Duhesme Clinic, July 1991. Orlan the performance artist is wheeled into the operating room for the fifth in a series of transformations.
She is wearing a black, strapless gown and a conical, harlequin hat. She is wearing makeup (Orlan always wears makeup for photos) and brandishes a skull and a trident in red-gloved hands. There are assistants dressed in black wetsuits, surgeons, anesthesiologists, a cameraman and a tall, black-caped dancer who has donned a green wig. The dancer begins to sing-rap-and does a striptease, slipping off the cape to reveal a gold bustier and layers of silvery, transparent trousers. He sheds the wig to reveal his shaven head.
Orlan reads: “The flesh is deceiving. . . . It is unnecessary, because the being and the appearance do not coincide. . . . I have the flesh of an angel, but I am a jackal; the flesh of a crocodile, but I am a pup; black flesh, but I am white; the flesh of a woman, but I am a man. I never have the flesh of who I am.”
An anesthesiologist administers an epidural, a long needle sliding into her back. The operation begins; the surgeon cuts into one of Orlan’s thighs, and inserts a tube for liposuction. With rough movements, he thrusts the tube in and out of the incision. Fat and blood flow through the tube into a small receptacle. Orlan begins reading a text by French philosopher Michel Serres. The surgeon begins on the other thigh. Orlan’s reading grows slow and belabored as the anesthetic seeps into her brain.
The surgeon moves to Orlan’s face. He makes an incision in each of her cheeks, and again agitates in the opening with a tube. Using a syringe, he then injects the fat taken from her thighs above her eyelids, in her upper lip and below her cheekbones. In less than two hours, he is finished. By now unable to speak, Orlan is wheeled from the operating room, gesturing to the cameraman to follow as she waves her arms in the air, mocking and mugging.
“This is a meticulous attempt, little by little, to find a more fragile, reflexive, a less sensual person. It’s a transsexual operation-from woman to woman,” the 45-year-old Orlan says, now installed with a cup of tea on an aluminum table in her apartment. It is 1993, and she has come in from a spring downpour and removed her black, gold-studded sunglasses and the red, glow-in-the-dark raincoat thrown over a black T-shirt and leggings. She is still wearing a baseball cap covered in a patchwork of neon-colored sequins. A tuft of pink hair peeks out.
“I was always very timid, very tender, fragile. I was like that as a young girl. But when I wanted to do things in society, I had to create an aggressive, hard personality. An external sensuality. This persona served me well for a long time, it allowed me to accomplish a lot. But now this person encumbers me. It causes misunderstandings with those around me. So the idea is to find what I think is most deep, most elusive in me.
“This,” she says, pointing to an enormous poster that takes up much of the top half of the two-story wall, “is a psychological self-portrait. A more vulnerable person, who allows herself to show that vulnerability, tenderness and timidity.”
The poster, titled “Reincarnation of Saint-Orlan,” is a blowup of the computer-composite image that Orlan hopes to resemble when her surgical quest is over. As small, inset pictures show, the features of her future face come from paintings by Renaissance and post-Renaissance greats: the chin of Botticelli’s Venus, the nose of Jean-Leon Gerome’s Psyche, the lips of Francois Boucher’s Europa, the eyes of Diana (unattributed, from a French school of artists) and the forehead of the Mona Lisa-these form the basis of Orlan as she feels she ought to be.
She insists that she chose the women for what they represent, not for how they look. Nonetheless, the computer image is indeed pensive, romantic, tender, fragile. It looks nothing like Orlan. She has had six operations since 1990. She says she’ll have as many as it takes.
“It’s not a question of putting on a mask,” she says, “but of taking one off. It’s not to improve, or rejuvenate, but to erase my previous image. I was a person who scared people. Someone who seemed aggressive, outgoing, a presence-this obviously scares people. I think we can bring appearance around to reality.
“But I am also doing this as an artist. I don’t want to be a Barbie doll-the nose I have is like this”-her nose is thinnish and upturned-“the one I’ll have is longer, thicker here between the eyes. You could say I’ll be more masculine.”
She’d also like her eyes to be farther apart, and her chin to have a cleft. Her upper lip has already been changed from a kewpie, pointed shape to a broad, thick one; it will need some sort of silicone or other support to bring the ends higher.
This business isn’t easy. “Sometimes I have to go backward to go forward,” she says. “At the end of the third operation, I was less recognizable than I am now. . . . They’ve tried three times to put a cleft in my chin. Technically it’s very difficult to do; they’ve transferred fat, removed things. So far it hasn’t succeeded.” She lifts a hand toward a still-smooth chin.
