Lisa Choban's Project on the Artist Orlan

The artist Orlan was born on May 30, 1947 in Saint-Etienne, France. Currently, she resides in Paris, New York City and Los Angeles. Orlan is a professor of fine arts at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Dijon, France and she also on the board of administrators for the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. In 1982 Orlan founded the first on-line magazine of contemporary art. Orlan chooses to keep her personal information and life history vague. This ambiguity helped propel and maintain Orlan’s status as a famous cultural icon.

Orlan’s most famous pieces of artwork are the nine plastic surgeries, which altered her face. The purpose of these surgeries was not to become more beautiful. Orlan states, “My goal was to be different, strong; to sculpt my own body to reinvent the self. It's all about being different and creating a clash with society because of that. I tried to use surgery not to better myself or become a younger version of myself, but to work on the concept of image and surgery the other way around. I was the first artist to do it." Orlan also performs these surgeries to show women that “female beauty is constructed by men for the pleasure of men.”

Orlan’s surgeries attempted to alter her facial features to reflect those of iconic women in art history. For example, one operation changed the shape of Orlan’s mouth to make it look more like the mouth of Francois Boucher’s Europa. Another changed her chin to look like that of Botticelli’s Venus. The two implants on Orlan’s temples are a result of misplaced cheekbone implants used to mimic the protruding browline of DaVinci’s Mona Lisa.

Orlan also insists on filming her operations. Famous designers give Orlan gowns to wear when she undergoes these surgeries. Music and poetry is often played or recited during her operation as well. Orlan also chooses to remain under local anesthesia, which means she is awake and conscious for her surgeries. Orlan chooses to make a spectacle of her surgeries in order to show that the risk and process to achieve beauty is truly dangerous, ugly and horrifying.

Orlan has also created many other works of art using many different mediums that all comment on the female body image and the female’s place in history and society. Many of these photos and paintings involve Orlan taking graphic images of her own nude body. Many of these works are of Orlan mimicking many famous historical pieces involving women’s bodies.