English 114EM: Women Writers, 1650-1760
Orlan's Philosophy of Carnal Art
What
is "Carnal Art"?
Carnal Art is a self-portrait in the classical sense, yet realized through the technology of its time. Lying between disfiguration and figuration, it is an inscription in flesh, as our age now makes possible. No longer seen as the ideal it once represented, the body has become an 'modified ready-made'. Carnal Art loves the baroque and parody; the grotesque, and other such styles that have been left behind, because Carnal Art opposes the social pressures that are exerted upon both the human body and the corpus of art. Carnal Art is anti-formalist and anti-conformist.
What
are the classical influences of Carnal Art?
Orlan
has engineered art projects around nine operations which remake her appearance,
and the series as a whole is entitled The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan or
Image-New Images. Orlan deals with the problem of dissection, peeling, and
unveiling which feminist theorists have critiqued as masochistic compared
to the sexual sadism of the "anatomist's ruthless penetration -- the
thrust of the male creator. But her work is also a task of incorporating the
image of goddesses from mythology and art history -- such as Leonardo Da Vinci's
"Mona Lisa" and the goddess Diana -- as a computerized process of
hybridization. Orlan explains: "...I devised my self-portrait using a
computer to combine and make a hybrid of representations of goddesses from
Greek mythology. I chose them not for the cannons of beauty they are supposed
to represent, but rather on account of the stories associated with them. Diana
was chosen because she refuses to submit to the gods or to men, she is active
and even aggressive..." (Goode, 1997)
Of the
operations performed so far, one altered her mouth to imitate that of François
Boucher's 
Europa; another "appropriated" the forehead of da Vinci's Mona Lisa;
yet another imitates the chin of Botticelli's Venus. These models were not
chosen by Orlan purely for their ideal beauty, however, but also for their
mythical and symbolic connotations. Venus was selected for her symbolic notions
of fertility and "Europa because she looked to another continent, permitting
herself to be carried away into an unknown future" (Rose, 85). Yet another
surgery, the widely publicized "Omniprésence," which took
place in November of 1993, implanted protrusions in her forehead to mimic
the protruding brow of Mona Lisa. Naturally, Orlan's was more exaggerated:
rather than a gentle protrusion, the end result was two symmetrical horns.
What
are the religious implications of Carnal Art?
"Clearly
Carnal Art does not inherit anything from the Christian tradition, against
which it fights! Carnal Art points to religion's denial of the 'pleasures
of the body', and puts the naked body in the spaces opened up through scientific
discovery. Carnal Art does not inherit anything from hagiography through decapitations
and other martyrs, it adds more than it takes away. Augmenting their powers
instead of reducing them, Carnal Art is not self-mutilation." (Carnal
Art Manifesto)
Carnal Art transforms the body into language, reversing the Christian principle of 'the word made flesh', the flesh is made word. Only the voice of Orlan remains unchanged.
Next Page: Orlan's Surgeries/Performances
This page has been explicitly designed for educational purposes and images should not be reproduced.
This page has been designed by Denee Pescarmona for English 114EM: Women Writers, 1650-1760, taught by Professor Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook.
This website was created in 2003. All references were accurate and all links were operative at the time the site was created. The site has not been updated since then, nor have broken links been fixed. For current information on ORLAN see http://www.orlan.net/.