Performance

These images testify to the After Party at Silencio, where ORLAN performed “Je Suis Slowsexuel.le” with Sir Alice and “Les corps de métiers m’excitent” with Tentative, who also provided a DJ set throughout the evening. Octave de Bascher photographed the event and its exceptional guests. Her costume was designed by Beñat Moreno, and featured a lycra dress and chiffon cape. He created a textile print using the slogans on the signs, all in black and white. With this costume, ORLAN becomes a manifesto, visually embodying her concept. The Grand Jury, comprising President Michèle Lamy, Diane Pernet, Christophe Mecca, Sophie Rosemont, Sophie Duplaix, Elisabeth Couturier, Laurent Goumarre, Florence Tredez, Leïla Voight, François Renard, Raphaël Fontang and Léonard Lasry, awarded first prize to Mimosa, who received the original Slow de l’Artiste cape, made by Beñat Moreno, as well as an edition of L’originie de la guerre, second prize to Sir Alice, who received an edition of Zoom Baroque, Plis et Déplis, and third prize to Tentative, who received an edition of La pétition contre la mort. Tentative, doubly rewarded, won the Audience Prize, and received an edition of ORLAN and l’ORLANoïde: Masques sans corps sur texte généré par l’ORLANoïde.  

She realized that many of her assistants had never slow-danced before, and decided that she couldn’t go on like this – she had to do something for young people! With this project, she hopes to help people discover and revive this dance as a therapeutic treatment in this still difficult period of reconstruction.

ORLAN wrote the lyrics for each slow, which she then proposed to musicians to create the melody and sing her texts. She then inserted her voice into the music, in collaboration with the guest.

This album brings together twenty extraordinary slow songs created by Orlan in perfect harmony with some fantastic artists: Sir Alice, Jean-Claude Dreyfus, Terrenoire, Les Tetines Noires, Les Chicks On Speed, Mimosa, Yael Naim, Tentative, Régis Campo, Myope, Blue Carmen, Les Sans Pattes, La Femme, Romain Brau, Charlie Morrow, Demi Mondaine, Charlemagne Palestine, Kat May, and Iury Lech.

The vinyl is on sale at FNAC and on all platforms. Several clips have been produced to visually illustrate ORLAN’s message: she made “Je suis slowsexuel.le” with Sir Alice and “Les corps de métiers m’excitent” with Tentative. A book will be published with texts written by the artist. ORLAN  has performed on several occasions with musicians including Demi Mondaine on Culture Box.

ORLAN collaborates with Say Who to photograph the Grand Jury Prize. Laurent de Cernet, director of Olympia, opened the doors of his historic billiard room to ORLAN for this major event. Ruinart teamed up with ORLAN to make the evening even more sparkling, and the artist herself offered her iconic recipe for Lait de Vierge, guaranteed impure, with no colorants or preservatives. She proposed a listening session commented and performed by Beñat Moreno, so that an exceptional jury could vote for the three best slows on the album. The jury included President Michèle Lamy, Diane Pernet, Christophe Mecca, Sophie Rosemont, Sophie Duplaix, Elisabeth Couturier, Laurent Goumarre, Florence Tredez, Leïla Voight, François Renard, Raphaël Fontang and Léonard Lasry. A few VIPs joined us for the event, which was followed by an after-party at the Silencio Club. Her costume was designed by Beñat Moreno, and featured a lycra dress and chiffon cape. He created a textile print using the slogans on the signs, all in black and white. With this costume, ORLAN becomes a manifesto, visually embodying her concept.

She realized that many of her assistants had never slow-danced before, and decided that she couldn’t go on like this – she had to do something for young people! With this project, she hopes to help people discover and revive this dance as a therapeutic treatment in this still difficult period of reconstruction.

ORLAN wrote the lyrics for each slow, which she then proposed to musicians to create the melody and sing her texts. She then inserted her voice into the music, in collaboration with the guest.

This album brings together twenty extraordinary slow songs created by Orlan in perfect harmony with some fantastic artists: Sir Alice, Jean-Claude Dreyfus, Terrenoire, Les Tetines Noires, Les Chicks On Speed, Mimosa, Yael Naim, Tentative, Régis Campo, Myope, Blue Carmen, Les Sans Pattes, La Femme, Romain Brau, Charlie Morrow, Demi Mondaine, Charlemagne Palestine, Kat May, and Iury Lech.

The vinyl is on sale at FNAC and on all platforms. Several clips have been produced to visually illustrate ORLAN’s message: she made “Je suis slowsexuel.le” with Sir Alice and “Les corps de métiers m’excitent” with Tentative. A book will be published with texts written by the artist. ORLAN  has performed on several occasions with musicians including Demi Mondaine on Culture Box.

Of course, spectators were invited to dance, to get closer, to rediscover themselves…. ORLAN lines the exhibition room from floor to ceiling with cardboard signs bearing the project slogans “JE SUIS SLOWSEXUEL.LE”, “NOUS SOMMES SLOWSEXUEL.LE.S”, “JE SUIS ARTSEXUEL.LE”, “NOUS SOMMES ARTSEXUEL.LE.S”. These signs were used by ORLAN during her first demonstration “Je Suis Slowsexuel.le”, which appears at the end of her eponymous title “Je Suis Slowsexuel.le”. They have become a ubiquitous iconographic feature of the project. Facet balls and light projections create a sensual, intimate space. ORLAN created two augmented reality avatars in her image, in reference to the album cover. One in a blue wig, the other in a two-tone wig, both in costume with her manifesto dress. Her costume was designed by Beñat Moreno, and featured a lycra dress and chiffon cape. He created a textile print using the slogans on the signs, all in black and white. With this costume, ORLAN becomes a manifesto, visually embodying her concept. To mark the closing of her exhibition, ORLAN stages the very first showcase of the album, performing “Je Suis Slowsexuel.le” with Sir Alice, “Contre la Mort” with Demi Mondaine, “Les corps de métiers m’excitent” with Tentative, “Sortir du Noir” with Kat May and “Bléssé.és, écorché.es, boulversé.es, transpercé.es” with Blue Carmen.

She realized that many of her assistants had never slow-danced before, and decided that she couldn’t go on like this – she had to do something for young people! With this project, she hopes to help people discover and revive this dance as a therapeutic treatment in this still difficult period of reconstruction.

ORLAN wrote the lyrics for each slow, which she then proposed to musicians to create the melody and sing her texts. She then inserted her voice into the music, in collaboration with the guest.

This album brings together twenty extraordinary slow songs created by Orlan in perfect harmony with some fantastic artists: Sir Alice, Jean-Claude Dreyfus, Terrenoire, Les Tetines Noires, Les Chicks On Speed, Mimosa, Yael Naim, Tentative, Régis Campo, Myope, Blue Carmen, Les Sans Pattes, La Femme, Romain Brau, Charlie Morrow, Demi Mondaine, Charlemagne Palestine, Kat May, and Iury Lech.

The vinyl is on sale at FNAC and on all platforms. Several clips have been produced to visually illustrate ORLAN’s message: she made “Je suis slowsexuel.le” with Sir Alice and “Les corps de métiers m’excitent” with Tentative. A book will be published with texts written by the artist. ORLAN  has performed on several occasions with musicians including Demi Mondaine on Culture Box.

Of course, spectators were invited to dance, come closer, and rediscover themselves…. ORLAN lined the exhibition hall from floor to ceiling with cardboard signs bearing the project’s slogans: “I AM SLOWSEXUAL,” “WE ARE SLOWSEXUALS,” “I AM ARTSEXUAL,” “WE ARE ARTSEXUAL.” ORLAN used these signs during her first performance, “I Am Slowsexual,” which appears at the end of her eponymous work “I Am Slowsexual.” They have become an iconic and ubiquitous element of the project. Disc balls and light projections create a sensual and intimate space. ORLAN created two augmented-reality avatars in her likeness, referencing the album cover. One wears her blue wig, the other her two-tone wig; both are dressed in her “manifesto” dress. Her costume was designed by Beñat Moreno and consisted of a Lycra dress and a muslin cape. He created a textile print featuring the slogans from the signs, all in black and white. With this costume, ORLAN becomes a manifesto, visually embodying her concept. For the opening, ORLAN staged a demonstration/performance with her studio, friends, extras, and people who joined her at the CENTQUATRE. She made her way through the entire CENTQUATRE, then ended up in her installation, where she invited everyone to dance the Slow, and she herself danced with her audience. This performance will be presented by ORLAN or Beñat Moreno every Saturday for the duration of the exhibition.

