Mixed Media

In 2001, ORLAN created her series around the Plan du Film, based on a quote by Jean-Luc Godard: “The only greatness of Jacques Becker’s Montparnasse 19 is that it is not only a film in reverse, but in a way the reverse of cinema. The concept was to take Godard literally, to create an upside-down film, starting with the poster. ORLAN called in an advertising agency, Publidécor, with whom ORLAN creates photo posters from recycled artworks, which she materializes in the form of light boxes. ORLAN uses the names of her friends from the art world of the moment, and one or two names of movie stars to make people believe that the film exists. Her intention with these posters was to tell the story of her life in art.

Finally, in 2018, ORLAN had the pleasure of being invited to take part in the ORGANOÏDE project created by her friend and academician Fabrice Hyber and Olivier Schwartz. This is a database of images created by artists to support scientific research at the Institut Pasteur. ORLAN presents Les Phages d’ORLAN, an installation in OMICS, in the lobby of the Institut’s Simone Veil and Alexandre Yersin buildings. Among other things, she creates light boxes based on the colorful harlequinade of her cells and viruses created for Le bœuf sur la langue, but in a different version. The words included were, for example, “rabies”, “pasteurella pestis”, “vaccine”, or “researcher”, a term that ORLAN greatly appreciates as it underlines the feminization of the names of professions, whereas Marie Curie as a woman suffered greatly from being a researcher among researchers.

The robot, equipped with a text and movement generator, speaks with ORLAN’s voice, as she recorded 22,000 words and placed them in separate MP3s. The artist worked in collaboration with Jean-Pierre Balpe, a true pioneer who has posted an open-source text generator on his website. The installation consisted of the robot and two large LED screens showing videos. One of the videos was a theater of deep learning, the others consisted of filmed performances questioning our times: “I’m hungry, I’m thirsty, but it could be worse”, “No baby no, where are the ecologists?” and “Petition against death”.

It’s a work that reflects his interest in hybridity, the body-machine, sculpture and interactivity.

Nicolas Gaudelet (Voxels Productions) was responsible for setting up the technical installation at the Grand Palais. 

ORLAN is currently working with the company RASPIAUDIO to develop the robot for its retrospective exhibition at SESC Paulista in São Paulo, Brazil, curated by Alain Quemin.

ORLAN created a transparent bioreactor that simulates the Harlequin’s head, showing the red liquid feeding the cells and the three polymers to which they were attached. It was as if a moving face agitated the liquid. 

Inside the fluorescent Plexiglas Harlequin coat, with one side fluorescing yellow and the other red, were Petri dishes designed to hold polymers and dead cells.

This installation questions the fragility of life by showing living, dead and dying cells, and projections representing cells in these different states. The cells raised in the bioreactor are defenseless, without immunity, and those that survive the longest are the youngest and strongest. We’re a long way from hybridization.

For her first series, the artist hybridizes with pre-Columbian cultures, with over thirty works, some inspired by the skull deformations found among pre-Columbians, Africans, Egyptians and Merovingians! The Vierge à l’Enfant (Virgin and Child) from Rabastens attests to this, showing both the Virgin and Child with a deformed, elongated skull. 

In her work, ORLAN has sought to break away from Western references and stereotypes of beauty, creating this first series using digital photography and interactive 3D video installations based on skull deformities, squinting, nose jobs known to the Mayas, Olmecs and Aztecs, and representations of the god Xipe Totec.

In 2009, ORLAN created the installation Suture-Hybridation-Recyclage, in which she hybridized her wardrobe following the same protocol with David Delfin, Maroussia Rebecq and Agatha Ruiz de la Prada, asking them to find a way of assembling two of her different garments to bring together times, materials, designers and moments in her history. Maroussia Rebecq has cut two garments and attached a small fluorescent yellow lace to bring them together, while David Delfin has attached ribbons full of staples, enabling them to be detached and reattached to another garment, creating a hybridization, or rather a temporary assembly and multiple shifting hybridizations.

Agatha Ruiz de la Prada proposed a more radical solution. She carefully selected beautiful dresses from her museum, cut them in half and then split ORLAN’s garments in half from the waist down and assembled them.

So each dress was recomposed with half an Agatha Ruiz de la Prada dress, and half dresses from ORLAN’s wardrobe, whose designer I don’t necessarily know. ORLAN has kept her entire wardrobe since adolescence.

ORLAN asked her to do the impossible, i.e. to honor the scent of hay and tobacco in her perfume, as well as all the smells that intoxicated her, such as fig leaves, celery, tomatoes, pines, lime blossom, mint, lilies, cypress, rosemary, cumin, fennel, basil, laurel, and also wax and turpentine? 

