Tag: body

Tiqqun, from Sonogram of a Potential (full text here )

Orlan, The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan 

The Reincarnation of Sainte-ORLAN, a new project that started in 1990, involves a series of plastic surgeries through which the artist transformed herself into elements from famous paintings and sculptures of women. As a part of her “Carnal Art” manifesto, these works were filmed and broadcast in institutions throughout the world, such as the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Sandra Gehring Gallery in New York.[14] ORLAN’s goal in these surgeries is to acquire the ideal of female beauty as depicted by male artists. When the surgeries are complete, she will have the chin of Botticelli’s Venus, the nose of Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Psyche, the lips of François Boucher’s Europa, the eyes of Diana (as depicted in a 16th-century French School of Fontainebleu painting), and the forehead of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. ORLAN picked these characters, “not for the canons of beauty they represent… but rather on account of the stories associated with them.” ORLAN chose Diana, because she is inferior to the gods and men, but is leader of the goddesses and women; Mona Lisa, because of the standard of beauty, or anti-beauty, that she represents; Psyche, because of the fragility and vulnerability within her soul; Venus, for carnal beauty; and Europa, for her adventurous outlook on the future.[15]

Instead of condemning cosmetic surgery, ORLAN embraces it;[16] instead of rejecting the masculine, she incorporates it; and instead of limiting her identity, she defines it as “nomadic, mutant, shifting, differing.” ORLAN has stated, “my work is a struggle against the innate, the inexorable, the programmed, Nature, DNA (which is our direct rival as far as artists of representation are concerned), and God!”.[17]

“I can observe my own body cut open, without suffering!… I see myself all the way down to my entrails; a new mirror stage… I can see to the heart of my lover; his splendid design has nothing to do with sickly sentimentalities… Darling, I love your spleen; I love your liver; I adore your pancreas, and the line of your femur excites me.” (from Carnal Art manifesto)

“Sainte ORLAN” came from a character that I created for “Le baiser de l’artiste” from a text called “Facing a society of mothers and merchants.” The first line of this text was: “At the bottom of the cross were two women, Maria and Maria Magdalena.” These are two inevitable stereotypes of women that are hard to avoid: the mother and the prostitute. In “Le baiser de l’artiste” there were two faces. One was Saint ORLAN, a cutout picture of me dressed as Madonna glued onto wood. One could buy a five francs church candle and I was sitting on the other side behind the mock-up of the vending machine. One could buy a French kiss from me for the same amount of money one could buy a candle. The idea was to play on the ambivalence of the woman figure and the desire of both men and women towards those biblical and social stereotypes. Being showcased in the Paris International Contemporary Art Fair, the artwork was somehow both an installation and a performance,“[18] said ORLAN, in her interview with Acne Paper.

MONA HATOUM, DEEP THROAT, 1996

“Mona Hatoum began her artistic career using performance and video in the 80’s, focusing with great intensity on the idea of ​​the body and performance action. From the beginning of the 1990s, her artistic work was developed through large-scale installations that aim to engage the viewer in the contradictory emotions of desire and repulsion, fear and fascination. In her sculptural installations, Mona Hatoum has used the resource of the transformation of the familiar and the everyday (household objects such as chairs, tables, kitchen utensils, etc.) into something strange, threatening and dangerous. Even the human body becomes unusual in works like Corps étranger (1994) or Deep Throat (1996), installations using endoscopic paths through the “interior landscape” of the artist’s own body. In Homebound (2000) and Sous Tension (1999) Hatoum uses a somewhat surreal and threatening domestic dramatization, to catch the viewer in their perceptual and corporal journey through the space of the installation. The evolution of the artistic work of Hatoum lies in the spatial extension of the body within its limits, borders and spaces of collision, creating installations with an emphasis on the spatial construction caused by the effect of the displacement and the movements of the body in them. A body which in turn is the personal element of her autobiography and the material with which it identifies, the subaltern and the cartographic exile of her own autobiography, her status as a female Palestinian artist.

The ability to recreate and question cultural and political geographic spaces has become an invariable in her work, from the personal condition of exile and the reference to transportation and new ways of relating spatially, objectively and culturally in the passage, transition and movement of the body, giving a broad perspective of a body located between the interstitial of the artistic performance. Exodus, displacement, and instability are inescapable concepts in the life and work of Hatoum, and according to Kimberly Lamm, “the only real consistency in Hatoum’s work is her destabilization of ‘home’” (Lamm, 2004: 2)….The installations and sculptural objects of Mona Hatoum are defined based on spatiality, the measurement and the displacement of the body, and are impregnated by a sense of dislocation and disorientation, which leans towards the grotesque. Hatoum frequently redeems the uprooting of familiar and strange places, which occurs in the displacement, in the exile and through the body and their affects. They become a dislocation of memory. The fears and defamiliarizations of transit spaces and unearthed everyday objects, irreconcilable with their basic function they are transformed into something different, something unstable and precarious as in her work Present Tense (1996). The materials used in her installations such as hair, nails, stains, blood, etc., remind us of the relation between the body and the performativity of space; since her work is associated with the fabric of space and the body. And is directly linked to her own condition of nomadism, passage and transit between three territorial political entities, Palestine, Lebanon and Great Britain. But it is not only her status as an exiled Palestinian woman, which has repercussions on her work. Her work is developed challenging the stereotypes of reality, as she says: “In a very general sense I want to create a situation where reality itself becomes a questionable point (…) A kind of self-examination and an examination of the power structures that control us”

—Toni Mulet