She realized that many of her assistants had never slow-danced before, and decided that she couldn’t go on like this – she had to do something for young people! With this project, she hopes to help people discover and revive this dance as a therapeutic treatment in this still difficult period of reconstruction.

ORLAN wrote the lyrics for each slow, which she then proposed to musicians to create the melody and sing her texts. She then inserted her voice into the music, in collaboration with the guest.

This album brings together twenty extraordinary slow songs created by Orlan in perfect harmony with some fantastic artists: Sir Alice, Jean-Claude Dreyfus, Terrenoire, Les Tetines Noires, Les Chicks On Speed, Mimosa, Yael Naim, Tentative, Régis Campo, Myope, Blue Carmen, Les Sans Pattes, La Femme, Romain Brau, Charlie Morrow, Demi Mondaine, Charlemagne Palestine, Kat May, and Iury Lech.

The vinyl is on sale at FNAC and on all platforms. Several clips have been produced to visually illustrate ORLAN’s message: she made “Je suis slowsexuel.le” with Sir Alice and “Les corps de métiers m’excitent” with Tentative. A book will be published with texts written by the artist. ORLAN  has performed on several occasions with musicians including Demi Mondaine on Culture Box.

She’s creating an evening that’s all about the vulva! For example, she invited Circé Deslandes, who had sung a torrid lyric entitled “Ta bite debout sur le bar” in a very sweet, gentle voice. ORLAN did a concert with Chicks on Speed. She also invited singers MADMOIZEL and QUEER to take part in the event, as well as female DJs such as Piu Piu and TGAF.

On arrival at the nightclub, people were presented with a mask printed with a photo of ORLAN’s vulva, a reworking of a work created long ago in the video Mise en scène pour un grand fiat (1984), which was shown in full that evening. She also printed the same photo of her vulva, enlarged and cut into strips so that people could pass over and over it as they moved around Salò. ORLAN also exhibited works from the Masques de l’Opéra de Pékin series in several rooms, facing designs and augmented reality, as well as several projected videos.

This work is a self-portrait in the form of a biotechnological performance—a snapshot of a biological moment. In this digital and technological experiment, the ORLAN-BODY measures itself against the public’s gaze through the mediation of the bacteria that live in symbiosis within it—co-authors of all human identity. What is now known as the microbiota. The ORLAN-CORPS becomes a public space for the duration of a “nanoscale striptease.” ORLAN then cultivates her oral, vaginal, and intestinal flora.  

ORLAN seeks to demonstrate that, for a woman, striptease is “impossible,” because they cannot strip us of all the images that clothe them, all the fantasies, all the beauty standards, and all the preconceptions that cover them up and prevent them from being seen. These are leaden garments that cling to the skin, acting as a screen.

Through these performances, ORLAN used her body as a new instrument of measurement: the ORLAN-BODY. ORLAN applied this principle to measure streets named after historical figures (most of whom, 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 Pittsburgh, and the M HKA in Antwerp. ORLAN also measured the Le Corbusier complex in Firminy, the Vatican, and many other sites.

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, like 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.

She used her body to measure the entire facade of the museum, despite the pain. The result was a series of extraordinary photographs that highlight the architecture of the M HKA, designed by the architectural firm Robbrecht and Daem. Marina Abramovic, a close friend of ORLAN’s who had performed in Antwerp the night before, was present to witness “MesuRAGE,” along with Jan Fabre, Flor Bex, and Barbara de Koening.

Through these performances, ORLAN used her body as a new instrument of measurement: the ORLAN-BODY. ORLAN applied this principle to measure streets named after historical figures (most of whom, 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 Pittsburgh, and the M HKA in Antwerp. ORLAN also measured the Le Corbusier complex in Firminy, the Vatican, and many other sites.

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, like 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.

This performance in the form of a medical intervention was realized in 2007, when ORLAN was invited for a three-month residency at the University of Perth in Australia, where they created the SymbioticA laboratory through Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr in the Department of Human Anatomy and Biology, in collaboration with BioArt technician Jens Hauser.

The staging was minimal: around the hospital bed on which ORLAN lay, dressed in harlequin cloth, were two sheets of the same fabric, one velvet and the other satin.

A diamond-shaped incision was made in the groin crease by burn surgeon Fiona Wood.

Following this medical intervention, the installation “Le manteau d’Arlequin” was created.

Her trip to India was part of “the film plan,” a series of works conceived after reading 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 a film in reverse, beginning with the poster and promotional materials—including a trailer, flyers, a soundtrack composed by the band Tanger, and a television program for the feature film’s launch. ORLAN enlisted the help of an advertising agency, Publidécor, which specialized in hand-painted movie posters from the 1950s; together, they created fourteen hand-painted posters based on photos of the artist and images of recycled artworks. Her intention with these hand-painted posters—created with acrylic paint on 3 m x 2 m canvases—was to tell the story of her life in art. ORLAN created these posters by featuring the names of her friends in the art world at the time, along with one or two names of movie stars, to make it seem as though the film actually existed. She also staged a fake press conference with the help of director Bigas Luna and exhibition curator Lorand Hegyi during a biennial in Valencia. She invited numerous journalists to tell them about a film she claimed to have made—one that did not actually exist.

There were also real film directors like Richard Dembo, as well as many actors and actresses, Sylvie Testud, Jean-Claude Dreyfus, Jean-Christophe Bouvet…film and art critics like Christine Buci-Glucksmann and artists like Raymond Hains.

ORLAN recreated a fake TV set and projected the movie posters. Each of the actors and actresses seemed to have just come out of the premiere, telling the story of the film, the story of the shoot and their relationship with the cast and crew.

The “Exogène” exhibition, created by Bruno Guiganti and Morten Salling, took the form of a multi-part criminal investigation and identity quest. Works created by ORLAN using her own blood and flesh have been submitted to  the Danish forensic police for sequencing to verify whether they were created by the same artist. Sequencing analysis proved that they had indeed been produced by ORLAN. These works were a reliquary with flesh in the center and a St suaires soaked in ORLAN’s blood.

This fiction within a fiction spread throughout Copenhagen. Wanted posters featuring ORLAN were then put up all over the city, and a skull supposedly found by the art center was handed over to the criminal investigation department to find out if it might belong to her.

Traces of this investigation (works by ORLAN, fingerprints, DNA sequencing, wanted notices, skulls, etc.) were then exhibited in the desecrated Nikolaj Church, transformed into an art center.

One could say, then, that this is a commissioned performance. In this proposal, she found a way to speak out loud and clear about how negatively she viewed artistic production in the 1980s. She therefore decided to stage a performance that went against the grain, serving as a counterpoint to what was happening in the contemporary art scene. In those years, most artists had become completely conformist and overly accommodating to market forces. ORLAN wanted to create a performance that built on her previous work—one that looked toward the future, radical in and of itself and transcending her own persona.  

It was while reading *La Robe* (which she would use as a motto for all her surgical-performance operations) by Eugénie Lemoine-Luccioni, a Lacanian psychoanalyst, that the idea of this “passage à l’acte” occurred to her. She thought that at that time they were beginning to have the means to bridge the gap between the internal image and the external image. She then said that she was engaging in “woman-to-woman transsexualism,” alluding to transsexuals: a man who feels like a woman wants others to see him as a woman (and vice versa). We could summarize this by saying that it is a communication problem. ORLAN creates a classic self-portrait, initially developed using a computer and then permanently inscribed on her flesh. She refers to this as “carnal art” to distinguish it from body art and questions the status of the body in society and its future in coming generations through new technologies and genetic manipulation.  

The artist’s body becomes a venue for public debate. 

On May 30, 1990, ORLAN’s birthday, in a deconsecrated church called “All Saints” in Newcastle, England, she announced, during an inaugural ritual performance, her decision to undertake the Surgical-Performance Operations by reading her “Carnal Art” manifesto, which she had written in 1989. 

