Plastic Surgery as Art? 6 Facts About ORLAN

Before the development of plastic surgery, a fashionable silhouette was something easily achieved with the help of shapewear and the right garments. Trends for facial features existed, yet they could only be achieved through the genetic lottery. Plastic surgery made these features available on demand, albeit with the uncomfortable side effects of pain and long healing. The famous French artist ORLAN adopted plastic surgery and body manipulation as her main artistic instruments, undergoing a series of operations in the early 1990s. She also founded an art movement called Carnal Art.

A conversation about ORLAN’s artistic path is far from the usual discourse of family, cultural background, and education. For most of her career, she kept her birth name and exact age unknown, as well as the details of her personal life and preferences. Aged seventeen, she legally changed her name to ORLAN, all in capital letters. Her personal myth states that her birthday happened in 1964 when the emerging artist presented her first work ORLAN Gives Birth to Her Beloved Self. This work presented a nude artist giving birth to a life-sized plastic mannequin—the artistic identity of ORLAN as it would soon become known. In the following years, she would turn herself into a living mechanism, transform her face, and move her body to the digital realm.

The concept of self-imposed transformation is central to ORLAN’s work. The artist achieves it through a wide variety of means, from photomanipulation and digital instruments to real-life plastic surgery. ORLAN’s art continues the tradition of a woman presented as an object, yet this time, this object is in charge of her own representation and transformation. Instead of being a passive recipient of imposed beauty standards and demands, she constructs from them her own image that somehow seems even more disturbing to the general audience.

2. She Is the Founder of the Carnal Art Movement

ORLAN’s art is sometimes read as a celebration of suffering as the necessary element of religious martyrdom, the sacrifice to achieve a higher step of existence. One of her main inspirations has always been Baroque art, which often dealt with religious ecstasy and painful spiritual transformation. Yet, ORLAN insists that her Carnal Art is a celebration of modifications made painless through modern anesthetics and a rejection of Christian morals and demands. This art celebrated the science that has surpassed the natural limits of the human body and welcomed the transformation of a living body into an artistic language. Still, it is full of irony and grotesque, existing as the eternal opposition to any set standard or imposed rule.

The most famous, scandalous, and influential work of ORLAN was a series of plastic surgeries that she went through in the early 1990s. The project, titled The Reincarnation of Saint ORLAN, caused a stir in the French and European media. Throughout nine surgeries, the artist completely transformed her face. As references, she chose women from famous works of art: a nose from an unattributed painting Diana the Huntress, a forehead from Mona Lisa, a chin from Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, and a mouth from Boucher’s Europa. Apart from their art historian significance, each figure had a special meaning that went against the paradigm of traditional submissive femininity. For the artist, Mona Lisa symbolized gender ambiguity (theories suggest that the painting was da Vinci’s self-portrait), while Diana represented aggressive and ruthless persuasion of one’s goals.

The practice of reshaping one’s appearance through plastic surgery, seen by many as an extreme case of body dysmorphia, turned into a tool of self-reinvention and self-discovery. Instead of hiding the anxieties and the gruesome details related to body image and beauty practices, ORLAN proudly puts them on display. For her, the process is more important than the result; hence, the main artistic product of her experiments was not the final reveal of her updated facial features but the surgery itself. In almost every procedure the artist went through, she remained conscious, choosing local anesthesia instead of general. As the surgeons worked on her face, the artist sang and recited poetry. The walls of the operating theater were decorated with painting reproductions, with the entire process recorded and broadcasted.

However, despite ORLAN’s chosen features corresponding to Western beauty standards, fitting in was never her goal. To finish her transformation, she asked her surgeons to place two implants in her temples. She deliberately wanted to add something monstrous and repulsive in her appearance to balance off the perfectly rebuilt features and enforce the uncanny valley effect. That small addition discreetly posed a systemic question: why are we attracted to some products of aesthetic manipulation, but are deeply disturbed by others? At which point does beauty turn into horror?

In her public appearances, ORLAN deliberately covers her implants with glitter and bright makeup to give her an even more alien-like appearance. According to the artist, she has always centered her work on women, their experiences, and societal expectations. Instead of attacking them directly, ORLAN dismantles them from within, reaching the peaks of absurdity in the quest for modified beauty.

5. She Sued Lady Gaga and Lost 

In 2013, ORLAN filed a $30-million lawsuit against the pop singer Lady Gaga two years after the release of her music video Born This Way. There, Lady Gaga appeared wearing facial prosthetics similar to the implants of Orlan’s face and later performed in a plexiglass cube, surrounded by severed heads. A strikingly similar image appeared in ORLAN’s 1996 work Woman with Head, with the artist’s head with a similar haircut and color set on a table. French law does not allow artistic ideas to be protected by copyright but recognizes the notion of creative parasitism, which happens when an innovative artist is taken advantage of without compensation or permission. As the artist’s lawyers stated, ORLAN was initially reluctant to file a case, believing that the singer would reach out to her or simply acknowledge the inspiration. Yet, after two-years-wait, she decided to take legal action.

Despite the visual similarities, the artist lost the case, both in France and the US. The court stated that ORLAN could not suffer from the alleged copying of her work by Lady Gaga since the two creatives did not share target audiences. The singer’s representatives called the case a mere attempt of ORLAN to generate press coverage overseas.

Transhumanism has always been the central concept in ORLAN’s work. For that matter, she started to explore the possibilities of a human being in digital realms way before the majority of other contemporary artists. Live broadcasts of her surgeries and performances, conducted way before the widespread use of the internet, had already explored the possibility of existing in an alternative time and space. From the 1990s, she used digital photography and editing software, further exploring the possible forms a human body can take in the new non-physical realm.

In 2018, she presented a robot made to her own likeness, reinterpreting the genre of self-portrait. The robot read poetry in her voice, recalling her past experience during surgeries. The only “real” things that remained from the artist in this self-portrait were her voice and her memory. Still, despite her experiments with technology, the core of ORLAN’s art remains as physical as ever. To the shock of her visitors, she keeps the leftover surgery tissue preserved in her studio. For her final and most ambitious project she is planning the mummification of her dead body for public display, but she still has to find a museum that agrees to it.