Carnal Art

The French artist Orlan is infamous for performances during which her body is surgically altered. In nine such performance surgeries, features from Greek goddesses painted by Botticelli, Grard, Moreau, and an anonymous School of Fontainebleau artist, as well as from da Vincis Mona Lisa, were implanted into Orlans face. During her surgical performances, viewers witness a material tampering with the relationship between the face and individual identity, the original and the constructed, a historical critique of the association of art with beauty and the female body.Responding to Orlans definition of her performance surgeries as carnal art, C. Jill OBryan considers how the artists ever-fluctuating reconstructions of her face question idealized beauty and female identity, persuasively arguing that Orlans surgically reinvented face succeeds in both reinforcing and breaking apart corporeal subjectivity and representation. OBryan contextualizes Orlans operations within the centuries-long history of public dissections and surgeries, lavish anatomical illustrations created to draw the gaze into the opened anatomy, Artauds Theater of Cruelty in the early twentieth century, and contemporary works and performances by Cindy Sherman, Hans Bellman, and Annie Sprinkle. A compelling blurring of the line between feminist theory and art criticism, OBryans close examination of Orlans performance surgeries complicates and reconfigures the notion of identityand its relation to the bodyat the very boundary dividing art from identity.C. Jill OBryan is an independent scholar and artist who has written and lectured widely on Orlan in particular and body art in general.