The series has two titles: The Reincarnation of Sainte-ORLAN (a reference to the character who gradually came into being by adopting religious imagery in his major series Documentary Study: Drapery, The Baroque) or “New Images—Images” (A nod to the Hindu gods and goddesses who change their appearance to undertake new works and achieve new feats. For ORLAN, this involves shifting her frame of reference—moving from Judeo-Christian religious iconography to Greek mythology. Furthermore, this second title alludes to the so-called “new images,” that is, new technologies.) It is a series of nine performances created by ORLAN between 1990 and 1993 in Paris, Brussels, and New York.  

In the very beginning, ORLAN created a self-portrait by mixing and blending, using a computer, images of goddesses from Greek mythology—chosen not for the beauty standards they are supposed to represent, but rather for their stories. 

Diane was chosen because she defies both gods and men, because she is proactive—even aggressive—and because she leads a group. The Mona Lisa as a flagship figure in art history, as a point of reference, because she isn’t beautiful by today’s standards of beauty, because there is a man hidden beneath this woman. We now know that it is Leonardo da Vinci’s self-portrait that lies hidden beneath the Mona Lisa (which brings us back to the issue of identity).  

ORLAN will say: 

“ISo I don’t want to look like Botticelli’s Venus.

I don’t want to look like Gustave Moreau’s Europa (who isn’t my favorite painter). I chose this painter’s depiction of Europa because she appears in an unfinished painting—as, in fact, do most of his paintings!

I don’t want to look like Gérard’s Psyche.

I don’t want to look like Diane from the Fontainebleau School.

I don’t want to look like Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa… as some newspapers and television shows have said and continue to say, despite my many contradictions and outbursts of anger. (The media coverage I can’t escape—whether in print or on TV—will be analyzed and make sense in about ten years. ”

For ORLAN, these depictions of female figures serve as a framework and a source of inspiration, and are symbolically far below them. Through this process of digital hybridization, she asked the surgeons to come as close as possible to this image.

In the three most recent surgical procedures performed in New York, ORLAN has broken free from conventional models by carrying out operations that were not intended to create beauty but rather ugliness and monstrosity. 

At first, finding a surgeon was difficult. After many rejections, ORLAN found one—a very cautious surgeon who started by taking small steps, which allowed her to understand what she was getting into and to assess what she could manage to do in an operating room, what the limitations were and her own limits, understand how she reacted, how her body reacted, and thus learn to manage the entire surgical process better and better.  

ORLAN created this series to disrupt the conventional practices of cosmetic surgery aimed at enhancement and rejuvenation. ORLAN is not against cosmetic surgery itself, but rather against the way it is used. She thus uses this technique to create a form of self-love by challenging the mask of the “natural.” The primary condition agreed upon with the various surgeons was that there be no pain, as ORLAN advocates for BODY-PLEASURE. 

Each procedure was conceived as a rite of passage. As a visual artist, ORLAN sought to intervene in the cold, stereotypical aesthetics of surgery and transform them. For each performance, ORLAN decorated the operating room, which, through this act, became her artist’s studio. She and the entire medical team were dressed by a renowned designer who collaborated with the artist. The performances were accompanied by readings, and whenever the surgical procedure allowed, ORLAN produced images—creating films, videos, photographs, and drawings using her blood and fingers— reliquaries using her fat and flesh, a sort of “holy shroud” made from her dried blood and medical gauze from the operation—onto which she applied photographic transfers—and objects that were subsequently exhibited in museums and galleries.

One could say, then, that this is a commissioned performance. In this proposal, she found a way to speak out loud and clear about how negatively she viewed artistic production in the 1980s. She therefore decided to stage a performance that went against the grain, serving as a counterpoint to what was happening in the contemporary art scene. In those years, most artists had become completely conformist and overly accommodating to market forces. ORLAN wanted to create a performance that built on her previous work—one that looked toward the future, radical in and of itself and transcending her own persona.  

It was while reading *La Robe* (which she would use as a motto for all her surgical-performance operations) by Eugénie Lemoine-Luccioni, a Lacanian psychoanalyst, that the idea of this “passage à l’acte” occurred to her. She thought that at that time they were beginning to have the means to bridge the gap between the internal image and the external image. She then said that she was engaging in “woman-to-woman transsexualism,” alluding to transsexuals: a man who feels like a woman wants others to see him as a woman (and vice versa). We could summarize this by saying that it is a communication problem. ORLAN creates a classic self-portrait, initially developed using a computer and then permanently inscribed on her flesh. She refers to this as “carnal art” to distinguish it from body art and questions the status of the body in society and its future in coming generations through new technologies and genetic manipulation.  

The artist’s body becomes a venue for public debate. 

On May 30, 1990, ORLAN’s birthday, in a deconsecrated church called “All Saints” in Newcastle, England, she announced, during an inaugural ritual performance, her decision to undertake the Surgical-Performance Operations by reading her “Carnal Art” manifesto, which she had written in 1989. 

The series has two titles: The Reincarnation of Sainte-ORLAN (a reference to the character who gradually came into being by adopting religious imagery in his major series Documentary Study: The Drapery, The Baroque) or “new images—images” (A nod to the Hindu gods and goddesses who change their appearance to undertake new works and achieve new feats. For ORLAN, this involves shifting her frame of reference—moving from Judeo-Christian religious iconography to Greek mythology. Furthermore, this second title alludes to the so-called “new images,” that is, new technologies.) It is a series of nine performances created by ORLAN between 1990 and 1993 in Paris, Brussels, and New York.  

In the very beginning, ORLAN created a self-portrait by mixing and blending, using a computer, images of goddesses from Greek mythology—chosen not for the beauty standards they are supposed to represent, but rather for their stories. 

Diane was chosen because she defies both gods and men, because she is proactive—even aggressive—and because she leads a group. The Mona Lisa as a flagship figure in art history, as a point of reference, because she isn’t beautiful by today’s standards of beauty, because there is a man hidden beneath this woman. We now know that it is Leonardo da Vinci’s self-portrait that lies hidden beneath the Mona Lisa (which brings us back to the issue of identity).  

ORLAN will say: 

“ISo I don’t want to look like Botticelli’s Venus.

I don’t want to look like Gustave Moreau’s Europa (who isn’t my favorite painter). I chose this painter’s depiction of Europa because she appears in an unfinished painting—as, in fact, do most of his paintings!

I don’t want to look like Gérard’s Psyche.

I don’t want to look like Diane from the Fontainebleau School.

I don’t want to look like Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa… as some newspapers and television shows have said and continue to say, despite my many contradictions and outbursts of anger. (The media coverage I can’t escape—whether in print or on television—will be analyzed and make sense in about ten years. ”

For ORLAN, these depictions of female figures serve as a framework and a source of inspiration, and are symbolically far below them. Through this process of digital hybridization, she asked the surgeons to come as close as possible to this image.

In the three most recent surgical procedures performed in New York, ORLAN has broken free from conventional models by carrying out operations that were not intended to create beauty but rather ugliness and monstrosity. 

At first, finding a surgeon was difficult. After many rejections, ORLAN found one—a very cautious surgeon who started by taking small steps, which allowed her to understand what she was getting into and to assess what she could manage to do in an operating room, what the limitations were and her own limits, understand how she reacted, how her body reacted, and thus learn to manage the entire surgical process better and better.  

ORLAN created this series to disrupt the conventional practices of cosmetic surgery aimed at enhancement and rejuvenation. ORLAN is not against cosmetic surgery itself, but rather against the way it is used. She thus uses this technique to create a form of self-love by challenging the mask of the “natural.” The primary condition agreed upon with the various surgeons was that there be no pain, as ORLAN advocates for BODY-PLEASURE. 

Each operation was conceived as a rite of passage. As a visual artist, ORLAN sought to intervene in the cold, stereotypical aesthetics of surgery and transform them. For each performance, ORLAN decorated the operating room, which, through this act, became her artist’s studio. She and the entire medical team were dressed by a renowned designer who collaborated with the artist. The performances were accompanied by readings, and whenever the surgical procedure allowed, ORLAN produced images—creating films, videos, photographs, and drawings using her blood and fingers— reliquaries made from her fat and flesh, sorts of “holy shrouds” created with her dried blood and medical gauze from the operation—onto which she made photographic transfers—and objects that were subsequently exhibited in museums and galleries.

