This biography is republished in full with kind permission from The Art Story – ORLAN.
Born: 30 May 1947, France
Died: NA
Country most active: France
Also known as: Mireille Suzanne Francette Porte
ORLAN molds her own flesh in the service of her art. Transforming her face over the course of several surgeries in the 1990s, she is a pioneer of what she terms “Carnal Art”. She raises fascinating questions of beauty, self-image, and consent, prefiguring and inspiring many of the conversations taking place today on the subjects of transhumanism, utopian technologism, and body modification. Her practice is both an inspiration to artists working with the body and a precursor to these wider social conversations around identity and bodily autonomy in the 21st century.
But ORLAN’s work extends well beyond the surgeons table, encompassing sculpture, painting, installation, and the innovative use of technology in visual art. Since before her famous surgical performances in the 1990s she has consistently experimented with technology, working at the borders of art, science, and engineering through genetic and biological experimentation, artificial intelligence, and robotics. After nearly 60 years or artistic practice, ORLAN is still an artist at the cutting edge of exploring relationships between the body and identity.
Early Life
The artist known as ORLAN was born as Mireille Suzanne Francette Porte in Saint-Étienne in 1947. To this day, she shares very little information about her youth and personal life. Art historian, critic, and curator Barbara Rose explains that “As a star in her own literal ‘theater of operation,’. ORLAN leaves her background deliberately fuzzy, the better to maintain the anonymity required to project an enigmatic ‘star quality.'”
When the artist turned fifteen, she officially changed her name to ORLAN. As she explains, “every letter of my name is written in capitals, because I have no desire to step back into rank.” She considers 1964, the date of her first documented work, ORLAN Gives Birth to Her Beloved Self (a photograph of her nude self giving birth to a life-sized mannequin) to be her “real” date of birth.
Education and Early Career
ORLAN tells those who ask that she started making art “when I was a baby”, and that she briefly attended art school at the Conservatory of Dramatic Arts and at the School of Fine Arts of Saint-Étienne (ESADSE), but dropped out because it “was too conventional from me”. As many other artists were, she was inspired by the social unrest of May 1968, which saw the economy of France cease to function due to general strikes, demonstrations, and the occupation of universities. This event, which some have called a “social revolution”, raised the possibility of a new and creative society. Many young people in France, like ORLAN, were inspired by the artistic dimension and creative potential of the May 1968 protests, with several artist groups and countercultural figures taking part in or inspiring aspects of the unreset, such as the posters and slogans connected to the Situationist International. ORLAN was 21 in 1968, and in the aftermath she began to enact public performances and spectacles in her hometown. Over the next decade she continued to perform, venturing further afield to Lyons and as far as New York.
In 1978, while preparing to present at a symposium on Video and Performance art, ORLAN was rushed to hospital for emergency surgery due to an ectopic pregnancy. She recalls, “I almost died […] They had to operate to save my life and remove what they told me was a non-viable fetus.” She brought a film crew along with her, and refused to undergo general anesthetic, wishing to remain conscious for the duration of the pregnancy. She states. “I wasn’t in pain and what was happening to my body was of profound interest to me.”
In the 1990s, ORLAN underwent a series of plastic surgeries, one of the first artists to engage with their body in performance in this way (building on the work of earlier pioneers like Ulay).
Arts writer Stuart Jeffries notes that “ORLAN saw the surgeon as a priest-like figure, his assistants gathered around him like fellow celebrants at a Catholic mass. The light from above recalled the heavenly beams that shine down in Bernini’s Baroque sculpture of Saint Teresa, writhing in religious ecstasy.” Likewise, ORLAN states that “For many years, I had appropriated baroque imagery in my work, especially in relation to Catholic art. So when I lay on the operating table, the parallels between the operating theatre and the Catholic mass were not wasted on me.” This experience propelled ORLAN toward a fearless use of plastic surgery as part of her Performance art.
Mature Period
In 1978, ORLAN created the International Symposium of the Performance in Lyon before moving to Paris in 1980. She worked out of a studio in the working-class suburb of Ivry-sur-Seine, next-door to the insane asylum where French writer and artist Antonin Artaud spent the final two years of his life. ORLAN used inmates from the asylum in her early tableaux vivants. In 1982, she and artist Frédéric Develay created the first online magazine of contemporary art, Art-Accès-Revue, on Minitel (a precursor to the internet of today), which invited International artists (like Bernar Venet, Vera Molnár, Ben, François Morellet, and Daniel Buren) to create original works specially conceived “on Minitel, by Minitel, and for Minitel”, which were then accompanied by critical essays.