Le Parfum de l’Artiste is the result of the first two perfumes created: Le Parfum de Sainte-ORLAN and Le Parfum de l’ORLAN-CORPS.

Le Parfum also featured a fashion show-performance, with the presentation of a collection of garments designed from ORLAN’s recycled and hybridized wardrobe.

ORLAN has also presented Parfum de l’Artiste installations at the Fondation Lambert and FRAC Île-de-France, curated by Caroline Bourgeois and Elisabeth Lebovici. The image of the sculpture arrangement of the Artist’s Kiss was projected large, with two perfume diffusers, that of ORLAN-CORPS, on the left, and that of Sainte-ORLAN on the right. At the center of the space, the Parfum de l’Artiste was supposed to be re-fabricated in the air, with its unclassifiable scent, the smell of something that once existed and could exist again. Perfume is like music: it fills space and eroticizes it.

ORLAN wanted to market this perfume, but was unable to do so for lack of funds.

His trip to India was part of “le plan du film”, a series of works imagined from the reading of a quote by Jean-Luc Godard: “The only greatness of Jacques Becker’s Montparnasse 19 is that it is not only an upside-down film, but in a way the upside-down of cinema.” The concept was to take Godard literally, to create an upside-down film, starting with the poster and promotion with the trailer, letrilles, a soundtrack and a TV show to launch the feature. ORLAN enlisted the help of Publidécor, an advertising agency specializing in 1950s painted movie posters, to create fourteen painted posters based on photos of the artist and recycled works. Her intention with these hand-painted acrylic posters on 3 m x 2 m canvases was to tell the story of her life in art. ORLAN made the posters using the names of her friends in the art world at the time, and one or two names of movie stars to make it seem as if the film existed. She also staged a fake press conference with director Bigas Luna and curator Lorand Hegyi for a Valencia biennial. She invited a number of journalists to talk about a film she had made that didn’t really exist.

LA RÉINCARNATION DE SAINTE-ORLAN OU IMAGES NOUVELLES-IMAGES DITES OPÉRATIONS-CHIRURGICALES-PERFORMANCES, is a series of 9 performances created by ORLAN between 1990 and 1993 in Paris, Brussels and New York. ORLAN created this series to derail surgery from its habits of enhancement and rejuvenation, and to perform surgical operations that weren’t supposed to bring beauty, but ugliness, monstrosity and indesirability. 

The central idea behind these surgical operations was to combat stereotypes and models. ORLAN is not against cosmetic surgery, but against what we do with it. She uses this technique to invent the self-love by attacking the mask of the innate. The first condition with the different surgeons was no pain, because ORLAN is all for BODY-PLEASURE. For each performance, ORLAN decorated the operating theatre, turning it into her artist’s studio. She and the rest of the medical staff were costumed by a renowned designer working in collaboration with the artist. The performances were orchestrated by readings, and when the surgical gesture allowed it, ORLAN produced images, films, videos, photos, drawings with her blood and fingers, reliquaries with her fat and flesh, “holy-suaries” of sorts made with her dried blood and medical gauze from the operation onto which she made photographic transfers, and objects subsequently exhibited in museums and galleries.

The artist makes ironic reference to religious iconography, namely the miraculous imprint of Christ’s face on the Turin shroud and its trace on Veronica’s veil, images that were left simply by skin contact. In the case of this series, the material substance of her body remained on the fabric, but ORLAN had to use technology to make her face appear.

While the operations can be seen as ostentatious exercises in self-exposure, ORLAN’s printed faces on the Holy Shrouds are barely visible remnants of her presence, mere apparitions, fragile mementos of a performance, allowing us to establish a certain distance between the opening images of her body and our gaze. These works are sometimes shown as objects and sometimes as photographs.

To escape the father’s territory, you have to change your skin. ORLAN then decided to experiment with new, multiple forms, in a humorous, distanced vein. ORLAN is in favor of shifting, mutant, nomadic identities, not fixed ones.

In this series, ORLAN has a different outfit for each photo, as well as a hat ranging from a kepi to a mitre, a cap and a donkey’s head.

His trip to India was part of “le plan du film”, a series of works imagined from the reading of a quote by Jean-Luc Godard: “The only greatness of Jacques Becker’s Montparnasse 19 is that it is not only an upside-down film, but in a way the upside-down of cinema.” The concept was to take Godard literally, to create an upside-down film, starting with the poster and promotion with the trailer, letrilles, a soundtrack and a TV show to launch the feature. ORLAN enlisted the help of Publidécor, an advertising agency specializing in 1950s painted movie posters, to create fourteen painted posters based on photos of the artist and recycled works. Her intention with these hand-painted acrylic posters on 3 m x 2 m canvases was to tell the story of her life in art. ORLAN made the posters using the names of her friends in the art world at the time, and one or two names of movie stars to make it seem as if the film existed. She also staged a fake press conference with director Bigas Luna and curator Lorand Hegyi for a Valencia biennial. She invited a number of journalists to talk about a film she had made that didn’t really exist.

