Tag: self-mutilation

“French performance artist ORLAN has gone under the knife nine times for art. Her seventh surgery, a 1993 piece entitled “Omnipresence,” performed in New York was broadcast live to her studio in New York (the Sandra Gering gallery) and many others. All were connected to ORLAN’s operating room by videophone and to each other’s screens.Before the surgery begins, she reads from a script, in French, “Man treats this skin so cheaply, though it means so much to him. He sheds it at the slightest bidding, for he wants to shed his skin. The only thing he possesses. ‘I only have my skin.’ It is too much since having and being do not coincide.”She seats herself on the operating table and answers questions asked her through videophone while a woman draws on her face – under her eyes, then outlining her cheekbones, then around the implants as she holds them to ORLAN’s face. “It’s about renaissance and reconstruction,” she says. A skull rests nearby, with blue implants (normally used for enhancing cheekbones) attached to show how her facial structure will change – on the cheekbones, along the ridge of the nose, along the outer edge of the brow bone, and on the underside of the chin.  The first question comes from the New York gallery: “what will the body be in the future?” ORLAN replies, “the body is now obsolete, totally obsolete.”“

—The Art Pour

“French performance artist ORLAN has gone under the knife nine times for art. Her seventh surgery, a 1993 piece entitled “Omnipresence,” performed in New York was broadcast live to her studio in New York (the Sandra Gering gallery) and many others. All were connected to ORLAN’s operating room by videophone and to each other’s screens.Before the surgery begins, she reads from a script, in French, “Man treats this skin so cheaply, though it means so much to him. He sheds it at the slightest bidding, for he wants to shed his skin. The only thing he possesses. ‘I only have my skin.’ It is too much since having and being do not coincide.”She seats herself on the operating table and answers questions asked her through videophone while a woman draws on her face – under her eyes, then outlining her cheekbones, then around the implants as she holds them to ORLAN’s face. “It’s about renaissance and reconstruction,” she says. A skull rests nearby, with blue implants (normally used for enhancing cheekbones) attached to show how her facial structure will change – on the cheekbones, along the ridge of the nose, along the outer edge of the brow bone, and on the underside of the chin.  The first question comes from the New York gallery: “what will the body be in the future?” ORLAN replies, “the body is now obsolete, totally obsolete.”“

—The Art Pour

Star (from the portfolio ‘Dear Stieglitz’)

Marina Abramović

This photograph relates to a performance called ‘Lips of Thomas’ from 1973, in which the artist tested her physical endurance. In the manner of offering herself as a ritual sacrifice, Abramović ate a kilogram of honey, drank a litre of red wine, and cut a five-pointed star into her stomach with a razor blade. She then whipped herself until she could no longer feel any pain and finally lay on a cross made of ice. The photograph is from a portfolio called ‘Dear Stieglitz,’ named in homage to Alfred Stieglitz, the photographer and gallery owner who published the art-photography journal ‘Camera Work’ in the early Twentieth century.