“I live, thus I provoke.” is the slogan of a woman artist that overturned the performance of contemporary bodies. In Orlan’s vision: “the skin throws you of the scent…in life you have nothing but your skin…there is a flaw in inter-human relationships, because you never really know what you have…do I have an angel skin, or am I a she-devil…I am not the skin I have[1].”
She is the artist of the bombarded epidermis. Orlan, born in 1947 at Saint-Etienne, gets transformed hallucinantly in order to radically provoke. The submission- display of the expression of a metaphorically imagistic treatment is for Orlan a way of life. The artist proposes a carnal art, which inscribes surgery in the morphology of the face; a face that became a live show. The surgical gesture is, for Orlan, a substantially political gesture.
The body is the stage of public debates, a place impregnated by the ideology of excessive perfectibility and by the interrogation of the manipulation strategies, provoking the placement within a physical frame of the up-to-dated events. The recent history, the present history and post-history are laid down on the body. The body becomes a sum of questions that articulate the past in the present and they open it towards imminent virtualisations -towards video- productions.
Orlan fashions a theatre of surgical operations, which tests the limits of psycho-somatic pain in order to transform helplessness into poetics and politics. Our epoch holds in high regard the malleability of the flesh, and it puts pressure on the deformation of the skin, to make it forever young, and on beautification at any costs. To the excess of the perfect body, broadcasted on all channels, Orlan opposes a personal poetic of the excesses from a series of Actions Orlan- bodies.
Orlan constructed each performance- operation around a philosophic, psychoanalytic or literary text (Michel Serres, Elizabeth Betuel Fibig etc.).
The performances created by women bring forward the conception about the feminine body and the cultural significances it can possess. The construction of the body automatically meant its cultural re-imagination[2].
The women artist from the ’70 reinvested the sexuality’s imagery with brute signification and they lowered the body in the sphere of the hand-to-hand fight with reality, with the raw material. Using the body, substantial questions had been posed regarding the individual and the collective perception of one of the most flexible and vulnerable social spaces. All the debates, about the manner in which the new feminine body should be represented, had been influenced by continuous interventions of pornography in America and Great Britain. Represented erotically reificated, fragmented and abused, in a context were masculine power was violently employed against them, the feminine bodies from the pornographic industry became the object of a critical investigation that women artist like Orlan and Abramoviæ re-contextualised. The downgrading of the body to the simple status of sexual object was reintroduced in the foreground on the basis of a post-mechanical reflexion. The body, in the perspective of the previously mentioned artists, moves from a container-object to an active-subject, which no longer certifies a shop window image, but meditates upon the convergent forms of apparition, presence and representation. The produced transformation is important, on the one hand at the level of cognitive- experimental performance of a body, which justifies itself through its subjectivity, and on the other hand, at the level of decoding all the layers of this body. It is a body, which verbalises all the subjective references, denying the code of the sexual availability and asserting the trauma and the suffering as modes of existing in the world. Thus, a manner of perception is destroyed, the one that originated the comfortable pleasure of watching, the delectation of entering into contact with another body, which doesn’t harm in any way the spectator’s tranquillity. The new body bothers, it breaks the partnership of visual comfort and it forces the spectator to take his stand in regard to what he sees. It animates and it activates a certain beneficial anxiety for what the performances put forward. “To see” becomes a synonym with “to participate” or “to react” through empathy and consideration; not only does the represented material and the materiality of the perception change, but also the frame of interaction. It is decided in the favour of a brutal direct contact that will be detrimental for the artist condition, as well as the spectator’s condition. The brutality is not based on a policy of the un-assumed shock, but it comes from a need of gathering into a corporal whole the scenic formula from the social creations. The space of production and the one of picking up become on and the same, practically taking over what Antonin Artaud theorized: “We renounce the delimitation scene-hall and we use one space- without any kind of barrier- which will become a theatre of action. The spectator placed in the middle of the action is affected and digested by the performance.” The performance of subjectivity is in Artaud’s opinion a passional and convulsive conception about life[3], seen as a reflexive gesture of the restlessness and the agitation of an era.
As Amelia Jones declares in Body Art-Performing the Subject [4], the radicalisation of the cultural-corporal expression occurs through the staging of the subject in such a manner as to dissolve the hierarchy actor-spectator and to give a political touch to the relationships. To provoke means for Orlan to be alive-in –the- action and to interfere into the territory of the extreme risk. Orlan jumps into the body and beyond the body without a safety net.
The theorization of the feminine body transformed into medical object, which enters into the matrix of research with a distance margin rigorously maintained, is what preoccupies the artist the most. The body is surgically observed as a medium of potential transformations. The identity is continuously re-performed by modern science, which imprints to the body a medical complexity. The body asserts its friable materiality, it integrates into a dynamic of multiple operations and it becomes an opened epidermis, a clearable and shapable surface.
[1] Orlan, Orlan on becoming Orlan în The Body. A Reader, edited by Marinam Fraser and Monica Greco, Routledge, London, 2005, pag.306
[2] Rosemary Betterton, An Intimate Distance: Women, Artists and the Body, Routledge, 1996, pag.3
[3] Antonin Artaud, Teatrul ºi dublul sãu, Editura Echinox, Cluj-Napoca, 1977, pag.154
[4]Amelia Jones, Body Art. Performing the Subject, University of Minnesota Press, 1998, pag.8
