ORLAN Manifesto. Body and Sculpture

Les Abattoirs, Musée - Frac Occitanie Toulouse are pleased to present a major exhibition of the artist ORLAN from 8 April to 28 August 2022. Her work, from the 1960s to the present day, is considered in a new way. For the first time, sculpture are the common thread: from the Body-Sculptures photographs, the performances, the surgeries, the sculptures of folds to AI and robotics. More than a classic monograph, it is a manifesto exhibition, conceived in close collaboration with the artist, which is proposed at Les Abattoirs.

ORLAN is a key figure in the art of the second half of the 20th century and the 21st century. She has played a major role in the history of feminist and performance art. Throughout her career, ORLAN has stepped out of the frame and made her own body the medium, raw material and visual support of her work. From the outset, it has become the tool and material for a re-reading of art history and the norms imposed by society. Within a transdisciplinary approach that combines sculpture, performance, photography, video and installation, ORLAN uses both traditional and new technologies - from minitel to digital, via robotics, medical sciences, video games and augmented reality. ORLAN is a pioneering artist, as she was one of the first artists to use scientific and medical techniques such as surgery and biotechnology. She never ceases to call upon technological innovation to envisage humanity in all its dimensions.

Since the 1960s, her innovative and subversive stances have subverted pre-established codes and conventions. Not without humour and provocation, ORLAN opposes morality, natural and social determinisms, and all forms of domination: male supremacy, religion, cultural segregation, racism, etc. Through her life and her art, she has defended freedom more than anything else. Her eminently political work commits us to emancipation and resistance to diktats. ORLAN sculpts her body and her identity; one could say that ORLAN is herself a sculpture. The artist manifests a boundless freedom and fights so that each and everyone can conceive their own destiny, their own body.

The exhibition at Les Abattoirs bring together around one hundred works and documents produced from the 1960s to the present day and drawn from a very wide range of media, including sculptures, her robot, photographs, videos, performances, etc. The exhibition feature iconic and lesser-known works from public and private collections, as well as from the artist’s studio, and historical archives.

A catalogue is published on the occasion of this exhibition by Éditions Manuella. Previously unpublished essays take a fresh look at ORLAN’s work.

DEFINITION

Carnal Art is self-portraiture in the classical sense, but realised through the possibility of technology. It swings between defiguration and refiguration. Its inscription in the flesh is a function of our age. The body has become a “modified ready-made”, 

no longer seen as the ideal it once represented ;the body is not anymore this ideal ready-made it was satisfaying to sign.

DISTINCTION

As distinct from “Body Art”, Carnal Art does not conceive of pain as redemptive or as a source of purification. Carnal Art is not interested in the plastic-surgery result, but in the process of surgery, the spectacle and discourse of the modified body which has become the place of a public debate.

ATHEISM

Carnal Art does not inherit the Christian Tradition, it resists it! Carnal Art illuminates the Christian denial of body-pleasure and exposes its weakness in the face of scientific discovery. Carnal Art repudiates the tradition of suffering and martyrdom, replacing rather than removing, enhancing rather than diminishing – Carnal Art is not self-mutilation.

Carnal Art transforms the body into language, reversing the biblical idea of the word made flesh ; the flesh is made word. Only the voice of Orlan remains unchanged. The artist works on representation.

Carnal Art finds the acceptance of the agony of childbirth to be anachronistic and ridiculous. Like Artaud, it rejects the mercy of God -Henceforth we shall have epidurals, local anaesthetics and multiple analgesics ! (Hurray for the morphine !) Vive la morphine ! (down with the pain !) A bas la douleur !

PERCEPTION

I can observe my own body cut open without suffering !….I can see myself all the way down to my viscera, a new stage of gaze. “I can see to the heart of my lover and it’s splendid design has nothing to do with symbolics mannered usually drawn.

Darling, I love your spleen, I love your liver, I adore your pancreas and the line of your femur excites me.