Among the medical team and the STUDIO ORLAN team, there was a woman specializing in sign language for the deaf and hard-of-hearing, and this character was there to remind us that we are all at times deaf and hard-of-hearing. His presence in the operating theatre was a display of body language. She was assisted by Raphaël Cuir, videographer Tom Klinkowstein, who handled the satellite transmission, Sophie Thompson, who took care of the English translation, and Connie Chung, the famous star broadcaster of the time, who asked to be in the operating room with ORLAN and did a full report on the CNN evening news at 8pm. She came to France to attend ORLAN’s wedding to Raphaël Cuir in Sologne. 

During this mythical operation, ORLAN had solid silicone implants placed on her cheekbones to enhance them on both sides of her forehead. The idea was to create an operation that wouldn’t bring beauty but, on the contrary, undesirability and monstrosity. ORLAN wanted to demonstrate that beauty is a dictate of the dominant ideology in a geographical and historical point in time. These bumps have become organs of seduction. ORLAN says “it’s my convertible”.  

Thanks to Christian Vanderborght, this performance was broadcast live via satellite to the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Mac Luhan Centre in Toronto, the Banff Multimedia Centre, Canada, Belgium, Germany, Latvia, Japan, the Netherlands, New York, Santa Monica and in France to Nice and Lyon. Spectators from all over the world were able to watch the operation and ask questions, which ORLAN answered live as soon as the surgical procedure allowed. Participants in the satellite transmission at the Centre Georges Pompidou included Gladys Fabre, Jean-Paul Fargier, Christian Vanderborght and François Barré, President of the Centre, among others.

One could say, then, that this is a commissioned performance. In this proposal, she found a way to speak out loud and clear about how negatively she viewed artistic production in the 1980s. She therefore decided to stage a performance that went against the grain, serving as a counterpoint to what was happening in the contemporary art scene. In those years, most artists had become completely conformist and overly accommodating to market forces. ORLAN wanted to create a performance that built on her previous work—one that looked toward the future, radical in and of itself and transcending her own persona.  

It was while reading *La Robe* (which she would use as a motto for all her surgical-performance operations) by Eugénie Lemoine-Luccioni, a Lacanian psychoanalyst, that the idea of this “passage à l’acte” occurred to her. She thought that at that time they were beginning to have the means to bridge the gap between the internal image and the external image. She then said that she was engaging in “woman-to-woman transsexualism,” alluding to transsexuals: a man who feels like a woman wants others to see him as a woman (and vice versa). We could summarize this by saying that it is a communication problem. ORLAN creates a classic self-portrait, initially developed using a computer and then permanently inscribed on her flesh. She refers to this as “carnal art” to distinguish it from body art and questions the status of the body in society and its future in coming generations through new technologies and genetic manipulation.  

The artist’s body becomes a venue for public debate. 

On May 30, 1990, ORLAN’s birthday, in a deconsecrated church called “All Saints” in Newcastle, England, she announced, during an inaugural ritual performance, her decision to undertake the Surgical-Performance Operations by reading her “Carnal Art” manifesto, which she had written in 1989. 

The series has two titles: The Reincarnation of Sainte-ORLAN (a reference to the character who gradually came into being by adopting religious imagery in his major series Documentary Study: The Drapery, The Baroque) or “new images—images” (A nod to the Hindu gods and goddesses who change their appearance to undertake new works and achieve new feats. For ORLAN, this involves shifting her frame of reference—moving from Judeo-Christian religious iconography to Greek mythology. Furthermore, this second title alludes to the so-called “new images,” that is, new technologies.) It is a series of nine performances created by ORLAN between 1990 and 1993 in Paris, Brussels, and New York.  

In the very beginning, ORLAN created a self-portrait by mixing and blending, using a computer, images of goddesses from Greek mythology—chosen not for the beauty standards they are supposed to represent, but rather for their stories. 

Diane was chosen because she defies both gods and men, because she is proactive—even aggressive—and because she leads a group. The Mona Lisa as a flagship figure in art history, as a point of reference, because she isn’t beautiful by today’s standards of beauty, because there is a man hidden beneath this woman. We now know that it is Leonardo da Vinci’s self-portrait that lies hidden beneath the Mona Lisa (which brings us back to the issue of identity).  

ORLAN will say: 

“ISo I don’t want to look like Botticelli’s Venus.

I don’t want to look like Gustave Moreau’s Europa (who isn’t my favorite painter). I chose this painter’s depiction of Europa because she appears in an unfinished painting—as, in fact, do most of his paintings!

I don’t want to look like Gérard’s Psyche.

I don’t want to look like Diane from the Fontainebleau School.

I don’t want to look like Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa… as some newspapers and television shows have said and continue to say, despite my many contradictions and outbursts of anger. (The media coverage I can’t escape—whether in print or on television—will be analyzed and understood in about ten years. ”

For ORLAN, these depictions of female figures serve as a framework and a source of inspiration, and are symbolically far below them. Through this process of digital hybridization, she asked the surgeons to come as close as possible to this image.

In the three most recent surgical procedures performed in New York, ORLAN has broken free from conventional models by carrying out operations that were not intended to create beauty but rather ugliness and monstrosity. 

At first, finding a surgeon was difficult. After many rejections, ORLAN found one—a very cautious surgeon who started by taking small steps, which allowed her to understand what she was getting into and to assess what she could manage to do in an operating room, what the limitations were and her own limits, understand how she reacted, how her body reacted, and thus learn to manage the entire surgical process better and better.  

ORLAN created this series to disrupt the conventional practices of cosmetic surgery aimed at enhancement and rejuvenation. ORLAN is not against cosmetic surgery itself, but rather against the way it is used. She thus uses this technique to create a form of self-love by challenging the mask of the “natural.” The primary condition agreed upon with the various surgeons was that there be no pain, as ORLAN advocates for BODY-PLEASURE. 

Each procedure was conceived as a rite of passage. As a visual artist, ORLAN sought to intervene in the cold, stereotypical aesthetics of surgery and transform them. For each performance, ORLAN decorated the operating room, which, through this act, became her artist’s studio. She and the entire medical team were dressed by a renowned designer who collaborated with the artist. The performances were accompanied by readings, and whenever the surgical procedure allowed, ORLAN produced images—creating films, videos, photographs, and drawings using her blood and fingers— reliquaries made from her fat and flesh, a sort of “holy shroud” created from her dried blood and medical gauze from the operation—onto which she made photographic transfers—and objects that were subsequently exhibited in museums and galleries.

One could say, then, that this is a commissioned performance. In this proposal, she found a way to speak out loud and clear about how negatively she viewed artistic production in the 1980s. She therefore decided to stage a performance that went against the grain, serving as a counterpoint to what was happening in the contemporary art scene. In those years, most artists had become completely conformist and overly accommodating to market forces. ORLAN wanted to create a performance that built on her previous work—one that looked toward the future, radical in and of itself and transcending her own persona.  

It was while reading *La Robe* (which she would use as a motto for all her surgical-performance operations) by Eugénie Lemoine-Luccioni, a Lacanian psychoanalyst, that the idea of this “passage à l’acte” occurred to her. She thought that at that time they were beginning to have the means to bridge the gap between the internal image and the external image. She then said that she was engaging in “woman-to-woman transsexualism,” alluding to transsexuals: a man who feels like a woman wants others to see him as a woman (and vice versa). We could summarize this by saying that it is a communication problem. ORLAN creates a classic self-portrait, initially developed using a computer and then permanently inscribed on her flesh. She refers to this as “carnal art” to distinguish it from body art and questions the status of the body in society and its future in coming generations through new technologies and genetic manipulation.  

The artist’s body becomes a venue for public debate. 

On May 30, 1990, ORLAN’s birthday, in a deconsecrated church called “All Saints” in Newcastle, England, she announced, during an inaugural ritual performance, her decision to undertake the Surgical-Performance Operations by reading her “Carnal Art” manifesto, which she had written in 1989. 

The series has two titles: The Reincarnation of Sainte-ORLAN (a reference to the character who gradually came into being by adopting religious imagery in his major series Documentary Study: The Drapery, The Baroque) or “new images—images” (A nod to the Hindu gods and goddesses who change their appearance to undertake new works and achieve new feats. For ORLAN, this involves shifting her frame of reference—moving from Judeo-Christian religious iconography to Greek mythology. Furthermore, this second title alludes to the so-called “new images,” that is, new technologies.) It is a series of nine performances created by ORLAN between 1990 and 1993 in Paris, Brussels, and New York.  

