The
images shown by journalists, television and such like have always
led to an erroneous interpretation of the artist Orlan's approach.
This unfortunately tended to undermine the very quality of her actions
and to instill permanent doubts in the minds of the many people
interested in her approach. In 1991, the need to make a film about
her became obvious. The spirit of metamorphosis was to replace the
shock footage that the media were so fond of at the time.
MA
"OPERATION OPERA" 1991
The
appearance on-screen of Orlan's source material - her own body -
is supposed to plunge the audience into a state of fascination/repulsion:
the image of the raw material, Orlan's flesh, sculpted by the skilled
hand of a surgeon of Orlan's choosing, with the body often taking
on a new organic and/or plastic gradually changing substance.
MA "OPERATION OPERA" 1991
The surgeon-accomplice is no longer the medical deity feeding from
the habitually lucrative source of his patients/subjects. This doctor
is no longer the mythical modeler who becomes an "artist"
himself, but belonging to the medical profession, he is a part of
the process.
The instrument does still exist: there is the scalpel which signs
the flesh. There is also the cannula which ventures into the body's
inner space. The aim is to extract the precious decanted fat and
place it in another inner space: a reliquary. Orlan's matter is
packed in a transparent capsule in which a body's history can be
read. In this toughened glass container ringed with steel, the work
of art conserves its organic nature as it travels throughout the
world from one gallery to the next.
The aesthetics of the disappearance of an initial image of the face
and body renews the process of appearance: one face leads to another.
This dissimulation of one's first physiological identity is the
work itself which has embarked on its program of mutation. The cosmic
time in which the shifting shape evolves is, in any case, this universe:
an illusion in which art is there to announce to us the virtuality
of the universe where all shapes converge on the absolute identification
decided upon in advance by the artist.
The ideal structure will not be limited to the endless application
of surgery for that would once again imply the media's gloom-mongering
and would ruin the endeavor. There are other actions and performances
to come, and there are the very important past actions which, fortunately,
were filmed, archived, and preserved. With archeology protecting
and somehow conserving the primitive video images, I should manage
to bring into symbiosis these archives which serve as a counterpoint
to the film's surface.
"OPERATION OPERA" 1991
Various
states of mythological representation of our history circulate inside
the space-time continuum, and the pursuit of the work is what makes
the imagination possible. Out of ancient goddesses arise the shapes
of Orlan, the replicant. The rite of this genesis is accomplished
in the accursed studio, the chaotic, baroque operating room which
is marked by a state of confusion worthy of the creation of the
world in which painted canvasses, plastic sub-objects and signed
dresses confront baskets of fruit, cameras, a rap dancer, a lobster,
the video, cinema and photography technicians, panting in submariners'
outfits!!!
MA
"OPERATION OPERA" 1991
Vertiginous
Kinematics
This laboratory which is the film, which is the operation of the
film which is the film of the operation is the hullabaloo, the racket
of the overexcited surgeons, anesthetists and dancer around their
subject. The body-bag-costume is taken to a time in which the whole
universe goes the wrong way.
According to Hindu philosophy, the soul in the inner space of the
stitched-unstitched-body-bag-costume is invariable. It exists from
the start of the spiral of the first cosmic cycle, the breath of
this soul is protected, indestructible.
While the artist Orlan, the Being of an intermediary time, tries
to rest before her next operation, all dressed up in those adhesive
strips which resemble the ones used to wrap exposed boxes of film,
I think of the trauma of the operations and the physiological consequences
they may have, and I wonder: Does one's soul leap from one body
to the next, after each reincarnation? According to a Tamil text,
the body is but a lie, a bag of wind.
I
MA
"OPERATION OPERA" 1991
Like
the consciousness of time, like tissue permanently healing, like
the tissue of the stitched-unstitched-restitched-body-bag-costume,
sticks itself together automatically, I want the soul of the film,
if it exists, to stick itself together with scotch tape on my editing
table.
MA
"OPERATION OPERA" 1991
Khrisna
explains that the soul passes from one body to the next after each
rebirth... The journey to India. The female carnal artist accomplishes
a different kind of work there: the experience in Madras (Tamil
Nadu) is the sublime demonstration of this. Orlan's work with Indian
painters familiar with pictures on a gigantic scale takes shape,
and this complicity transposes the structure of the film's spirit.
The body-territory temporarily disappears, giving way to the dynamic
strokes of the paintbrushes.
In the Indian cinema capital, the movie poster specialists, the
painters, transfer onto canvas the multiple outsized portraits,
Orlan's "Video Art", the photographs, the computer-generated
titles, and above all, the performances in the operating room. The
Artist poses for a plastic art used by advertising. The medium of
this advertisement is a series of fictitious films whose imaginary
world comes from Orlan the heroine. One seeks to find out whether
the films in this series have already been or are still to be made.
MA
JOËL RAFFIER DIR ALLIANCE FR MADRAS 1992
Thanks
to the rickshaws, the bone-shaking, overheated delivery tricycles,
the giant portrait of the Star is swiftly transported through the
megalopolis and hung from the front of the Liberty movie theater.