ORLAN invited visual poets, musicians, video artists, literary figures, philosophers and visual artists to create a work (or several works) using the enormous pixels and 8 gradations of gray that made up the Minitel. 

These were the best international artists, carefully selected from those working in situ and/or with conceptual issues. Artists capable of fighting with or against constraints, able to divert and circumvent difficulties, and to ask themselves the problems of the medium they invest in. 

Two keys are available to help the public better understand the works and artists. Consultants wishing to do so will be able to display two additional pages on their screen, one written by the artist himself, setting out his position and angle of attack, and explaining why he has chosen to respond to the Minitel in this way. Another page given over to a critic chosen by the artist (and not the other way around) will present the artist to the public in clear, non-jargonized terms. Only artists can transgress, adapt, play with and exploit the full potential of this new tool.

The resulting works are often counterpoints (Bernar Venet, Ange Leccia, Vera Molnar, Aldo Spinelli) to the usual videotex, or ironically imitate the services by mischievously slipping into them (Jean-François Bory, Alain Snyers, Jean-Claude Lefèvre). 

Every two months, the magazine featured additional works and columns by artists (Ben, Charles Dreyfus, Scarpetta, Sarenco), and took into account questions from the general public, giving answers and the right of reply. ORLAN has organized nights in the company of Buren, Didier Bay, Léa Lublin, Morellet… 

For our surprise parties, isn’t it delicious to make love, guilt-free, with Sainte-ORLAN flashing her breast and eyes, a welcome replacement for the saints of Lisieux or elsewhere with their little colored lights, this cold, modern Minitel that can become, depending on the artist, baroque, ironic or kitsch.

Poetry and literature were the Minitel’s tried-and-tested and favorite partners, and a new way of writing/reading was born, a new visual poetry (Frédéric Develay, Sarenco, Jil Wolman). 

When it came to music, the Minitel had no sound! Musicians such as Franck Royon Le Mée proposed graphic scores. Musicians such as Gean-Yves Bosseur, Alain Savouret, Martin Davori Jagodic, Pierre Mariétan, Michel Redolfi and Max Neuhaus played on plastic scores or unplayable scores. 

On several occasions, ORLAN has shown large-scale installations consisting of stacks of Minitels with the images produced. 

This installation was presented by Jean Paul Lyota in the exhibition Les Immatériaux at the Centre Pompidou, 1985.

Through these performances, ORLAN used her body as a new measuring instrument: the ORLAN-CORPS. ORLAN has used this principle to measure streets named after historic stars (most, of course, are men, with rare exceptions) and to measure cultural institutions such as the Guggenheim, the Musée Saint-Pierre des Beaux-arts in Lyon, the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburg and the M HKA in Antwerp. ORLAN has also measured the Le Corbusier unit in Firminy,  the Vatican and many other places.

The idea behind this performance was to take Protagoras’s theory that “Man is the measure of all things” and apply it to a pseudo-scientific method of measurement.

The MesuRAGEs protocol is very precise: ORLAN puts on a dress made from the sheets of her trousseau, always the same until it wears out, complete or almost. She has created several installations with the dress between two glass or Plexiglas partitions.

ORLAN measures the determined space with her body by lying on the ground and drawing a chalk line behind her head, then getting down on all fours and moving forward again, lying on her back with her shoes flush with the line. ORLAN counts the number of times her body is contained within this space, and her witnesses count aloud, “One ORLAN-CORPS, two ORLAN-CORPS, three ORLAN-CORPS…”. Then, each of the witnesses signs the report drawn up at the very beginning of the performance on a large sheet of Canson paper attached to a drawing board placed on an easel, and it is finalized by marking the number of ORLANs contained in the space with the signatures of each of the witnesses and ORLAN’s signature.

Then she fetches water, removes her dress and washes it in public. She takes samples of this dirty water into vials, which are then labeled, numbered and sealed with wax to produce an edition with a photo of the finding. ORLAN then exhibits these samples, findings, photographs and videos in galleries and museums, along with commemorative plaques and her life-size effigy with the last pose, such as the Statue of Liberty, the dress or the ORLAN-CORPS measuring instrument – all concrete relics, the convinctions of these ephemeral moments.

These performances put the body back into play.