In the very beginning, ORLAN created a self-portrait by mixing and blending, using a computer, images of goddesses from Greek mythology—chosen not for the beauty standards they are supposed to represent, but rather for their stories. 

Diane was chosen because she defies both gods and men, because she is proactive—even aggressive—and because she leads a group. The Mona Lisa as a flagship figure in art history, as a point of reference, because she isn’t beautiful by today’s standards of beauty, because there is a man hidden beneath this woman. We now know that it is Leonardo da Vinci’s self-portrait that lies hidden beneath the Mona Lisa (which brings us back to the issue of identity).  

ORLAN will say: 

“ISo I don’t want to look like Botticelli’s Venus.

I don’t want to look like Gustave Moreau’s Europa (who isn’t my favorite painter). I chose this painter’s depiction of Europa because she appears in an unfinished painting—as, in fact, do most of his paintings!

I don’t want to look like Gérard’s Psyche.

I don’t want to look like Diane from the Fontainebleau School.

I don’t want to look like Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa… as some newspapers and television shows have said and continue to say, despite my many contradictions and outbursts of anger. (The media coverage I can’t escape—whether in print or on television—will be analyzed and understood in about ten years. ”

For ORLAN, these depictions of female figures serve as a framework and a source of inspiration, and are symbolically far below them. Through this process of digital hybridization, she asked the surgeons to come as close as possible to this image.

In the three most recent surgical procedures performed in New York, ORLAN has broken free from conventional models by carrying out operations that were not intended to create beauty but rather ugliness and monstrosity. 

At first, finding a surgeon was difficult. After many rejections, ORLAN found one—a very cautious surgeon who started by taking small steps, which allowed her to understand what she was getting into and to assess what she could manage to do in an operating room, what the limitations were and her own limits, understand how she reacted, how her body reacted, and thus learn to manage the entire surgical process better and better.  

ORLAN created this series to disrupt the conventional practices of cosmetic surgery aimed at enhancement and rejuvenation. ORLAN is not against cosmetic surgery itself, but rather against the way it is used. She thus uses this technique to create a form of self-love by challenging the mask of the “natural.” The primary condition agreed upon with the various surgeons was that there be no pain, as ORLAN advocates for BODY-PLEASURE. 

Each procedure was conceived as a rite of passage. As a visual artist, ORLAN sought to intervene in the cold, stereotypical aesthetics of surgery and transform them. For each performance, ORLAN decorated the operating room, which, through this act, became her artist’s studio. She and the entire medical team were dressed by a renowned designer who collaborated with the artist. The performances were accompanied by readings, and whenever the surgical procedure allowed, ORLAN produced images—films, videos, photographs, and drawings—using her blood and fingers, reliquaries from her fat and flesh, a sort of “holy shroud” made from her dried blood and medical gauze from the operation—onto which she applied photographic transfers—and objects that were later exhibited in museums and galleries.

One could say, then, that this is a commissioned performance. In this proposal, she found a way to speak out loud and clear about how negatively she viewed artistic production in the 1980s. She therefore decided to stage a performance that went against the grain, serving as a counterpoint to what was happening in the contemporary art scene. In those years, most artists had become completely conformist and overly accommodating to market forces. ORLAN wanted to create a performance that built on her previous work—one that looked toward the future, radical in and of itself and transcending her own persona.  

It was while reading *La Robe* (which she would use as a motto for all her surgical-performance operations) by Eugénie Lemoine-Luccioni, a Lacanian psychoanalyst, that the idea of this “passage à l’acte” occurred to her. She thought that at that time they were beginning to have the means to bridge the gap between the internal image and the external image. She then said that she was engaging in “woman-to-woman transsexualism,” alluding to transsexuals: a man who feels like a woman wants others to see him as a woman (and vice versa). We could summarize this by saying that it is a communication problem. ORLAN creates a classic self-portrait, initially developed using a computer and then permanently inscribed on her flesh. She refers to this as “carnal art” to distinguish it from body art and questions the status of the body in society and its future in coming generations through new technologies and genetic manipulation.  

The artist’s body becomes a venue for public debate. 

On May 30, 1990, ORLAN’s birthday, in a deconsecrated church called “All Saints” in Newcastle, England, she announced, during an inaugural ritual performance, her decision to undertake the Surgical-Performance Operations by reading her “Carnal Art” manifesto, which she had written in 1989. 

The series has two titles: The Reincarnation of Sainte-ORLAN (a reference to the character who gradually came into being by adopting religious imagery in his major series Documentary Study: The Drapery, The Baroque) or “new images—images” (A nod to the Hindu gods and goddesses who change their appearance to undertake new works and achieve new feats. For ORLAN, this involves shifting her frame of reference—moving from Judeo-Christian religious iconography to Greek mythology. Furthermore, this second title alludes to the so-called “new images,” that is, new technologies.) It is a series of nine performances created by ORLAN between 1990 and 1993 in Paris, Brussels, and New York.  

In the very beginning, ORLAN created a self-portrait by mixing and blending, using a computer, images of goddesses from Greek mythology—chosen not for the beauty standards they are supposed to represent, but rather for their stories. 

Diane was chosen because she defies both gods and men, because she is proactive—even aggressive—and because she leads a group. The Mona Lisa as a flagship figure in art history, as a point of reference, because she isn’t beautiful by today’s standards of beauty, because there is a man hidden beneath this woman. We now know that it is Leonardo da Vinci’s self-portrait that lies hidden beneath the Mona Lisa (which brings us back to the issue of identity).  

ORLAN will say: 

“ISo I don’t want to look like Botticelli’s Venus.

I don’t want to look like Gustave Moreau’s Europa (who isn’t my favorite painter). I chose this painter’s depiction of Europa because she appears in an unfinished painting—as, in fact, do most of his paintings!

I don’t want to look like Gérard’s Psyche.

I don’t want to look like Diane from the Fontainebleau School.

I don’t want to look like Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa… as some newspapers and television shows have said and continue to say, despite my many contradictions and outbursts of anger. (The media coverage I can’t escape—whether in print or on television—will be analyzed and understood in about ten years. ”

For ORLAN, these depictions of female figures serve as a framework and a source of inspiration, and are symbolically far below them. Through this process of digital hybridization, she asked the surgeons to come as close as possible to this image.

In the three most recent surgical procedures performed in New York, ORLAN has broken free from conventional models by carrying out operations that were not intended to create beauty but rather ugliness and monstrosity. 

At first, finding a surgeon was difficult. After many rejections, ORLAN found one—a very cautious surgeon who started by taking small steps, which allowed her to understand what she was getting into and to assess what she could manage to do in an operating room, what the limitations were and her own limits, understand how she reacted, how her body reacted, and thus learn to manage the entire surgical process better and better.  

ORLAN created this series to disrupt the conventional practices of cosmetic surgery aimed at enhancement and rejuvenation. ORLAN is not against cosmetic surgery itself, but rather against the way it is used. She thus uses this technique to create a form of self-love by challenging the mask of the “natural.” The primary condition agreed upon with the various surgeons was that there be no pain, as ORLAN advocates for BODY-PLEASURE. 

Each procedure was conceived as a rite of passage. As a visual artist, ORLAN sought to intervene in the cold, stereotypical aesthetics of surgery and transform them. For each performance, ORLAN decorated the operating room, which, through this act, became her artist’s studio. She and the entire medical team were dressed by a renowned designer who collaborated with the artist. The performances were accompanied by readings, and whenever the surgical procedure allowed, ORLAN created images—films, videos, photographs, and drawings—using her blood and fingers; reliquaries from her fat and flesh, a sort of “holy shroud” made from her dried blood and medical gauze from the operation—onto which she applied photographic transfers—and objects that were subsequently exhibited in museums and galleries.

One could say, then, that this is a commissioned performance. In this proposal, she found a way to speak out loud and clear about how negatively she viewed artistic production in the 1980s. She therefore decided to stage a performance that went against the grain, serving as a counterpoint to what was happening in the contemporary art scene. In those years, most artists had become completely conformist and overly accommodating to market forces. ORLAN wanted to create a performance that built on her previous work—one that looked toward the future, radical in and of itself and transcending her own persona.  

