Living Doll: How Orlan used plastic surgery to become a sculpture
I’ll be real with you, dear reader, I have no idea what to make of plastic surgery.
On the one hand, a hill that I will die on is that people have the liberty to do with their bodies exactly what they want to do with them.
There is a vanishingly thin line between legitimate concern and body policing, no matter how well-intentioned any input might be. At a time like this, where just existing is to suffer constant psychic damage every single day, if you can be at peace with the way you look, you’re more than welcome to achieve that peace however you can. Which, quite neatly, brings me to the other hand.
Whether or not plastic surgery brings peace to anyone regarding the way they look is a very good question. After all, it seems that there’s no such thing as “just one procedure” anymore. It seems a little like tattoos, the moment you get one, the floodgates start to open, and suddenly, you’re covered in them. Except for tattoos, the goal is self-expression to look more unique. The question with plastic surgery is whether people actually want to go through with the procedures, or whether people feel like they should in order to live up to impossible-to-achieve beauty standards.
That’s not even taking into account the uncomfortable fact that most people who’ve had plastic surgery do not look the way they intended to. Especially after a few procedures. People tend to take on this strange, uncanny look because the really, really good procedures that famous people get are prohibitively expensive to all but the uber-rich. Even then, one look at Simon Powell these days shows that even they’re not immune to looking inhuman, no matter how much money they throw at the surgeon.
However, there’s a tiny possibility that it’s intentional. After all, they’d be taking after the French artist Orlan, whose uncanny, inhuman look they received after getting extensive plastic surgery on their face was entirely the point.
Who was Orlan, and why did they get so much plastic surgery?
Orlan (or ORLAN, if ya nasty) is a conceptual performance artist hailing from Saint Etienne, France.
For as long as she’s been active, Orlan has presented her body as the canvas for her work, and nowhere was this more apparent (or infamous) than in her work The Reincarnation of Saint-Orlan. This process began in 1990 and was an attempt to comment on the way that men have depicted women in art throughout history.
Over the course of nine plastic surgery procedures over the course of the decade, Orlan changed a different part of her face to fit one of the many classic pieces of art depicting a beautiful woman. The chin of Botticelli’s Venus, the forehead of Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and so on. The piece was accompanied by an extensive photo gallery depicting not only the physical transformation but also the effort put into making the work happen. Travelling all over the world and doing damage to her face that at times looks genuinely brutal, all in the name of her art.
That’s not all. During each procedure, she would request a fragment of her removed material to keep. Whether it was bone, hair, teeth or a scrap of body fat, she kept it and sold it as a relic for as much as 10,000 francs. Asking her why on earth she would do this sounds like a fair question until you take a step back and look at what you’re asking.
Then you’ll realise something truly horrifying: all she’s doing is making herself look more like things that men have called beautiful.
There are billions of people doing that all over the world at any given moment. Does literalising it the way that Orlan did really make it all that worse?