Orlan, Carnal Art
Director: Stephan Oriach
Release Date: 14 May 2003 (France)
Genre: Documentary
The film chronicals a series of operations performed on Orlan, a French artist intent on completely changing her appearance. These operations however, are not an attempt to change her apperance for purposes of beauty, but is instead an attempt to change her appearance to what beauty was considered at different points in history. Through this she attempts to show how she can manipulate and change the body through science and technology.Using her own body as a medium, Orlan is the creator and leader of the carnal art movement, which seeks to put surgical body modification in the realm of public debate. Since 1991, she has been staging her surgeries as performance art and purposefully altering her own body based on classical Western images of beauty and her own imagination.
Critical Text by Jeremy Drummond
” Through the means of plastic surgery, Orlan morphed different sections of her face to match the facial structures of seven icons of feminine beauty, as projected by male artists throughout art history. For example, two of the seven characteristics are the forehead of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and the chin of Botticelli’s Venus. Orlan’s intention was not to become “beautiful,” but rather to suggest that the male perception of ideal feminine beauty is an impossible feat to conquer. These performances illustrate how ridiculous this unattainable ideal beauty would actually look and how horrific the surgical process is. ”
Info from <http://www.digibodies.org/online/orlan.htm>
My thoughts:
Throughout the entire film, I question myself at many points on WHY? why? why? is she doing this. For Art? To question the idea of beauty in art history and to become that beauty by surgery? To question identity? The transformation of identity that takes place when one physically changed from one to another? Transition? As she talks, recites and narrates while her body undergoes the surgery? I must honestly declare that I cannot totally understand her intent, but I believe that one of the main objective of her presenting her body as an art work is to arise the millions of questions that invade the viewers’ eyes upon the images. Can we call this sacrifice? for art? or perhaps a sincere attitude towards a search, which finds no end through the endless surgeries and transformations.
