Sculptures

There was also a sign with the prices of the parts of her body where it was written “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.

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

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

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

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

ORLAN wanted to create bodiless dresses shown on a catwalk passing between Gothic columns as if it were a fashion show, with four sculptures made without molds. Resembling dresses with different surface appearances, they raise the question of copying and cloning, difference and repetition. The series was made without molds, so each sculpture is unique and has its own identity with infinite nuances. Only the final “coating” seems to differentiate them, but on closer inspection it’s possible to perceive that each fold has different curves and tensions, and that some folds are very organic, like the large front fold which resembles an enormous vulva.

They link periods (from Gothic to Baroque to Pop Art) and the permanence of representations. The absent body is at once that of the nuns who stayed at the abbey, of the artist, and of the models performing in the fashion shows. 

Following in the footsteps of Baiser de l’artiste, ORLAN’s landmark performance presented at FIAC in 1976, these four pieces stigmatize stereotypical representations of women. They remind us, through the principle of BODY-SCULPTURE, long exploited in ORLAN’s work, that the body is eminently political. For the artist, this body can and must become the place where the freedom of the individual is expressed, and where these differences are embodied without constraint.

In the installation, the luminous parts of the sculpture react to the presence of visitors. When the public entered one of the installation’s three light zones, the sculpture’s lighting program changed. The interaction is based on the confrontation between the organic, living breathing of the sculpture and the agitated surface on the ground, decorated with patterns of coltan atoms. This mineral, used in electronics, is a new resource whose exploitation is both a source of wealth and a major source of geopolitical conflict, hence its presence as jewels in the body of the sculpture and as elements of instability on the base.

Judeo-Christian culture asks us to choose between good “or” evil. The Baroque invited the artist to reflect on this “or” and to use the “and”: good “and” evil, for in Bernini’s work, which inspired her so much, he shows us St. Teresa enjoying the angel’s arrow in an ecstatic “and” erotic ecstasy. Jacques Lacan wrote a great deal about this in his book Encore. 

Most of his works are based on this Baroque lesson.

The concept is to illustrate how reading has enabled the artist to stand up straight, to speak loud and clear, with content thanks to knowledge. This approach enabled him to emancipate himself from his often poorly-educated working-class social class, and reach a higher cultural and intellectual level. This is the beginning of its internal reconstruction.

The second series, ORLAN standing in her book straitjacket, shows how reading causes pain and prevents the body from moving. ORLAN presents herself with a wooden structure that she wears like a body prosthesis, to which she has glued books. This gesture shows the weight of reading on the body, on the shoulders.

It’s a materialization of ORLAN-CORPS. It’s a wooden slat, the size of which corresponds to ORLAN’s waist. On one side is the inscription in red letters engraved on black “UN ORLAN-CORPS” and on the other side ten representations of ORLAN brandishing the rinsing liquid…

ORLAN displays this ORLAN-CORPS on a large white base, preserved and sacralized in a Plexiglas bell.

This series consists of a series of black and white photographs based on ethnographic photography, the first photos in which the Other is photographed. ORLAN also creates a few color works, as well as resin sculptures of mutant characters, notably exhibited at the 1999 Lyon Biennial of Contemporary Art: “Partage d’exotismes”, curated by Jean-Hubert Martin.

In her series, ORLAN creates a manifesto work “Femme Surmas avec Labret et Visage de Femme Euro-Stéphanoise avec bigoudis” (Surmas Woman with Labret and Euro-Stephanoise Woman’s Face with Curlers), which demonstrates that beauty is merely a question of dominant ideology in a historical and geographical location. 

ORLAN presents a woman with a huge labret, very confident and sure of her ability to seduce, because in her tribe, the bigger the labret, the more desirable the woman. If we wore a labret here and now, in our Western culture, we would be designated by all as unbeatable monsters!

Both an installation and a performance space, the Chapelle functioned as a work of art in the artist’s absence, and as a set designed for the final performance. The entrance was decorated with draped artistquement hangings topped by a black-and-white photo Sein unique, Monstration phallique. Once inside, visitors were confronted with a personal theater made up of real, artificial and virtual 3D elements: plastic flowers mixed with lilies and arums, a hologram representing an angel, living doves. Real and fake marble plaques featuring 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 destined for a cult of the true and the false, mixing the living and the artificial.

After measuring the space determined with her body by lying on the floor and drawing a chalk line behind her head, then counting the number of times her body is contained within that space, she fetches water, removes her dress and washes it in public. She takes samples of this dirty water, which she places in vials that are then labeled, numbered and sealed with wax to make a small edition with a photo of the finding.

ORLAN then exhibits these samples in galleries and museums, along with the findings, photographs and videos, commemorative plaques, the life-size effigy of the last pose, the dress or the ORLAN-CORPS stallion, all concrete relics of these ephemeral moments. These performances put the body back into play. In life, you don’t just have one body, you have many different bodies.

These two effigies “guard” an ORLAN-CORPS displayed on a pedestal and preserved by a Plexiglas bell.

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. After measuring the determined space with her body by lying on the ground and drawing a chalk line behind her head, she turns around, crawls forward and then counts the number of times her body is contained in this space using her ORLAN-CORPS unit of measurement, counting aloud with several witnesses. At the end, she fetches water, removes her dress and washes it in public, then stores the dirty water from the dress in a glass container.

ORLAN then exhibits these samples in galleries and museums, along with the findings, photographs and videos, commemorative plaques, the life-size effigy of the last pose, the dress and the ORLAN-CORPS stallion, all concrete relics and exhibits of these ephemeral moments. These performances put the body back into play.

Judeo-Christian culture asks us to choose between good “or” evil. The Baroque invited the artist to reflect on this “or” and to use the “and”: good “and” evil, for in Bernini’s work, which inspired her so much, he shows us St. Teresa enjoying the angel’s arrow in an ecstatic “and” erotic ecstasy. Jacques Lacan wrote a great deal about this in his book Encore. 

Most of his works are based on this Baroque lesson.

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 this sum, ORLAN gave a real artist’s kiss, not a childish one, but a real one. french kiss… The result was a huge media scandal, so much so that the international contemporary art fair has never had so many press articles classified not as “FIAC” but as “baiser de l’artiste”. ORLAN has also been invited to appear on numerous television platforms.

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”.

ORLAN then exhibits these samples in galleries and museums, along with the findings, photographs and videos, as well as commemorative plaques, the life-size effigy of the last pose, the dress and the ORLAN-CORPS stallion, all concrete relics of these ephemeral moments. These performances put the body back into play. 

The dress is displayed and inserted in a box between two glass or Plexiglas partitions.

Virtually all of ORLAN’s work can be read through the prism of dress, costume and cross-dressing. For the artist, clothing is a better interface than skin. You can’t choose your skin, but thanks to clothing, you can create a second skin, a calling card that reflects who you are, the image you want to project, your culture and your tastes.

In this work, Botticelli used brushes to make the kind of beauty retouching that is currently possible with Photoshop: removing wrinkles, hairs, spots, pores, etc. ORLAN used this software to deconstruct the beauty Botticelli had created. It’s a black-and-white photo of his body glued to wood and cut to scale 1.