into a specific environment as a measure can be seen as an instance or citation anthropometry, which is a science consisting of the collection of the measurements of different human bodies for use by professional engineers and designers. According to Anne Balsamo, a feminist commentator on technology snd the gendered body, anthropometry is a field with which many cosmetic surgeons have some familiarity.’
page 35 – ‘The parallel of Orlan’s measuring with the practice of anthropometry brings out two aspects of her actions. The first is that her body is female and that it’s use as a measure is already different from the use of the male body that has traditionally lain behind the construction of systems of measurement.’
page 35 – ‘There is a striking affinity between Orlan’s measurings and the reflections on the relationship of gender to the use of the body in space made by Christine Battersby in her article ‘Her Body / Her Boundaries’. Within this larger problematic the specific issues Battersby investigates are containment and bodily boundaries, and she mentions fashion and cosmetic surgery as highly significant methods by which women may discipline the boundaries of their bodies’.
page 37 – ‘Battersby ends by specifying that the new feminist metaphysics she is calling for ‘will not appeal to an unsymbolised imaginary’.
page 37 – ‘Lacan’s concept of the imaginary is related to his highly influential concept of the mirror stage according to which a child’s first glimpse of a unified image of its bodily is a key moment in the formation of its identity. Whereas the mirror stage describes a particular moment in childhood development, the imaginary designates an entire order which overlaps with the pre-Oedipal mirror stage, but also describes subsequent operation of the ego, such as identifications and falling in love. Although the imaginary is a concept particular to Lacan, and not formulated as such by Freud the role of the body – image in its formation has striking similarities with Freud’s notion that the mental projection of bodily surfaces contributes significantly to the formation of the ego.’
page 37 – ‘One idea which follows from the psychoanalytic conception of the imaginary in particular is that it revolves the specular image in mental life. Since this image is based upon the outline or ‘envelope’ of the body, dress, as well as body shape, will play a vital part in imaginary formations. Furthermore, the work of psychoanalysts has revealed that the limits of the body as perceived by the subject can undergo displacement, so that which the subject feels connected, such as its home, or a particular room in that home, act as extensions of its body image, and are as actively involved in the imaginary as the (dressed or undressed) profile of the body’.
page 38 – ‘The last important feature of Luce Irigaray’s imaginary distinguishes her from Cornelius Contoriadis too. This is that for Irigaray, the imaginary is sexuate: in other words, it becomes meaningful to speak of a male and female imaginary respectively, because the imaginary bears the morphological marks of the gendered body. The body which shapes the social imaginary is not an empirical but already a symbolic one, in which a metaphorical relationship to anatomy lends particular shape-related values to thought and culture. This enables Irigaray to argue that Western patriarchal culture is and always has been shaped by the male imaginary, meaning that its cultural products carry the characteristics of male morphology – unity, linearity and closure. The tradition dominance of the male imaginary means that the female imaginary has been suppressed and not thoroughly theorized.’
page 46 – ‘Although her status as an artist of representation required the choice of visual images for her digital self-redesign, she selected the features of Mona Lisa, Venus, Diana, Europa and Psyche not for their appearance, but because of the mythical qualities and attributes these women possessed – The Mona Lisa for the androgyny resulting from the palimpsest of Leonardo Da Vinci’s self-portrait beneath her image, Venus because of her connection to fertility and creativity, Diana for her insubordination to men and her aggressivity as the goddess of hunting, Europa because Gustave Moreau’s painting of her is unfinished and because her look to another continent showed her interest in an unknown future, and Psyche because of her need for love and spiritual beauty. Combining features from a number of art historical icons was a strategy Orlan adopted in order to work against notions of aesthetic unity and identity resemblance (one of the few parallels postwar contemporary art can offer is Andy Warhol’s celebrity collages). Her own explanations of her own surgical performances, as well as a proportion of the commentary about them, emphasise that ‘Reincarnation’ was never planned as a quest or pursuit of a single image, beautiful, diabolic or anything in between. The alternative title of the project, ‘Image-New Image’ ‘makes passing reference to Hindu gods and goddesses who change appearances to carry out new deeds and exploits…’.’
page 55 – ‘According to Armstrong ‘The body is the most immediate focus of control and has been used as a statement of personal self identification.’
page 67 – ‘Her performance of Medusan femininity was one of two works in which Orlan has deliberately invoked a mythical or literary ‘monstrous’ woman. This witty and yet potentially taboo-breaking performance, the display of her bleeding vagina, was inspired by a famous twentieth-century intertext to the Medusa myth, Fffers his rather unliterary intepretation of Freud’s short essay of 1922 ‘Medusa’s Head’. Here Freud offers his rather unliterary interpretation of the enduring power of the Medusa, which is that her decapitated head is a symbol for the terrifying castrated genitals of the woman/ Mother.
