Tracy Graves
Orlan, The Reincarnation of St. Orlan
It seems fitting in a seminar
devoted to discovering the workings and notions of beauty that we should, in
our last meeting, be confronted with a text that attempts to unseat beauty�s
claim to seriousness. Jeremy
Gilbert-Rolfes 1999 book Beauty and the
Contemporary Sublime examines the place of both of beauty and the sublime
in contemporary culture in terms of their evolution throughout the history of
aesthetics as well as their relationship to its tropes and technologies. In this text, Gilbert-Rolfe posits
contemporary beauty as powerless, glamorous and frivolous. Notions of the sublime, on the other hand,
are removed from the historical framework of nature and tied instead to the
rampant economy of late-capitalism and the increasing proliferation of
technology.
Multi-media and performance
artist Orlans Carnal Art thematizes
the melding of aesthetic beauty, technology and the body and ultimately draws
into question the ethics of contemporary notions of beauty and popular
aesthetics with regard to the female body.
Orlans multi-step project The Reincarnation of St. Orlan,
or Images New Images consisted of a series of seven plastic surgeries
undertaken during the 1990s. Performed
before a live audience, captured on video or transmitted live via satellite to
different parts of the world, each surgery was designed to remodel a different
part of the artists face based on features taken from female figures in famous
artworks (da Vincis Mona Lisa, Boticellis Venus, Bouchers Europa and Gerômes
Psyche among others), thus molding
the artist into an art-historically sound composite of ideal beauty. The surgeries were performed by plastic
surgeons from all over the world on a conscious Orlan,
who commented on and directed the action, fielded questions, read aloud or
whiled away the time by painting pictures on pieces of paper with her own
blood.
While the result of her plastic
surgeries might be seen as effecting a mockery of the very notion of ideal
standards of beauty (she appears now, one might suggest, as a caricature of
beauty, far from the realization of its ideal), Orlans
performance pieces and the discourse surrounding them serve to posit that the
place inhabited by beauty in contemporary society is far from frivolous. In juxtaposition to earlier projects taken on
by the artist, many of which utilize digital imaging to form photographic
hybrids from her own face altered only by stage make-up (Self-Hybridation), this project reveals
the moments of pain that are usually only vaguely and abstractly associated
with the medical technologies of cosmetic transformation due to the mass
medias overbearing emphasis on the before-and-after shot (as seen on
contemporary television in Extreme
Makeover, The Swann, Dr. 90210 etc. ad nauseam). By focusing on the processes involved in
these invasive surgeries, Orlans painful
reconstructions suggest that the idealization of beautiful figures throughout
history has led to the formation of standards of beauty and perfection that are
not only nearly impossible to meet, but are often perilous to attain. I mean
to make reference here to the manifold risks associated with plastic surgery as
well as eating disorders connected to achieving ideal weight, to name only two.
What is potentially
compelling about Orlans project with regard to
Gilbert-Rolfes theses on beauty and the sublime is the extent to which her
work embodies a shifting of artistic media and technology. The
Reincarnation of St. Orlan presents a context in
which historically and societally fixed notions of
beauty pierce the body, effectively washing away the boundary between aesthetic
ideal and concrete physicality. There no
longer seems to be a place for natural beauty in society; in its most extreme
form, the realization of social standards of beauty is contingent upon medical
technology inscribing and incising the ideal into the physical human
reality. One might say that the face of
Helen of Troy could no longer launch a thousand ships
shed need a face-lift
first.