Orlan

ORLAN's career as a performance artist began in 1964, when she performed Marches au ralenti (Slow motion walks) in her hometown of Saint-Étienne. During these performances, she would walk as slowly as possible between two central parts of the city.

In 1965, ORLAN produced MesuRages, in which she used her own body as a measuring instrument. With her "ORLAN-body" as the unit of measurement, she evaluated how many people could fit within a given architectural space. This was the first time she utilized her trousseau in a performance piece. ORLAN repurposed her trousseau in several later projects.

Between 1964 and 1966, ORLAN produced Vintages, a series of black and white photographic works. She destroyed the original negatives of these pieces, and today only one copy of each photograph remains. In this series, she posed naked in various yoga-like positions. One of the most famous pictures of this series is ORLAN accouche d'elle m'aime.

Between 1967 and 1975, ORLAN produced a body of work entitled Tableaux Vivants. She based these on the works of Baroque artists such as El Greco and Gericault. She used prison inmates as models, wore exaggerated faux-Baroque costumes, and drew inspiration from Caravaggesque stereotypes. In 1971, ORLAN "baptized herself" Sainte-ORLAN, adorning herself with billowing black vinyl and white leatherette. Color photographs of Saint ORLAN were later incorporated into photo-collages, videos, and films tracing a fictive hagiography.

During the 1977 FIAC International Contemporary Art Fair in Paris, ORLAN executed the controversial performance piece The Artist's Kiss (Le baiser de l'artiste). Outside the Grand Palais in Paris, a life-size photo of her torso was turned into a slot machine. Spectators could see the coin they inserted into the torso descend down into a groin before being awarded a kiss from the artist.

In 1972, ORLAN created Documentary Study: The Head of Medusa, in which she displayed her sexual organs during menstruation under a magnifying glass. The installation was organized in Aachen, Germany on occasion of an International Symposium of Performance Art at the Ludwig Forum for International art. The piece's title was derived from the statement by Sigmund Freud that "at the sight of the vulva, even the devil runs away," which he articulated in his short, posthumously-published essay entitled "Medusa's Head."

In 1978, ORLAN founded the International Symposium of Performance in Lyon where she also explored the use of new technologies in the arts. In 1982, with Frederic Develay, she created the first online contemporary art creation magazine, Art-Acces-Revue, on Minitel. This magazine invites international artists working in situ and/or with conceptual issues to create original works specially designed on Minitel (Bernar Venet, Vera Molnar, Ben, Francois Morellet, Daniel Buren...). This database was represented in the exhibition Les immateriaux by Jean-Francois Lyotard.

At the end of the 1990's, Self-hybridations, the artist uses through digital photography and computer graphics retouching software, hybridizes her face of "Euro-Stephane" woman with extra-western canons of beauty (pre-Columbian, African, Amerindian, Chinese....).

ORLAN further expands the frontiers of contemporary art by using biotechnology to create “Harlequin’s Coat” in 2007, made from the artist's own cells and cells of human and animal origin in Perth, Australia in Symbiotico's laboratory.

Since 1998, ORLAN has been creating a digital photographic series titled "Self-Hybridizations," where her face merges with past facial representations (masks, sculptures, paintings) of non-western civilizations. So far, three have been completed: Pre-Columbian, Native American and African.

In 1999, ORLAN was appointed to teach at the École Nationale Supérieure d'Arts de Paris-Cergy, France.[1]

In 1990, ORLAN began the The Reincarnation of Sainte-ORLAN. It involves a series of plastic surgeries through which the artist transformed herself into elements from famous paintings and sculptures of women. As a part of her "Carnal Art" manifesto, these works were filmed and broadcast in institutions throughout the world, such as the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Sandra Gehring Gallery in New York.[2]

ORLAN's goal in these surgeries is to acquire the ideal of female beauty as depicted by male artists. When the surgeries are complete, she will have the chin of Botticelli's Venus, the nose of Jean-Léon Gérôme's Psyche, the lips of François Boucher's Europa, the eyes of Diana (as depicted in a 16th-century French School of Fontainebleau painting), and the forehead of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa. ORLAN picked these characters, "not for the canons of beauty they represent... but rather on account of the stories associated with them." ORLAN chose Diana, because she is inferior to the gods and men, but is leader of the goddesses and women; Mona Lisa, because of the standard of beauty, or anti-beauty, that she represents; Psyche, because of the fragility and vulnerability within her soul; Venus, for carnal beauty; and Europa, for her adventurous outlook on the future.[3]

ORLAN defines cosmetic surgery as "nomadic, mutant, shifting, differing." ORLAN has stated, "my work is a struggle against the innate, the inexorable, the programmed, Nature, DNA (which is our direct rival as far as artists of representation are concerned), and God!".[4] In an interview with Acne Paper, ORLAN stated:

I can observe my own body cut open, without suffering!... I see myself all the way down to my entrails; a new mirror stage... I can see to the heart of my lover; his splendid design has nothing to do with sickly sentimentalities... Darling, I love your spleen; I love your liver; I adore your pancreas, and the line of your femur excites me." (from Carnal Art manifesto) "Sainte ORLAN" came from a character that I created for "Le baiser de l'artiste" from a text called "Facing a society of mothers and merchants." The first line of this text was: "At the bottom of the cross were two women, Maria and Maria Magdalena." These are two inevitable stereotypes of women that are hard to avoid: the mother and the prostitute. In "Le baiser de l'artiste" there were two faces. One was Saint ORLAN, a cutout picture of me dressed as Madonna glued onto wood. One could buy a five francs church candle and I was sitting on the other side behind the mock-up of the vending machine. One could buy a French kiss from me for the same amount of money one could buy a candle. The idea was to play on the ambivalence of the woman figure and the desire of both men and women towards those biblical and social stereotypes. Being showcased in the Paris International Contemporary Art Fair.[5]