page 68 – ‘Barbara Creed in The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis suggests that horror may be distinguished from other film genres by the way it does not attempt to soothe castration anxiety. Multiple representations of female monstrosity are one means it uses to arouse and play on the spectator’s fears, ‘the monstrous – feminine constitutes and important and complex stereotype which can be broken down into a number of different figures of female horror; woman as archaic mother, monstrous womb, vampire, possessed monster, female castratrice, witch, castrating mother.’
page 68 – ‘Creed concentrates mainly on the question of what the relationship of gender is to the viewing position that is constructed by images of the monstrous – feminine. In doing so, she seeks to deconstruct phallocentric theories of looking. Her subject is horror cinema but she argues that the aesthetic and ideological structures of encounters with the monstrous-feminine are present in the legends and myths of all ages and across the cultural spectrum. From the medusa to the Alien films, in poetry and in pornography, representations of the monstrous feminine expose the construction of phallocentric looking, as it is only by repressing certain important aspects of these representations that this look can pretend to master its female object. Female monsters of myth, fairy tale and popular fiction challenge phallocentric representations of women because the monstrous-feminine does not fit within the phallocentric symbolic order.’
page 71 – ‘What appear to be ‘femme fatale’ stories, in which the feminine object is identified as deathly and enigmatic, can be read more subtle as illustrations of ‘overzealous male gazing’ in which ‘at best, it seems, assaultive gazing is risky business’ (Carol Clover).
page 71 – ‘Images of monstrous femininity are inadmissible to the male imaginary as they are viewable by the male gaze. By supplying these horrifying images live, Orlan confronted the male imaginary with its own abject content.’
page 73 – ‘monsters, whose various, unpredictable and grotesque forms trouble definitions of ‘human’ and ‘humanity’.’
page 73 – ‘Over centuries of human history monsters have acted, as the feminist theorist Nina Lykke suggests as ‘boundary phenomena’ between the viewable and the unviewable, between the human and the animal, between socially acceptable and abject bodies. Etymologically, a monster/ monstrum is an ‘object of display’. As creatures of fable, myth and fairy tale, or exhibits at fairs, sideshows and the circus it is always their separateness and passive difference that monsters advertise. Their object – status draws attention to what sets them apart from the human onlooker, and so to the boundaries between humanity and its others. The monsters meaning as an ‘object of display’ immediately raises further questions about the aesthetics of monstrosity. What facial and body features count as monstrous? What meanings can be ascribed to these features, and how are these meanings determined? An important aspect of any consideration of monstrous appearance is the distinction between the body and the face.’
page 74 – ‘Discord and tension have been generated by the deliberate distortion of a previously well-proportioned face’.
page 74 – ‘Zizek’s monstrosity theory is a historical one, formulated around modernist and postmodernist ideas of subjectivity.’
page 74 – ‘Monsters are conventionally positioned as the object rather than the subject of literary and film narratives, but how their appearances are read depends on the subject-object relations of the narrative in question.’
page 75 – ‘In Lacanian terms, these monsters can be thought of as the ‘Thing’, made of the same stuff as the object, unsymbolizable materiality of the maternal body.’
page 76 – ‘Leroux’s description, ‘the absence of that nose is a terrible thing to look at’ irresistibly encodes the phantom’s face as a site of lack, and therefore of femininity.’
page 78 – ‘Orlan’s work…openly exhibits its double relationship to the ‘fantasy space’ of modern patriarchy. She plays upon the appeal of its images and sometimes appears to be caught in its snare, but ultimately remains aloof both from its linear, end-stopping temporality, and from the morphology of its images.’
page 78 – ‘Portraiture in painting, the use of photography to exercise power through apparatuses of social control, and the cinematic close-up are all examples of how the face magnifies humanness by concentrating its supposed qualities into its open contoured surface.’
page 78 – ‘In order to further the investigation of the face ass a signifier of humanity, I would like now to turn to the concept of ‘faciality’ introduced by Giles Deleuze and Felix Guathari in A Thousand Plateaus. At the start if their discussion of faciality (visageite) they state that the face is a ‘horror story’; it’s skin ‘facade’ conceals a monstrous ‘horror’ of bloody tissue, muscle and bone.’
page 79 – ‘I would suggest that facial cosmetic surgery, rather than being just another domain of sociocultural or political activity to be added to this list, is a practice that reveals the escalating power of the ‘facialization’ machine. The face in cosmetic surgery has ceased to be a signifier of uniqueness and individuality, and become a detachable, graftable mask, a prosthesis.’
page 79 – ‘The discovery of this inhumanity of the face may even be attributed to cosmetic surgery.’
page 80 – ‘Cosmetic surgery’s privileging of the face may simply be a continuation of the faces provenience in painted and photographic portraiture, the cinema and advertising.’
