This week we decided to shake things up a bit at Jolique. All of this pleasant discussion about perfume and our sense of smell is très interessant, but every once in while we need a reminder that beauty isn't always pretty. Beauty can also be painful, shocking, controversial, and even fatal. Around the world, the body is used as a canvas upon which we place clothing and other adornments in order to convey our age, status, gender, occupation, religious/cultural beliefs and even our musical tastes. But never has the body-as-canvas theme been taken to more fascinating extremes than by the French performance artist, Orlan.

Some people give their bodies to science when they die; Orlan has given her body to art while still alive. Both artist and muse, Orlan has engaged in a series of surgical operations to alter her body (mainly her face) in ways that question the traditional male notion of an ideal beauty. (The fact that her dissenters have called her "an ugly bitch" seems to further reinforce the need to challenge the rigid standards created by the Euro-American beauty culture (Hall).)

The operating room is Orlan's atelier. And what a surreal theatre it is. Each of her "performances" is carefully choreographed. Famous designers, such as Paco Rabanne and Issey Miyake, have designed costumes for Orlan to wear during the surgeries. Poetry is read and music is played while she lies on the operating table fully conscious of the events taking place (only local anesthetic is used). Each surgery has been captured on video (and fed to live international audiences via satellite link-ups!), and exhibited in a number of galleries in Europe and the U.S., as well as at the Sydney Biennial (December 1993) in Australia. She calls it "Carnal Art." "Carnage Art" is more like it. Vials of her blood and fat, grisly by-products of the operations, have been displayed at public exhibitions. To fund the operations, Orlan sells videos and postcards of the surgical events, and accepts payment for interviews she grants.

Each of the operations has altered a specific facial feature. As of 1998, there had been at least nine operations, and another, the reconstruction of her nose ("the largest nose technically possible and ethically acceptable for a surgeon of this country"), is in the planning stages (Griffin). (Jolique has little information on this latest planned surgery.) Of the operations performed so far, one altered her mouth to imitate that of François Boucher's Europa; another "appropriated" the forehead of da Vinci's Mona Lisa; yet another imitates the chin of Botticelli's Venus. These models were not chosen by Orlan purely for their ideal beauty, however, but also for their mythical and symbolic connotations. Venus was selected for her symbolic notions of fertility and "Europa because she looked to another continent, permitting herself to be carried away into an unknown future" (Rose, 85). Yet another surgery, the widely publicized "Omniprésence," which took place in November of 1993, implanted protrusions in her forehead to mimic the protruding brow of Mona Lisa. Naturally, Orlan's was more exaggerated: rather than a gentle protrusion, the end result was two symmetrical horns. Next >>>