Iconoclastic
To make her body “a spot of public debate”: this is the iconoclastic vocation that ORLAN gave herself almost sixty years ago. Pictures, movies, sculptures, installations, performances, bodily metamorphoses, and digital hybridizations… she has made a manifesto of her work and her life.
A feminist and subversive manifesto because the retrospective (conceived with the artist) at the Musée des Abattoirs in Toulouse tells us.
Enjoying with the shadows drawn by the torsions of the members in her photographic collection of the Our bodies-sculpture (1964-1967), giving start to an androgynous clone on a white sheet (ORLAN accouche d’elle-même, 1964), or taking the pose in Botticellian Venus or in Great Odalisque of Ingres (1977) in “dwelling footage”, revisiting the tutorial canons and the fetishist postures assigned to lady in the middle of the history of the art; from the start, ORLAN made the “area of the body” (performed and photographed) her medium as material and instrument, and, on the similar time, matter, subject, and object.
Physique-sculpture
From 1964, on the age of seventeen, she realized performances on the street, slow-motion walks, in her native city of Saint-Etienne. First pioneer steps within the Physique art… And it is in 1966 that she affirms, in a photograph filled with humor with the worth of manifesto, her want of emancipation of the normal artwork, circumscribed to the area in two dimensions of the painted canvas: Try and get out of the frame with uncovered face, the place we see her, bare, extirpating herself from a rococo frame. Passing to the act, she doesn't hesitate to sell herself on the markets by small items (photographed) and to exhibit herself [dressed] of her own nudity (photographed), between 1976 and 1977. Some extent of no return and great scandal, it's in this similar yr, 1977, that she gives, on the steps of the temple of the business art (the FIAC), in an enormous, half-open drape of saint and baroque whore her Kiss of the artist for 5 francs (to slip in providing in her naked trunk of Madonna of truthful): blasphemy which can make her superstar. And which might be, any more, her credo.
Morphing, fusion, self-hybridization…
A trans-media artist, enjoying with all transgressions, she is going to go so far as to ship her flesh to the palms of surgeons in control of transforming her plastic based on the standards of the perfect magnificence incarnated by the goddesses of Botticelli and Leonardo da Vinci, during a collection of surgical operations-performances theatricalized (broadcasted stay). Supreme profanation that this “Art Charnel” making of the physique, “stitched” and “sutured”, “a modified ready-made”, a “self-creation”… A means of “disfiguration and refiguration” meant to thwart “the mask of the Innate” and to capture the circulate of the potential identities, a number of… that the artist – sporting, since her final operation-performance (dated 1993) of the protruding temples – will pursue, particularly, in digitized self-portraits, Self-Hybridations, merging scarifications, tattoos, masks, and deformations… together with her personal reconfigured face.
Robotic or skinned in 3D, the avatars of ORLAN are numerous. A work in progress now delivered to genetic manipulations and biotechnologies, to artificial intelligence and augmented reality, all devoted to transhumanism…
Exhibition Manifeste ORLAN. Bodies and sculptures
Till August 28th
Les Abattoirs – FRAC Occitanie Toulouse – www.lesabattoirs.org
See additionally
Exhibition Ladies Warriors Ladies in fight
With, particularly, Corinne Borgnet, Céline Cléron, Rachel Labadie, Olga Kisseleva, Myriam Méchita, Brigitte Ziegler, Aïda Patricia Schweizer… and ORLAN&
Until Might 7
Topography of art – rue de Thorigny, Paris, III – www.topographiedelart.fr
Autobiography of Orlan Strip-tease, all about my life, all about my artwork, revealed by Gallimard, June 2021
Stéphanie Dulout
L’article ORLAN & est apparu en premier sur Galerie Joseph.
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