Plastic Surgery as Subversive Spectacle-

    Performance artist Orlan enacts the Theater of Cruelty that theater innovator Antonin Artaud was unable to see fully manifested. In a series of operation-performances titled The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan, she permeates the faculties of and encroaches upon her audience through blood, ritual, and fetishized beauty. Appropriating components of classical beauty ideals and images, Orlan breaks free of the marasmus Artaud railed against, de-sacrilising masterpieces and the cultural connotations of feminine bodies that hinge on plastic surgery’s successes and successors. Orlan “moves the bars of the cage” and places us as spectators at the perimeter of her own interiority, as though we are the bourgeoisie watching the performance at Charenton.

    The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan begins with a digitized composite image Orlan created. Each of the figures used to create this composite face is an idealized feminine personage: Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, Botticelli’s Venus, Francois Pascal Simon Gerard’s Psyche, and Gustav Moreau’s Europa. Orlan claims that these figures were chosen “not for the canons of beauty they are supposed to represent… but rather on account of the stories associated with them.”[1]  Even so, by permanently, or at least semi-permanently, adhering renowned cultural signifiers of feminine beauty to her own body, Orlan rubs away at the division between the given self of the external and its adjoining connotations, and the chosen self of the internal.             

    The installation of Orlan’s composite face, over the course of nine plastic surgeries, ensures that the questions she asks are presented “in terms of new technologies”[2] without which most of Orlan’s pieces could not be performed or produced. This reliance on technological apparatuses demonstrates the dissolution of the binary opposition of nature and culture (the synthetic; technology): a new, post-feminine, created form of “beauty” asks us to “rethink our most basic assumptions about beauty, religion, art history, sexuality, and, ultimately, about the stability of the self,”[3] to challenge dominant cultural categories and hierarchies. Thus, The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan, in large part, focuses on elucidating the fictiveness of antiquarian binaries. It breaks down the barrier between nature (the mythical Other figure Simone de Beauvoir paints) and the created product, between the inherent locus of ideal beauty and the reconstructive processes used to recast a woman in accordance with that amorphous ideal.

    Contemporary feminist theorists and philosophers of the body explore how normalized priority, in Western culture, is dedicated in accordance with hegemonic oppositions that found themselves upon a gendered echelon. This is attributable to Rene Descartes’ “findings” in the Meditations and an historic disparagement of the body that both precedes and follows from the Cartesian rationale. As a result, females are implicated as weaker because of an overarching embodiment which they are pinioned to. The development of this brute bifurcation has been documented and discussed throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Critical theorist Elizabeth Grosz meticulously characterizes not only the mind/body opposition in philosophy, but also the “insidious” collection of additional oppositional pairs that follow from the Cartesian split. Among those Grosz lists are

   

    the distinctions between reason and passion, sense and sensibility, inside and outside, self and other, depth and surface, reality and appearance, mechanism and vitalism, transcendence and immanence, temporality and spatiality, psychology and physiology, (and) form and matter.[4]

     Orlan’s art, in contrast, results not only in the proliferation of meanings and interpretations of the bodily “perimeter” and “beauty,” but also of a potentially infinite composite of discussions about the interactivity of her performances themselves. The bodies of Orlan’s observers also become involved; reeling reactions of disgust, horror, or approval root out preliminary questioning of the binary oppositions Orlan’s work addresses. The audience, unable to escape their bodies as they witness her transformation, become participants in a forum for a discursive aesthetics, an embodied space for political and artistic discourses that forward heterogeneity through shock and spectacle. When Orlan says that the body is “obsolete,” this is not to demean the body or its associated oppositional pairs; rather, it is a call for an integration of elements formerly opposed: technology and nature.

    By decrying cultural comfortability as a pejorative primitivism, Orlan rewrites the narrative of the radical elective reconstruction and unveils the intertextuality of technology, the canonical, patriarchy, and gendered decision-making. She provokes a questioning of the validity and continuation of the ideal, the image-barrier, and the intolerance of the market of plastic surgery by tearing down curtains at the sacred temples of beauty regimes. In doing so, she intervenes in the Cartesian underwriting that so pervades Western culture today, parodying the paradoxical veneration of psychic and physical “perfection.” Her sacrificial undertakings echo the Artaudian call for artist to be “like victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames.”

                                                                     -Hannah Levinson

[1]  Orlan, “Orlan on Becoming-Orlan,” in The Body: A Reader, ed. Miriam Fraser and Monica Greco (New York, NY:Routledge, 2005): 312.

[2]  Ibid, 312.

[3]  Rhonda Garelick, “Fashioning Hybridity,” The Drama Review 53, no. 2 (Summer 2009)

[4]  Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington, ID: Indiana University Press, 1994): 3.