Tuesday, January 04, 2011

Orlan and the Work of Art in the Age of Hyper-mechanical Organic Reproduction


. Introduction
The French performance artist Orlan has risen to an extraordinary position in the contemporary art world. Her motto: “art is a dirty job, but someone has to do it” is given incredible meaning in the surgeries she has carried out on her body to make art. In these artistic performances or “Carnal Art,” she transforms her body and her face in an enactment of a critique of the beauty concept which she feels is embedded in male power and its construction of female-subjects in modern Western societies. In order to better understand Orlan’s artistic philosophy and her artistic production I wish to discuss concepts from both the Western and the Eastern intellectual worlds.
Find out more here:
http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol3_1/akman.htm