It was while reading *La Robe* (which she would use as a motto for all her surgical-performance operations) by Eugénie Lemoine-Luccioni, a Lacanian psychoanalyst, that the idea of this “passage à l’acte” occurred to her. She thought that at that time they were beginning to have the means to bridge the gap between the internal image and the external image. She then said that she was engaging in “woman-to-woman transsexualism,” alluding to transsexuals: a man who feels like a woman wants others to see him as a woman (and vice versa). We could summarize this by saying that it is a communication problem. ORLAN creates a classic self-portrait, initially developed using a computer and then permanently inscribed on her flesh. She refers to this as “carnal art” to distinguish it from body art and questions the status of the body in society and its future in coming generations through new technologies and genetic manipulation.  

The artist’s body becomes a venue for public debate. 

On May 30, 1990, ORLAN’s birthday, in a deconsecrated church called “All Saints” in Newcastle, England, she announced, during an inaugural ritual performance, her decision to undertake the Surgical-Performance Operations by reading her “Carnal Art” manifesto, which she had written in 1989. 

The series has two titles: The Reincarnation of Sainte-ORLAN (a reference to the character who gradually came into being by adopting religious imagery in his major series Documentary Study: The Drapery, The Baroque) or “new images—images” (A nod to the Hindu gods and goddesses who change their appearance to undertake new works and achieve new feats. For ORLAN, this involves shifting her frame of reference—moving from Judeo-Christian religious iconography to Greek mythology. Furthermore, this second title alludes to the so-called “new images,” that is, new technologies.) It is a series of nine performances created by ORLAN between 1990 and 1993 in Paris, Brussels, and New York.  

In the very beginning, ORLAN created a self-portrait by mixing and blending, using a computer, images of goddesses from Greek mythology—chosen not for the beauty standards they are supposed to represent, but rather for their stories. 

Diane was chosen because she defies both gods and men, because she is proactive—even aggressive—and because she leads a group. The Mona Lisa as a flagship figure in art history, as a point of reference, because she isn’t beautiful by today’s standards of beauty, because there is a man hidden beneath this woman. We now know that it is Leonardo da Vinci’s self-portrait that lies hidden beneath the Mona Lisa (which brings us back to the issue of identity).  

ORLAN will say: 

“ISo I don’t want to look like Botticelli’s Venus.

I don’t want to look like Gustave Moreau’s Europa (who isn’t my favorite painter). I chose this painter’s depiction of Europa because she appears in an unfinished painting—as, in fact, do most of his paintings!

I don’t want to look like Gérard’s Psyche.

I don’t want to look like Diane from the Fontainebleau School.

I don’t want to look like Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa… as some newspapers and television shows have said and continue to say, despite my many contradictions and outbursts of anger. (The media coverage I can’t escape—whether in print or on television—will be analyzed and understood in about ten years. ”

For ORLAN, these depictions of female figures serve as a framework and a source of inspiration, and are symbolically far below them. Through this process of digital hybridization, she asked the surgeons to come as close as possible to this image.

In the three most recent surgical procedures performed in New York, ORLAN has broken free from conventional models by carrying out operations that were not intended to create beauty but rather ugliness and monstrosity. 

At first, finding a surgeon was difficult. After many rejections, ORLAN found one—a very cautious surgeon who started by taking small steps, which allowed her to understand what she was getting into and to assess what she could manage to do in an operating room, what the limitations were and her own limits, understand how she reacted, how her body reacted, and thus learn to manage the entire surgical process better and better.  

ORLAN created this series to disrupt the conventional practices of cosmetic surgery aimed at enhancement and rejuvenation. ORLAN is not against cosmetic surgery itself, but rather against the way it is used. She thus uses this technique to create a form of self-love by challenging the mask of the “natural.” The primary condition agreed upon with the various surgeons was that there be no pain, as ORLAN advocates for BODY-PLEASURE. 

Each procedure was conceived as a rite of passage. As a visual artist, ORLAN sought to intervene in the cold, stereotypical aesthetics of surgery and transform them. For each performance, ORLAN decorated the operating room, which, through this act, became her artist’s studio. She and the entire medical staff were dressed by a renowned designer who collaborated with the artist. The performances were accompanied by readings, and whenever the surgical procedure allowed, ORLAN produced images—creating films, videos, photographs, and drawings using her blood and fingers— reliquaries made from her fat and flesh, a sort of “holy shroud” created with her dried blood and medical gauze from the operation—onto which she made photographic transfers—and objects that were subsequently exhibited in museums and galleries.

One could say, then, that this is a commissioned performance. In this proposal, she found a way to speak out loud and clear about how negatively she viewed artistic production in the 1980s. She therefore decided to stage a performance that went against the grain, serving as a counterpoint to what was happening in the contemporary art scene. In those years, most artists had become completely conformist and overly accommodating to market forces. ORLAN wanted to create a performance that built on her previous work—one that looked toward the future, radical in and of itself and transcending her own persona.  

It was while reading *La Robe* (which she would use as a motto for all her surgical-performance operations) by Eugénie Lemoine-Luccioni, a Lacanian psychoanalyst, that the idea of this “passage à l’acte” occurred to her. She thought that at that time they were beginning to have the means to bridge the gap between the internal image and the external image. She then said that she was engaging in “woman-to-woman transsexualism,” alluding to transsexuals: a man who feels like a woman wants others to see him as a woman (and vice versa). We could summarize this by saying that it is a communication problem. ORLAN creates a classic self-portrait, initially developed using a computer and then permanently inscribed on her flesh. She refers to this as “carnal art” to distinguish it from body art and questions the status of the body in society and its future in coming generations through new technologies and genetic manipulation.  

The artist’s body becomes a venue for public debate. 

On May 30, 1990, ORLAN’s birthday, in a deconsecrated church called “All Saints” in Newcastle, England, she announced, during an inaugural ritual performance, her decision to undertake the Surgical-Performance Operations by reading her “Carnal Art” manifesto, which she had written in 1989. 

The series has two titles: The Reincarnation of Sainte-ORLAN (a reference to the character who gradually came into being by adopting religious imagery in his major series Documentary Study: Drapery, The Baroque) or “new images—images” (A nod to the Hindu gods and goddesses who change their appearance to undertake new works and achieve new feats. For ORLAN, this involves shifting her frame of reference—moving from Judeo-Christian religious iconography to Greek mythology. Furthermore, this second title alludes to the so-called “new images,” that is, new technologies.) It is a series of nine performances created by ORLAN between 1990 and 1993 in Paris, Brussels, and New York.  

In the very beginning, ORLAN created a self-portrait by mixing and blending, using a computer, images of goddesses from Greek mythology—chosen not for the beauty standards they are supposed to represent, but rather for their stories. 

Diane was chosen because she defies both gods and men, because she is proactive—even aggressive—and because she leads a group. The Mona Lisa as a flagship figure in art history, as a point of reference, because she isn’t beautiful by today’s standards of beauty, because there is a man hidden beneath this woman. We now know that it is Leonardo da Vinci’s self-portrait that lies hidden beneath the Mona Lisa (which brings us back to the issue of identity).  

ORLAN will say: 

“ISo I don’t want to look like Botticelli’s Venus.

I don’t want to look like Gustave Moreau’s Europa (who isn’t my favorite painter). I chose this painter’s depiction of Europa because she appears in an unfinished painting—as, in fact, do most of his paintings!

I don’t want to look like Gérard’s Psyche.

I don’t want to look like Diane from the Fontainebleau School.

I don’t want to look like Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa… as some newspapers and television shows have said and continue to say, despite my many contradictions and outbursts of anger. (The media coverage I can’t escape—whether in print or on television—will be analyzed and understood in about ten years. ”

For ORLAN, these depictions of female figures serve as a framework and a source of inspiration, and are symbolically far below them. Through this process of digital hybridization, she asked the surgeons to come as close as possible to this image.

In the three most recent surgical procedures performed in New York, ORLAN has broken free from conventional models by carrying out operations that were not intended to create beauty but rather ugliness and monstrosity. 

At first, finding a surgeon was difficult. After many rejections, ORLAN found one—a very cautious surgeon who started by taking small steps, which allowed her to understand what she was getting into and to assess what she could manage to do in an operating room, what the limitations were and her own limits, understand how she reacted, how her body reacted, and thus learn to manage the entire surgical process better and better.  

