ORLAN’S OMNIPRESENCE by Janel Feliz Martir

Paul Farmer once wrote, “Science is socially constructed.” Farmer’s statement speaks to how science is deeply a social and cultural phenomenon, and that even empirical results and medical scientific breakthroughs are just as much revolutions in science as they are in culture. Orlan’s polemical performance art resides in this nebulous sphere of medical science and society.

Orlan’s art resides not solely in the ubiquitous experience of bodily metamorphosis both for herself and her spectators. In Orlan’s 1993 seventh surgery entitled Omnipresence, Orlan presents her living body splayed for consumption, for circulation in the traffic of the public gaze. To the spectator, this is the performance of visual cannibalism filtered through a digital screen.  For the artist, this is the ultimate transgression of a taboo. Art historical scholarship has typically discussed Orlan’s art as overtly transgressive in its presentation of the body as the site of performance.

Orlan's 1993 Omniprésence photo taken from Arts'Natole

Orlan’s art exacerbates the negotiation between an individual’s most primitive understanding of public and private spaces, which one understands as separated by a layer of soft tissue called skin. Most fascinating in Orlan’s art is the physical dialogue between the surgeon that sculpts and the artist’s body that responds to and rebels against the surgeon’s hand. There are two performances co-existing within Orlan’s art, namely the performance of the surgeon and the performance of the artist Orlan.

The title Omnipresence implies a parodic transcendence of the body, which Orlan transforms into a transgression. The surgeon’s incision breaks the material boundary of Orlan’s body, poising the artist in the liminal space of a myriad binaries: interior/exterior, life/death, public/private. In the making of this transgressive art, the artist creates(?) the intention, yet it is the surgeon who incises. The question arises: Who performs the ultimate taboo? Is it the surgeon who severs the material fixity of the skin, the organ that insulates the interior self from the outside? Or is it the artist who allows her body to be so invasively violated?

Art in this case fails to anesthetize. The body as a medium for art is still palpable. The surgeon enacts the performance of creation and destruction, dissecting and stitching the body.

I argue that individually neither the artist nor the surgeon is the ultimate transgressor. The transgression of Orlan’s art resides in the symbiotic relationship between artist and surgeon. While Orlan is the brain behind her art, the surgeon is the embodied means of its end. As the surgeon sculpts with scalpels and flesh, the surgeon realizes the ideal of the artist-patient. It is the precision, the calculated violence of the act of surgery that is essential to Orlan’s art.  The incision is the ultimate transgression.

During this “operational moment” (as Orlan calls it), the body is completely passive to the surgeon’s scalpel. The surgery ritual is undoubtedly infused with the complex symbology of religious rites of passage and catharsis. The procedure on some level takes on a sacred performance by which the skilled surgeon violates the perceived sanctity of the individual’s body through a series of pre-meditated incisions.

Additional Note from Blogger: Orlan’s art claims to herald (or market) an era of cultural and social acceptance of body modification. With the aid of surgical technology, individuals who are able to pay the price for surgery can also achieve (or purchase) “authenticity”. That is, plastic surgery, or artistic body modifications, can be the means by which individuals are able to express and be their “true” selves. More recently, Lady Gaga has taken up this philosophical mantle. Gaga’s second album entitled Born this Way features the artist with protruding “bones” on her cheekbones and shoulders, striking visual references to Orlan’s performance art.