FREEDOM

Carnal Art asserts the individual independence of the artist. In that sense it resists givens and dictats. This is why it has engaged the social, the media, (where it disrupts received ideas and cause scandal), and will even reached as far as the judiciary (to change the Orlan’s name).

CLARIFICATION

Carnal Art is not against aesthetic surgery, but against the standards that pervade it, particularly, in relation to the female body, but also to the male body. Carnal Art must be feminist, it is necessary. Carnal Art is not only engages in aesthetic surgery, but also in developments in medicine and biology questioning the status of the body and posing ethical problems.

STYLE

Carnal Art loves parody and the baroque, the grotesque and the extreme.

Carnal Art opposes the conventions that exercise constraint on the human body and the work of art.

Carnal Art is anti-formalist and anti-conformist.

As early as the late 1960s, ORLAN chooses to go beyond the frame to expose her body to space and take full measure of it. The artist begins to deconstruct spaces in which women are made invisible : the streets, art history, museums, monotheist religions, family.

In 1967, she creates an action, Nude Descending a Staircase (Nu descendant un escalier), an obvious reference to Marcel Duchamp’s 1912 eponymous painting. ORLAN can be seen from below, naked and wearing high heels. The choice of a low-angle shot distorts her body. She is staring at us – this action manifests the necessity to reclaim the space in which women are represented to deconstruct stereotypical roles : the muse, the artist’s model, the mother, the child-like woman, the desirable body, obedient and object of the male gaze. ORLAN chooses to oppose this patriarchal heritage by presenting her body in an active and powerful way. 

In 1964, she carries out a performance in a street in Saint-Etienne : ORLAN Body Action: Slow-Motion Walks Down “No Entry” Routes (Action OR-lent : les marches au ralenti dite au sens interdit). At rush hour, while everyone is in a hurry, ORLAN walks as slowly as possible. Her presence is thought of as a disruption to the order of things. The four photographs testify to her will to defy prohibitions, especially those regarding women and minorities. ORLAN tackles the public space head on. 

She radicalizes this approach with her first MesuRage in Saint-Chamond, near Saint-Etienne. Her body becomes the measuring tool, the ORLAN-Body, that allows her to physically confront the streets, the architecture and cultural institutions. The MesuRAGEs (1968-2012) are, among other things, a reaction to Protagoras’s words : “Man is the measure of all things”. But then, what about women ? ORLAN reverses stereotypical roles.

In 1974, she performs a strip-tease in which she progressively undresses, taking off pieces of fabric from her trousseau. Between 1976 and 1977, she literally sells pieces of her body on a Portuguese market. This performance foreshadows an iconic artwork : The Kiss of the Artist (Le Baiser de l’Artiste).

The 1968 MesuRage was the first in a long series of performances existing up to 2012. The artist follows a precise protocol: “I put on a dress made of sheets from my trousseau, always the same dress, until it’s completely worn down, or almost. (…) I measure the space with my body by lying down on the floor and drawing a chalk line behind my head, then I get on all fours and crawl again and lie down on my back with my shoes on the chalk line. With one, two or even more witnesses, I count the number of ORLAN-Bodies contained in this space. I write the report, I ask for water, I take off my dress, I wash it in front of everybody, I take samples of this dirty water with which I fill vials that will be labeled, numbered and sealed with wax.” The archives from several performances in Italy, Belgium, the United States and France are gathered here to grasp their extent.

Along with the MesuRAGEs are shown archives from a now-cult performance in contemporary art history: The Kiss of the Artist (Le Baiser de l’Artiste) (1977). In Paris, at the Grand Palais, during the International Contemporary Art Fair, ORLAN decides to sell her kisses. She explains : “I started the performance by screaming: 5 francs for the artist’s kiss, a conceptual and carnal artwork that is cheap, an artwork for all purses! (…) I triggered with each kiss a tape recorder playing the Toccata in D minor by Bach. When after a few bars, I decided it was over, I triggered an electronic alarm call which represents the “superego” and signals the end of the kissing. A lot of men and women queued up for this Kiss of the Artist, I was very successful!” 