ORLAN created this series to disrupt the conventional practices of cosmetic surgery aimed at enhancement and rejuvenation. ORLAN is not against cosmetic surgery itself, but rather against the way it is used. She thus uses this technique to create a form of self-love by challenging the mask of the “natural.” The primary condition agreed upon with the various surgeons was that there be no pain, as ORLAN advocates for BODY-PLEASURE. 

Each procedure was conceived as a rite of passage. As a visual artist, ORLAN sought to intervene in the cold, stereotypical aesthetics of surgery and transform them. For each performance, ORLAN decorated the operating room, which, through this act, became her artist’s studio. She and the entire medical team were dressed by a renowned designer who collaborated with the artist. The performances were accompanied by readings, and whenever the surgical procedure allowed, ORLAN produced images—making films, videos, photographs, and drawings—using her blood and fingers, reliquaries made from her fat and flesh, a sort of “holy shroud” created from her dried blood and medical gauze from the operation—onto which she made photographic transfers—and objects that were subsequently exhibited in museums and galleries.

Through these performances, ORLAN used her body as a new instrument of measurement: the ORLAN-BODY. ORLAN applied this principle to measure streets named after historical figures (most of whom, 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 Pittsburgh, and the M HKA in Antwerp. ORLAN also measured the Le Corbusier complex in Firminy, the Vatican, and many other sites.

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, like 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.

During her residency at the Getty Research Institute in 2007, ORLAN asked prominent researchers in residence with her that year to give her a book—or the title of a book—that had most profoundly influenced their thinking, their work, or their lives. The artist placed them all on a large block of granite at the entrance, where the words “Getty Research Institute” were engraved, then lay down next to the books and asked someone to remove those that extended beyond her body. After using her body to measure them, ORLAN read them continuously and annotated them. ORLAN has performed this piece several times throughout her life, in various places and circumstances—a performance that bridges the body and the corpus of the book.

On the last day of installation before demolition, ORLAN uses the elements, in particular the columns, to create perspectives for a grand performance. ORLAN put out a call through the press for young children to appear in the performance. On the day of the show, ORLAN had the children’s families sign image rights, and dressed them up as putti, loves and cherubs with little white wings, masks, bows and long trumpets…ORLAN herself was dressed as a Madonna covered in peacock feathers and little white feathers.  

The artist stood high up on a mobile podium, which she moved aside to let the children pass, simulating a metaphorical childbirth. She also had a very large effigy articulated like a puppet with which she played and made children play.

ORLAN took many photos that were used for installations projected onto the ceilings. Antenne 2 was also filming with Jacques Martins.

In the installation, the entrance was decorated with artistically draped hangings topped by a black-and-white photo of Sein unique, Monstration phallique. Once inside, visitors were confronted with a personal theater made up of real, artificial and virtual 3D elements: a resin statue of Saint Orlan, a single bare breast and a finger raised to the sky, plastic flowers mixed with lilies and arums, a hologram representing an angel, live doves. Real and fake marble plaques and photographs of ORLAN as a madonna were placed on the floor in front of the statue, and a series of columns from the Opéra de Lyon formed a semicircle around it. Behind the statue, she had placed a large halo of mirrors, in fact a video monitor showing the space and part of her sculpted face, accentuating the perspective effect created by the combination of architectural elements. The title refers to her own ironic canonization, her appropriation of the role of the Saint and her own designation of a place for this cult.

An association working for its reconstruction asked the artist to come via Cirque Divers. ORLAN measured this square in a completely different way: she used the shovels that had destroyed it and worked with the site workers, because she didn’t want to roll around in the mud and dirt of the building site, as the work would have read differently. Every day, an excavator would take ORLAN to the day’s stage, producing a shocking image of her being transported in her “scrap metal maw”. She’d moved on to the day’s stage, and she’d started the MesuRAGE with wooden planks laid by the workers in front of her, so that she could measure (without getting dirty) the number of ORLAN-CORPS contained in this square and its construction site. On the third day, she was arrested by the burgomaster: they forbade her to continue this performance, which was great for the Place Saint-Lambert association who had invited her, because this event made the headlines, putting their fight in the spotlight! Today, the square has become an abomination, with everything concreted over.

Through these performances, ORLAN used her body as a new instrument of measurement: the ORLAN-BODY. ORLAN applied this principle to measure streets named after historical figures (most of whom, 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 Pittsburgh, and the M HKA in Antwerp. ORLAN also measured the Le Corbusier complex in Firminy, the Vatican, and many other sites.

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, like 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.

Six men carried the shrine horizontally through the museum in a slow procession, then placed it vertically to present ORLAN to the standing public. Each fold of fabric was connected to a nylon thread, itself linked to rings placed on the fingers of each of his assistants. They moved the wires like puppets in front of a live camera that projected these draping studies throughout the performance onto 28 video screens. ORLAN then stepped out of the Plexiglas shrine, slowly removing the folds of fabric around her head, also unwrapping the object she carried in her arms, resembling a small swaddled child. Then, still in slow motion, the artist unfolded a very large ribbon as she spun around, gradually revealing a loaf of bread painted blue on the outside (the crust), and red on the inside (the crumb). She tore the head into bread, broke the child into pieces and ate him.

Then she untied her hair before getting down on all fours to cross a large circle of white flour, gradually advancing towards a very long red carpet. Slowly, from all fours, ORLAN wrapped herself in this red fabric, gradually transforming herself into an enormous red ball. The more she draped herself, the harder it became to wrap herself in more red fabric.

Through these performances, ORLAN used her body as a new instrument of measurement: the ORLAN-BODY. ORLAN applied this principle to measure streets named after historical figures (most of whom, 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 Pittsburgh, and the M HKA in Antwerp. ORLAN also measured the Le Corbusier complex in Firminy, the Vatican, and many other sites.

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, like 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.

ORLAN had to undergo emergency surgery. While waiting for the ambulance, she still had time to gather her team so they could come film and photograph her operation. The videotapes were then brought one by one to the festival, and the operation was screened at the FNAC as if it were a scheduled performance. ORLAN had always viewed life as an aesthetic phenomenon open to reinterpretation, and in that moment, it became self-evident. This operation was a defining moment in her career.

Through these performances, ORLAN used her body as a new instrument of measurement: the ORLAN-BODY. ORLAN applied this principle to measure streets named after historical figures (most of whom, 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 Pittsburgh, and the M HKA in Antwerp. ORLAN also measured the Le Corbusier complex in Firminy, the Vatican, and many other sites.

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, like 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.

Facing the audience seated in a circle at her feet, on the floor she removed the triangle representing the photographic pubis, revealing her real hair, which she had taken care to cut beforehand and glue back in place with hairpiece glue. She pretended to pluck these hairs in clumps, and glued them back together on a plastic painter’s palette with plasters positioned crosswise. ORLAN had dressed herself in the baroque folds of the trousseau’s sheets.

Once these hairs were placed on the “sick” palette, her pubis was smooth and bare, similar to those on the canvas behind her back.

ORLAN wanted to free her body, to free all bodies from the injunctions imposed by society.

Six men carried the shrine horizontally across Palazzo Grassi in a slow procession, then placed it vertically to present ORLAN to the standing public. Each fold of fabric was connected to a nylon thread, itself linked to rings placed on the fingers of each of his assistants. They moved the wires like puppets in front of a live camera that projected these draping studies throughout the performance onto 28 video screens. ORLAN then stepped out of the Plexiglas shrine, slowly removing the folds of fabric around her head, also unwrapping the object she carried in her arms, resembling a small swaddled child. Then, still in slow motion, the artist unfolded a very large ribbon as she spun around, gradually revealing a loaf of bread painted blue on the outside (the crust), and red on the inside (the crumb). She tore the head into bread, broke the child into pieces and ate him.

Then she untied her hair before getting down on all fours to cross a large circle of white flour, gradually advancing towards a very long red carpet spread out to the end of the boat dock from the center of Palazzo Grassi. Slowly, from all fours, ORLAN wrapped herself in this red fabric, gradually transforming herself into an enormous red ball. The more she draped herself, the harder it became to wrap herself in more red fabric. As the audience continued to watch her wrap herself, they had the impression that ORLAN was falling into the lagoon – a simple visual effect, since a boat was waiting for her below, onto which she fell and then unrolled, letting the red fabric fall gently into the Grand Canal.