Her most notorious and famous period of work took place in the early 1990s, where she had a series of plastic surgeries publicly performed to modify her face to resemble images from Renaissance and Classical art. This series of nine surgeries, which she titled The Reincarnation of Saint ORLAN (1990-93), included her attempting to reproduce facial features from Botticelli’s Venus and Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa on her own face. These surgeries were broadcast live to museum audiences, which required a satellite link as they took place before the advent of easy digital video connections. These performances were controversial, with the artist remembering that many people in the art world “wouldn’t talk to me anymore”, but nevertheless established ORLAN as a major artist at the forefront of formal and bodily experimentation. The press attention and notoriety of these performances also brought her into contact with new audiences and collaborators. The fashion designers Paco Rabanne and Issey Miyake created costumes for her whilst undergoing surgery, for example, bringing the project new attention and publicity.
Whilst attracting both negative and positive reactions in art world media and the general press, the attention generated by these performances resulted in ORLAN receiving further opportunities to exhibit, new teaching positions, and widespread recognition from the international art world. She exhibited multiple series of new works throughout the late 90s and early 2000s, alongside surveys and retrospective exhibitions that confirmed her significance. In 2005, ORLAN was awarded a one-year residency at the ISCP in New York by l’Association française d’action artistique (AFAA), and in 2006 was invited to participate in a residency at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles.
In June of 2013, ORLAN filed a complaint against musical artist Lady Gaga for plagiarism, alleging that Lady Gaga had drawn too heavily upon ORLAN’s Hybridizations series in the album Born this Way. The court ruled in favor of Lady Gaga, and ORLAN was ordered to pay 10,000 euros, as costs incurred, to the musician.
ORLAN now works as a professor of fine arts at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Dijon and at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts de Paris-Cergy. She lives with her husband, art historian and writer Raphael Cuir. She is represented in France by Paris’ Ceysson & Bénétière Gallery. She was awarded the prize of “Woman of the Year” by the Prince of Monte Carlo and decorated with the National Order of the Legion of Honor to the rank of Knight. She continues to make art that explores the use of the artist’s body, and the possibilities afforded by new technologies. ORLAN states that her “ultimate work” would be to have her mummified body placed in a museum, though she has yet to find an institution willing to agree to this.
The Legacy of ORLAN
ORLAN has spent the last several decades at the forefront of explorations of the use of science and technology in art. Her performances, installations, and multimedia creations have incorporated video, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, and robotics well before these were commonplace subjects or tools in artistic practice (or present in everyday life). The artist’s use of her own body has generated extensive critical discussions regarding the social, theoretical, and ethical implications of controversial technological advances (such as in the field of genetics). In her own words, “Artists today are interested in the context of the body: the body and junk food, pollution, AIDS, the body and new technologies and biotechnologies, the body and genetic modification. The more that technology is involved, the more we wonder what is going to become of humans, and the body in amongst all of that”.
As curator François Dareau notes, ORLAN’s work (particularly those projects that have involved the surgical modification of her own body) also enters into feminist discourses, by engaging with the theme of the violence done to women’s bodies, whether it be violence perpetrated by men, or what might be considered a form of self-inflicted violence (such as plastic surgery) for the purposes of appealing to male tastes. In this way, her oeuvre comes into conversation with that of pioneering feminist artists like Eleanor Antin, Ana Mendieta, Gina Pane, and Cindy Sherman. As artist and writer Siobhan Leddy asserts, “ORLAN is unwilling to be confined by the limits of pain, suffering, or even nature, and will obstinately work against them. If identity is constructed on the surface of a woman’s body, on the skin, ORLAN will peel it back to show us what lies beneath, or dramatically alter it so as to participate in the creation of her own identity.”
ORLAN’s engagement with feminist theory, the body, new technologies, and biotechnologies has laid the groundwork for a younger generation of artists to take up similar work, like Canadian trans artist Nina Arsenault, whose performances involve the enactment of violence upon her own body (such as when she spent two hours whipping herself while riding an exercise bike); and like Cypriot-Australian artist Stelarc, whose performances involve the integration of robotics technologies with his own body. Leddy best summarizes ORLAN’s influence when she writes, “Whether or not you find ORLAN’s body of work repulsive, stimulating, or something between the two, it’s exhilarating to see someone continue to make themselves anew – and with such utter disregard for orthodoxy.”