Thiru, Shridar and the painters are with us in this grandiose yet
quite natural cinematic ceremony. The shoot. The clapperboard becomes
the absurd clip snapping shut like the surgical instruments used
to delimit the operative field. She is operated on again behind
the iris of the machine, this time in the camera's field of view,
outside the bloody studio. The camera and pedestrians and trucks
and rickshaws and us are the cameramen strutting about in the approaching
heroine's path.
MA
"MADRAS" 1992
There
is a stampede towards the star painted on salvaged plywood. The
dust and the colored panel seem transported by the wind which carries
along the crowd, but the real star is here in the flesh, looking
radiant and given a welcome worthy of a star in the open! Dressed
just like the painting! Painted just like the cap and costume!
From the journey made through the living sculpture, worked with
a direct carving technique, the voyage is perpetuated in the living
painting. In the painters' studios, Saint Orlan finally becomes
the Goddess Kali, and the multiple arms wave - in an image frozen
by the acrylic and oil. These arms brandish the accessories seen
in the operating room in Paris and are transposed onto canvas.
Opposite, Ganesh, sitting in the temple, laughs tolerantly. The
Tamils understood Orlan's approach, after all. In any case, no one
has been disturbed by the artist's adventure. The Hindus are surprised
though by the idea of reincarnation in one's own lifetime - for
them, it comes after death.
MA
"MADRAS" 1992
Most
of the paintings, once they have been recorded, photographed, and
filmed, are destined to waterproof local roofs. Wrapping the roofs
and other forms of architecture is an obsession for some, but now
other Orlan-bodies - a cosmic unit of measurement - offer themselves
up to the cityscape of Madras. For the seventh surgical operation-performance
in New York, the filmed action is coupled with every interactive
means of telecommunications: a satellite beaming the pictures live,
broadcast to the Sandra Gering Gallery in New York, a videophone
transmitting the operation's progress to the Georges Pompidou Center
in Paris and to the MacLuhan Center in Toronto.
MA
NEW YORK 1993
Gathered
together for a special symposium, art critics and philosophers -
Gladys Fabre, Pierre Restany, Serge François - debate the
subject, question Orlan, analyze her artistic approach during the
operation as Dr Marjorie Cramer inserts silicone implants inside
the artist's open and bleeding face, in an experimental morphological
mutation. We share Orlan's thoughts, in the days after the operation,
as she talks to Barbara Rose, an art historian and critic from New
York, including a debate which makes an analogy between the violence
of war on television and the violence of the artist's performance.
MA
PIERRE RESTANY, CRITIQUE D'ART
MA
SERGE FRANÇOIS PHILOSOPHE, ECRIVAIN
MA
GLADYS FABRE CRITIQUE D’ART
I would like the genetics designers of the future to reflect on
this film which shows the state of genuine scientific fugue Orlan
rushes into. I would like them to understand that Orlan is the first
to have severed the ties between future time and place without concealing
them from those who advance chronologically. This terrible yet magnificent
approach does not seek to render more or less beautiful - rather,
it is the pure desire to change one's own image! How could that
not interest a filmmaker? Being able to film utopia, without any
special effects, without the pressure on the camera's release mechanism
being transformed into intriguing voyeurism.
MA
LOUPE 1993
I would like the Replicant not to be one of those more or less bionic
instruments of science fiction films packed with special effects.
Here the effect is totally natural. I want this naturalness not
be pushed toward the censorship of psychoanalysis. I wish Orlan
to decide for herself if she becomes her own mother, her own sister,
her own daughter, her own surgeon. I would like the dizzy array
of the artist's senses not to go where I could no longer follow
the precise, delicate metamorphosis in progress.
MA
"OMNIPRESENCE" 1993
This imaginary world leads me to confirm that the film becomes this
documentary of creation which is not about filming what does not
exist, and our cinema is turned into "Orlan-Truth" as
many times per second as necessary. The filmed work, an undertaking
which is parallel to the flesh-and-blood work, will nevertheless
be the ultimate medium. The "photogenous" star - what's
more, a video artist - extracting her creations from her stock,
offers this work on a magnetic medium which comes from that other
place inhabited by a multitude of Saint Orlans. Four video films
saw the light of day and featured an installation chosen by the
artist, a ceiling for the Sydney Biennial. The voyeurs/visitors
had the pleasure of being compelled to use their cervical vertebrae.
In the end, these other bodies also have to suffer slightly in order
to understand. They saw a strangely magnetic material: the heart's
blood cells, orchestrated to very varied rhythms and superimposed
over images of the operations. The tape-to-film transfer of this
footage interferes with the film's gelatin, perpetuating the confrontation
of the video and film cameras in the operating room.
MA
EFFETS 4 ECRANS
Still photography provides points of reference on the filmic journey.
This highlighting of the video footage, films or photos, as well
as the recorded accounts of the artists, analysts, scientists, Brahmans,
and critics force the director-producer to respect the visible metamorphosis
of reality and the strict accompaniment of the transfigured artist.
Stephan Oriach
MA
“SELF-HYBRIDATION" MAISON EUROPEENNE PHOTO 1999