Facing the audience seated in a circle at her feet, on the floor she removed the triangle representing the photographic pubis, revealing her real hair, which she had taken care to cut beforehand and glue back in place with hairpiece glue. She pretended to pluck these hairs in clumps, and glued them back together on a plastic painter’s palette with plasters positioned crosswise. ORLAN had dressed herself in the baroque folds of the trousseau’s sheets.

Once these hairs were placed on the “sick” palette, her pubis was smooth and bare, similar to those on the canvas behind her back.

ORLAN wanted to free her body, to free all bodies from the injunctions imposed by society.

During her residency at the Getty Research Institute in 2007, ORLAN asked prominent researchers in residence with her that year to give her a book—or the title of a book—that had most profoundly influenced their thinking, their work, or their lives. The artist placed them all on a large granite block at the entrance, where the words “Getty Research Institute” were engraved, then lay down next to the books and asked someone to remove those that extended beyond her body. After using her body to gauge their size, ORLAN read them continuously and annotated them. ORLAN has performed this piece several times throughout her life, in various places and circumstances—a performance that connects the body to the corpus of the book.

The artist Jean Dupuy organized an event for which he asked several artists to imagine one-minute performances related to a painting. On the eve of the big day, the Louvre’s management asked the artists to ensure that their performances did not generate crowds, that there was no music, no loud talking, decent dress, no eating or drinking and no accessories…All the artists, ORLAN included, were on the verge of giving up in the face of all these absurd rules, or protesting against the Louvre’s management, when some of them had the idea of doing a performance contrary to the rules, without being arrested by the museum guards.

ORLAN has chosen a painting featuring hairless naked women. First, she decided to stand in front of The Sleep of Antiope, a painting by Correggio in which Zeus is seen just after raping Antiope in her sleep, running before she wakes up. The Louvre did not accept her choice for security reasons, so ORLAN had to choose another less interesting painting by Jacques Blanchard, who is not her favorite painter. She arrived in front of the canvas, wearing a long, black coat covering her entire body. After pacing back and forth in front of the painting, she opened her coat, revealing my nude body as a trompe-l’œil dress photographed on canvas.

Facing the audience seated in a circle at her feet, on the floor she removed the triangle representing the photographic pubis, revealing her real hair, which she had taken care to cut beforehand and glue back in place with hairpiece glue. She pretended to pluck these hairs in clumps, and glued them back together on a plastic painter’s palette with plasters positioned crosswise.

Once these hairs were placed on the “sick” palette, her pubis was smooth and bare, similar to those featured on the canvas behind her back. Naturally, the panic-stricken guards alerted their superiors to contact Louvre security and stop the performance.  

Before they arrived, ORLAN had time to reach into one of her pockets and grab a large brush full of black paint, which she put between her teeth, then painted her pubic area as the guards ushered the audience out one by one. But she’d had time to finish her performance and leave.  

ORLAN wanted to liberate my body, to liberate all bodies from the injunctions imposed by society.

With this gesture, ORLAN invites the other to become ORLAN and allows herself to resemble the other. The artist distances herself from the other, while at the same time drawing closer to them. Artist and guest step outside their own frame. 

ORLAN has visited several of a participant’s apartments to see if the clothes are in keeping with her place of residence, and continues to exchange ideas with the Other.

Through these performances, ORLAN used her body as a new instrument of measurement: the ORLAN-BODY. ORLAN applied this principle to measure streets named after historical figures (most of whom, 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 Pittsburgh, and the M HKA in Antwerp. ORLAN also measured the Le Corbusier complex in Firminy, the Vatican, and many other sites.

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, like 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.

On the other, a life-size black-and-white photograph of her torso, with a flashing red lamp positioned at breast level, and an arrow pointing to the slit where the five-franc coin could be seen falling down a transparent plastic esophagus to a pubis of the same nature. 

It took place at the Grand Palais, and for that amount, ORLAN gave a real artist’s kiss—not a childish peck, but a French kiss…It resulted in a massive media scandal—so much so that the International Contemporary Art Fair (FIAC) had never seen so many press articles categorized not under “FIAC” but under “the artist’s kiss.” ORLAN was also invited to appear on numerous television shows.

As a result, ORLAN was fired from the school where she was teaching to train socio-cultural animators. Her students immediately went on strike, creating songs in praise of the “artist’s kiss” and to her glory, demanding that she be reinstated, which never happened…  

What followed was a terrible period when she had no money, no place to sleep and no food to eat. She lost her studio and many of her works because they had been sealed off.  

ORLAN finally passed a competitive examination to become a teacher at a fine arts school in Dijon, and there were several happy endings. The sculpture was purchased by a public collection, the FRAC des Pays de la Loire. This work has traveled all over the world, including the United States in the Wak exhibition, and was requested by FIAC for its 30th anniversary. It was displayed at the glass-protected entrance, and on the large wall was written “Le Baiser de l’artiste l’oeuvre qui a le plus impactée l’histoire de la FIAC”.

On a placard, the artist presented the prices of her body parts and wrote “does my body belong to me?” “guaranteed pure ORLAN with no colorants or preservatives”.

The aim was to question the way in which fragmentary representation transforms our relationship with reality. This issue of objectification and body fragmentation raises questions about the right to dispose of one’s body in relation to the historical and social context, and the right to sell the representation of one’s body when selling one’s body is forbidden.  

This performance is a preamble to the sale of “Baiser de l’artiste”.

Police officers wanted to charge her with exhibitionism, but it was impossible because ORLAN was dressed from head to toe and had her identity papers in her bag. 

In the public space, others are confronted with the representation of her nudity, without her actually being naked. ORLAN highlights this same gap in public life, where others represent rather than present themselves. In this sense, performance acts on real space, disrupting the relationship with the other and making the encounter critical. ORLAN seeks to get closer to the environment, to objects that mediate encounters with the other, and to create by challenging and disrupting the law without condemning it.

Through these performances, ORLAN used her body as a new instrument of measurement: the ORLAN-BODY. ORLAN applied this principle to measure streets named after historical figures (most of whom, 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 Pittsburgh, and the M HKA in Antwerp. ORLAN also measured the Le Corbusier complex in Firminy, the Vatican, and many other sites.

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, like 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.

Through these performances, ORLAN used her body as a new instrument of measurement: the ORLAN-BODY. ORLAN applied this principle to measure streets named after historical figures (most of whom, 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 Pittsburgh, and the M HKA in Antwerp. ORLAN also measured the Le Corbusier complex in Firminy, the Vatican, and many other sites.

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, like 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.

But when the day came, the artist didn’t show up. In her place, an assistant held up a sign with the following message: “My performance is my physical absence. The absence of my woman’s body. No body, no eroticism, no striptease. Frustration as performance.” He then leaves the sign on the floor.

This gesture—or rather, this deliberate absence—constitutes the performance. It is an act of artistic and political resistance: ORLAN withdraws her body, her image, and her flesh from the expected stage, refusing objectification, refusing the voyeuristic gaze, and even refusing conventional artistic consumption. This performance takes on its full meaning in the context of the 1970s, a period when women’s bodies, in art as in society, were at once overexposed and controlled, desired and censored. ORLAN highlights this contradiction by removing the female body from the field of visibility. This withdrawal, far from being an erasure, becomes a political statement. This refusal to be present becomes an act of reverse censorship. The term “frustration action” underscores the very heart of the performance: the frustrated audience becomes an accomplice to the critique. By coming to see—and seeing nothing—they directly experience what it means to be deprived of representation.

ORLAN  has used sheets to stretch them like a canvas on a stretcher, dressed up as a virgin and a madonna, but has also carried her sheets to her lovers’ homes to ejaculate in specific places on the sheets. Following this gesture, she took a seamstress’s tambourine to stretch the sheet over the site of the semen stain, which she had spotted with a wash to make the stain as visible as possible. Then ORLAN embroidered the sheets with a very large needle and thick black thread. This performance was performed in different versions, sometimes blindfolded, sometimes looking at the audience or with eyes closed. The result was a very rough embroidery that his mother would not have liked at all.

Based on this performance, ORLAN created an installation of 7 photos, framed on one side by a poetic text “reminiscence of maternal discourse” and on the other, the seamstress’s tambourine with the sperm stain. This piece was purchased by FNAC.

She has also produced several pieces, sometimes in triptychs with the text in the middle and two mirrored photos, and sometimes with single photos presented separately.