page 80 – ‘Amongst feminist commentators, Donna Haraway notes the gender bias of viewing the face as a privileged signifier of humanity when she says ‘Humanity’s face has been the face of man’.
page 82 – ‘As Haraway emphasises, feminist humanity ‘must, somehow, both resist representation, resist literal figuration, and still erupt in powerful new tropes, new figures of speech, new turns of historical possibility.’ As feminist figure, Orlan’s face has abandoned fixed form and fixed meanings for a future replete with what Haraway calls ‘the promises of monsters’.’
page 84 – ‘To feminist commentators of a postmodern era, however, Frankenstein’s monsters are more than warning figures; as a product of the early nineteenth century, they are situated on a border between the human and the non-human characteristic of this stage of modernity, which saw its purification of all non-human elements as part of its scientific and social project.’
page 84 – ‘Lykke suggests that contemporary feminism may usefully situate itself in the border zone between the human and the non-human, and identify with the monstrous rather than seeking to reject it. Lykke calls upon monsters, goddesses and cyborgs to serve as landmarks in the map of the discursive spaces in which feminism encounters the sciences, natural, social and human.’
page 85 – ‘Frankenstein is a creature of Romantic Gothic fiction and the beginnings of nineteenth-century modernity, but the Bride belongs to the age of mechanical reproduction, and to the cinema. The imaginary of her brief appearances is Whale’s film…is very suggestive for Orlan’s work as a female artist concerned with the impact of science and technology upon human, and especially female human, identity’.
page 85 – ‘half Nefertiti, half ghost with her long white bridal gown, or death robe, or swaddling cloth… she stands halfway between a zombie and a future punk, outlandishly sexy’ (Manguel 1997).’
page 86 – ‘…the traditional power of women’s hair to symbolise eroticism and animality. It’s volume and artificial white waves are a Medusan motif. As Alberto Manguel ‘s analysis of the film shows, there are close intertextual links between the cinematic image of the Bride and Surrealist photography of women by Man Ray and Max Ernst from the 1920’s and 1930’s. In which flowing, wavy hair is loaded with fetishistic erotic significance.’
page 91 – ‘the effects of patriarchal desire on female identity’
page 95 – ‘Orlan’s forehead implants resemble alien antennae, and give her an other-worldly appearance that directly invoke a cyborg identity’
page 104 – ‘Orlan’s ‘Omnipresence’ was achieved via media technology, and was as such a prime example of postmodern media culture, in which physical reality has given way entirely to mediatized reality, and referents are subsumed in the continuous circulation of signs.’
page 111 – ‘The links of performance to performativity make up an area that linguistics, philosophy and gender theory have recently began to consider closely.’
page 113 – ‘Performativity can most readily be defined as the capacity of a linguistic utterance to bring about the action the utterance describes, or names.’
page 113 ‘Butler insists that the notion of performativity must be kept distinct from the notion of performance, because while the latter presumes a voluntarist conception of subjectivity according to which we can all theatrically remake, or restyle, our bodies and identities, the former, performitivity, contests the very notion of the subject, The two concepts can and should be distinguished theoretically, but Orlan’s surgical performance art calls upon them both simultaneously; she performs performativity whilst performativity performs her’.
page 114 – ‘In ‘Reincarnation’ Orlan reads from what appear to be very carefully chosen texts: a passage from psychologist Eugine Lemoine -Luccioni’s book La Robe… from the work of the philosopher Michel Serres, and a well know passage from Julia Kristeva‘s Powers of Horror. I would like to suggest that text and reading are important to Orlan’s performances in at least the following ways. Firstly, the theoretical and intellectual character of the texts sends a strong message to her audience about how and in what context she wants her project to be understood – as theoretically significant and in an intellectual rather than a popular context. Secondly the act of reading aloud during her operations emphasises Orlan’s consciousness, which is linked in turn to two important aspects of ‘Reincarnation’.’
page 116 – ‘Orlan’s recitation of Kristeva’s description of the process of abjection – the formation of new bodily boundaries for subjectivity by means of the expulsion of matter, as occurs in liposuction – can be seen to be referring to and therefore contributing to the body – formation taking place.’
page 120 – ‘Parveen Adams endorses Orlan’s own description of herself as a ‘woman-to-woman transexual’.’ Kathy Davis – Reshaping the Female Body:The Dilemma of Cosmetic Surgery
page 141 – ‘Judith Butler’s theory of gender performitivty both accords with and develops Irigaray’s notion that feminine identity is imitable and performable through and though, since Butler never ceases to emphasise that woman’s identity is imitable and performable through and through, since Butler never ceases to emphasise that women’s identity under patriarchy is constructed rather than given, made rather than found. What is made can be remade, performativity transformed into other formations of femaleness not yet known, and Orlan’s performance art, pre-surgical and surgical, shows us this in fascinating and extreme ways’