In the tumult of feminist movements, The Kiss of the Artist condemns not only the very small space given to women artists in the art world and in the visible art space, but also the binary roles assigned to women who, according to a patriarchal way of thinking, are either saints or whores. The artwork, deliberately provocative, created an electroshock in the French art world. ORLAN paid the consequences for instance since she lost her teaching post in Lyon. Paradoxically, it is the work that made her known to a large national and international audience. She writes : “In my life, there was a before and an after The Kiss of the Artist (...). It’s an artwork for which I had to show impertinence, mischief, tenacity, determination and courage.”

“Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists ?”

Published in 1971, the provocatively-titled essay by art historian Linda Nochlin is a historical milestone. Contemporary with ORLAN’s work, it is one of the first analyses of the way artistic norms, but also institutional and economic structures, have restricted the development and visibility of women artists.

In that sense, ORLAN chooses to take up space in the public space, on her own initiative, and amongst others in places of knowledge and history like museums.

In In the Buff No Bush (A poil Sans poils) (1978) in the Louvre Museum, she turns the stereotypical image of the muse around: she is now the one holding the brush and the palette. 

In the Ludwig Museum, in Aachen (Germany), in 1978, she stands up on a pedestal, refusing the false inertia of the artist’s model, inertia which women have been reduced to in art history, and she becomes an active and human statue.

In the same year, she creates the International Performance Symposium in Lyon, which she led until 1982 in order to give space to other artists.

In order to create her own space in art history, she distorts painting masterpieces, successively identifying herself as Botticelli’s Venus (1484-1485) or Edouard Manet’s Olympia (1863).

She relentlessly calls attention to the writing of history. Desacralizing artistic matter, she creates collages from photocopies, revisits the weight and the constraints of established culture by creating actions with books. She urges her audience to read history differently and to discover new narratives.

In a last provocation, she takes possession of a controversial work, now capital in the Orsay Museum: The Origin of the World (L’Origine du Monde) by Gustave Courbet (1866). She refuses to reduce a woman to her anatomy, armless, legless, faceless, and replaces the feminine sex with a masculine one, calling the diversion The Origin of War (L’Origine de la Guerre) in order to highlight how virility and masculinity are intertwined with violence, war, and also how if female nudity has been made commonplace, the opposite is not true.

The Kiss of the Artist introduces the necessity of a physical and direct interaction between ORLAN and the audience. 

Performance art paves the way for other interactive works in which the questions of assigned roles is at the core of the artist’s preoccupations. From Interactive Photographic Installation (Tête à claque – Jeu de Massacre) (1977) to Self-hybridations – Masks from the Beijing Opera (Self-hybridations – Masques de l’Opéra de Pékin) (2014) to Let’s exchange, let’s change (Echangeons, Changeons) (1978), these works call upon the public to create mutations : physical, sartorial, temporal, cultural. Interaction comes from the game of undressing and dressing up the artist’s body. 

Dressing of the Bride to Be (Panoplie de la Bonne à Marier) (1981) invites us to dress up or undress the artist’s naked and smiling silhouette. 

The game includes disruptions and provocations regarding patriarchal traditions: gender shifts, the displacement of stereotypes, the embodiment of forbidden roles. ORLAN, for example, wears the masks from the Beijing Opera, even though it forbids women from going on stage. She goes even further, since if we scan the photographs with our phones, the 3D avatar of the artist emerges and does acrobatics. 

In 1978, in the streets of Angoulême, she asks bystanders to swap their clothes with hers. 

In 2015, she creates a video game, Experimental start of play (Expérimentale mise en jeu), in which we must help the main character, Bump Load, to rebuild an artwork. 

The sculpture representing Bump Load, near the entrance of the exhibition, wears sensors that allow it to react to our presence and our movements.

With determination and humor, ORLAN instills a sense of emergency : deconstructing the social standards enslaving bodies. Against a systemic and deadly alienation, the artist invites us to fight against oppressions and against moral judgements, and to become participants in this life-saving, emancipating deconstruction.

ORLAN asks : What is being an artist ? 

And what is being a woman ?