Challenge to the stomach
For all the trouble this process entails, Orlan says it is nonetheless painless. It does involve discomfort, she says, but suffering doesn’t interest her.
Still, it is hard for an observer to get over that first, instinctive reaction to Orlan’s work: nausea. On the second floor of her apartment, which also serves as studio, the artist has slides of her operations, ready to be worked into photos or posters that support her performances.
They show the surgeon’s knife cutting into a thigh like so much rumpsteak, or a closeup in which the skin of her upper lip is peeled back, raw. Even Orlan admits that looking at her surgery in retrospect is sometimes disturbing.
Then there’s the piece downstairs (which later would be included in an exhibit at the Penine Hart Gallery in New York). It is an airtight frame with text etched on glass around a small vial containing preserved flakes of saffron-colored flesh (fat, to be exact), a parody of a religious relic. The vial is leaking and has to be remade. Orlan says this is an annoyance, but it doesn’t matter; she has plenty of extra flesh for these sorts of works.
“To me the body seems obsolete,” she says. “We have to take the risk . . . of mutation.
“Modern psychology and Judeo-Christianity agree that it is wrong to attack the body,” she says. “But this is a primitive fear-both founded and unfounded-but it’s mostly just fear. In a few generations I think we’ll be totally used to the idea of remodeling the body through the genes and through surgery.”
Both actress and director
Orlan’s work raises several obvious questions: Is it art? Is she balanced?
“I call it art, because after considerable reflection I do believe that Orlan is a genuine artist, dead serious in her intent and fully aware of the risks and consequences of her elaborately calculated actions,” critic Barbara Rose recently wrote in a lengthy treatment of Orlan in the magazine Art in America. “To conclude that Orlan’s taboo-challenging investigations are aesthetic actions rather than pathological behavior forces us to reconsider the boundary that separates `normality’ from madness, as well as the line that separates art from nonart.
“Orlan’s brutal, blunt and sometimes gory imagery,” she wrote, “flatters neither herself nor the public; it transmits disquieting and alarming signals of profound psychological and social disorder.” Rose concluded that masochism may be a legitimate component of art-“illustrated psychopathology”-but that at least Orlan is both subject and object, actress and director.
A leading psychiatric review in France, VST, devoted most of one issue to analyzing Orlan, complete with an interview with the artist, photos of an operation and the considered conclusions of several psychiatrists. All found her normal, more or less. Or at least, not insane.
“The subject-object Orlan is manifestly afflicted with an insidious form of artistic monomania”-shrinkspeak for egoism-wrote one Dr. O. Relandt, a psychiatrist. “Her illness is not a source of danger. . . . She could present a danger to society in the case of an epidemic of this sort of monomania.”
Born in St. Etienne in 1947, Orlan came from a working-class family: Her father was a theater electrician, her mother a homemaker. She won’t say what her original name was, only that she adopted Orlan when she was 15 or 16. In the late 1960s she began experimenting with her first public performances and in the 1970s began performing abstract measuring actions in Lyon and New York.
In 1971 she baptized herself “Saint Orlan,” and developed a persona that she used in performances for two decades, a living sculpture dressed in fake-Baroque religious costume, baring one breast and brandishing a crucifix. She also began teaching art at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Dijon. She has never been married.
In 1990, invited to a conference in Newcastle, England, Orlan decided to embark on an ambitious new project, and came up with the idea of surgery.
“I very much enjoy the moment of operation. It’s fantastic,” she says. “There’s this great . . . meditation. It’s cathartic, silent. It’s very intense.”
But she’s getting impatient for results. The seventh operation, set for October in New York, is supposed to change her look radically: A surgeon will once again go for the cleft, add protrusions to her forehead and try to lengthen and round the look of her jaw.
`I want to knock down doors’
Orlan’s search for the ultimate artistic act seems in some ways to be the ultimate narcissistic act. As a gesture of liberation-from the modern norms of beauty, from the taboos of changing one’s image-her surgical quest is thought-provoking. As a challenge to the Judeo-Christian sanctity of the flesh, it is inspired, maybe even profound. But as a serious act of transformation, it seems rather pathetic. Does she really believe that surgery can re-create her long-lost fragile self; that it can undo, from the outside in, what time and character have done, from the inside out?
Indeed she does.
“I want it to be a complete change, one that poses a legal problem,” she says. “I want to knock down doors, to cut the prison bars.”
Her surgeon is not so sure.
“It’s possible that she’ll get close, but there is a permanent base of the person she is,” said Cherif Zahar, who did the 1991 operation. “We don’t want to do things that are too monstrous. It is true that with that permanent base you will always recognize that it’s her, even if little things have been changed.”