She successively takes all the traditional identities assigned to women and has fun thwarting the codes of representation, from the Fiancée to the Saint. In the theatric processions she organizes in the Palazzo Grassi in Venice and in the Centre Pompidou in Paris, as well as in the photographs in which she puts on a performance, she becomes alternately the martyr saint stripped naked and the resolute nun, the white Virgin and the black Virgin. Without taboos, she plays with trangressing bodies and costumes. With solemnity and humor, she highlights the ambiguity of the Madonna, both holy woman and woman-object. She is anchored in her era, she is fearless : she wears skaï, brandishes different objects ostensibly, climbs on televisions and in the 1980s, she directs a Minitel (French videotex) movie – a tool that ORLAN will be one of very few artists to use, even dedicating a pioneer journal to it, ACCES-ART.

Starting in the 1970s, an important part of ORLAN’s work on the Judeo-Christian iconography echoes an artwork by Bernini, famous 17th-century Italian sculptor and architect: The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1647-1652). This church sculpture representing the Saint, caught between pain and pleasure when an angel pierces her heart with an arrow, is considered one of the masterpieces of the Baroque movement.

Apart from the religious theme, ORLAN shares with this reference the importance of staging and of the materials, as well as an obsession: the fold sculptures. ORLAN relentlessly folds the fabric of bedsheets and dresses, or other materials such as kraft and resin, sometimes until the bodies disappear. The matter never seems to stop folding and unfolding, as in the installation in the Abattoirs’ nave. If fabric art is often feminist, the exuberance of shapes, the theatrics of the Baroque and the obsession with folds allows us to draw a parallel with The Fold : Leibniz and the Baroque (1988) by philosopher Gilles Deleuze : “the Baroque trait is the fold that goes on forever”. In thought and in art, folds allow to seek endlessly, without ruptures but with side roads, in every direction.

In 1975, ORLAN broadcasts the Carnal Art Manifesto to take a step aside from the Body Art and position herself differently. 

She defines it as : “Carnal Art is self-portraiture in the classical sense, but realized through the possibility of technology. It swings between disfiguration and refiguration. Its inscription in the flesh is a function of our age. The body has become a “modified ready-made”, no longer seen as the ideal it once represented; the body is no longer this ideal ready-made one could just sign.” Since the Body-Sculptures (Corps-Sculptures) (1964-1967) in which the artist wears Japanese masks from the Noh dance-drama, to the Surgery Performances (Opérations chirurgicales performances) (1986-1993), hybridations are a part of this approach of shifting one’s own body. The issue of the mask is at the core of the series.

ORLAN hybridizes images of her face to other faces to make a third image, one of a mutant body, one of a mask that defies norms. Through them, she questions the diktats imposed on Western women and radically refuses the mechanisms of a system conditioning and normalizing bodies. She wishes to remove herself from a “society that shows us what models to follow, whether they are from art history, magazines or advertisement, a society that shows us the woman we must be, the art we must make and how we must think.” 

ORLAN is inspired by different cultures: Western with an appropriation of Botticelli’s (1994) and Picasso’s (2019-2020) works, African with the use of headdresses and masks from different cultures (2000-2003), same with pre-Columbian (1998) and Native American (2005-2008) references. The modified body is now a place for public debate, where several questions emerge: what is beauty ? What is monstrosity ? What models are imposed upon us ? Can we define ourselves ? How do we deconstruct norms ? These questions feed ORLAN’s artistic and critical approach since the 1960s.

“I want to make my body a place for public debate”, ORLAN repeats.

At the beginning of the 1990s, she pioneers the “Surgeries-Performances”. With the help of doctors, the operating room becomes a theater and a public workshop, where her body is changed under her direction. Between 1990 and 1993, nine surgeries take place, following a skillfully orchestrated sequence of events. Sculptures-effigies are used as scenery and costumes are made by designers (Franck Sorbier, Issey Miyake, Paco Rabanne, etc.). Under local anesthetic, refusing pain, the artist, awake, reads texts from writers, philosophers or psychanalists, such as Michel Serres, Julia Kristeva or Antonin Artaud. The surgery itself is an artwork, but also leads to the production of videos, photographs, drawings, or sculptures.

Identity, its construction, and the body are constant themes in ORLAN’s work, who now sculpts herself – literally – and models her appearance, skin and flesh included. In 1992, she defines carnal art as “self-portraiture in the classical sense, but realized through the possibility of technology”.

In 1993, the Omnipresence surgery marks the radical transformation of the artist’s face by using implants in her cheeks and temples. From New York, thanks to satellites, a livestream is broadcast at the Sandra Gering Gallery (New York), at the Centre Pompidou (Paris), at the Banff Center for the Arts (Banff) or at the MacLuhan Center for Culture and Technology (Toronto). As she anticipates interaction and live broadcasting, now common in the age of the internet and social media, she gets faxes and calls from viewers who can speak live: the exchanges are translated into English, French, and in sign language.

ORLAN, early on, questions the new plasticity of flesh, which allows the re-creation of our own body by each and every one of us, all the while also questioning beauty standards and their violence. What matters here is building yourself, standing out, in opposition with conformism and the identical copies of standardized bodies involved in the current universal craze for plastic surgery. Through this transformation, ORLAN gave herself her appearance which makes her recognizable: in 1964, she “gave birth to herself” in the Sculptures-Bodies series, but since 1993, she is completely, entirely, permanently a sculpture of ORLAN.

ORLAN is one of the most important, internationally recognised French artists. She is not tied to one material, technology or artistic practice. She uses sculpture, photo-graphy, performance, video, 3D, video games, augmented reality, artificial intelligence and robotics (she created a robot in her image that speaks with her voice), as well as scientific and medical techniques such as surgery and biotechnology to question the social pheno-mena of our time. 

ORLAN constantly and radically changes the data, disrupting conventions and ready-made thinking. She is opposed to natural, social and political determinism, all forms of domina-tion, male supremacy, religion, cultural segregation, racism... Her work always contains humour, is sometimes parodic or is even grotesque. It questions social phenomena and challenges pre-established codes. 

ORLAN: Some key dates

1964–1967 ORLAN created her Corps-sculptures series.

1968 Start of her MesuRAGES perfor-mances with Ceci n’est pas un voeu on St Peter’s Square in the Vatican City, Rome.

1976–1977 Le Baiser de l’artiste at the Grand Palais during the FIAC in Paris, France.

1978 ORLAN founded the “Symposium international de la Performance”, in Lyon, France, which she organised until 1982.

1983 ORLAN revisited baroque art with the Skaï et Sky et Vidéo series, among others.

1990 ORLAN began her Opérations-Chirurgicales-Performances series.

2005–2008 ORLAN continued her Self-Hybridations with the Self-Hybridations Amérindiennes series, a project that started in 1994 with Entre-Deux, Self-Hybridation entre la Vénus de Botticelli et le visage d’ORLAN.

2007 The Musée d’art moderne de Saint Etienne, France, presented a retrospective entitled “Le récit”.

2008 ORLAN participed at the Busan Biennale, South Korea.

2012 ORLAN performed her most recent MesuRAGE at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, United States.

The Museo de Antioquia in Medellin and the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogota, Colombia, organised the exhibition “ORLAN Arte Carnal o cuerpo obsoleto / hibridaciones y refigurationes”.

2015 ORLAN was invited to a residency at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, United States, as a researcher and artist.

2017 The “ORLAN” exhibition was organised at the MACRO in Rome, Italy.

The same year, the “ORLAN EN CAPITALES” exhibition was presented at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, France.

2018 ORLAN-OÏDE was presented at the Grand Palais in Paris, France, as part of the “Artistes & Robots” exhibition.

2020 ORLAN was awarded the medal of the National Order of the Legion of Honour with the rank of Chevalière.

2021 ORLAN wrote her autobiography Striptease. Tout sur ma vie, tout sur mon art, published by Éditions Gallimard. ORLAN received the François Morellet Prize for her autobiography