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The camera opens to a bloated face. Viewers watch, in a mixture of horror and intrigue, as a hand in a blood-soaked glove holding a purple pen decorates the woman’s swollen lips and cheeks with more dashes and circles. There is a pronounced, raised mass of skin to the side of her chin that appears f

May 15 May 15 The Reincarnation of Saint ORLAN Emilie Biggs Magazine, Writing Sarah Courville The camera opens to a bloated face. Viewers watch, in a mixture of horror and intrigue, as a hand in a blood-soaked glove holding a purple pen decorates the woman’s swollen lips and cheeks with more dashes and circles. There is a pronounced, raised mass of skin to the side of her chin that appears from the blood and swelling to be the newest addition. Most striking: she is wearing mascara. This is a woman who woke up in the morning and, before heading into the neon-green operating room with surgeons in baroque costumes to have her flesh peeled open and silicon inserts shoved inside, remembered to add a layer of mascara to her eyelashes. ORLAN, briefly, seems human again.It is this, the humanity (and what has been interpreted as a subsequent movement away from it) that is so striking about the procedure. French artist ORLAN’s art is grounded in the flesh. Deeming her art style “carnal art,” she uses her own body as her medium, appropriating surgical traditions and medical technologies to create a new form for herself. The surgeries, part of an art piece labeled The Reincarnation of Saint ORLAN, are gruesome and captivating, both a celebration of the body and a celebration of its destruction. Before each procedure, she recites, “Skin is deceiving ... in life, one only has one’s skin ... there is a bad exchange in human relations because one never is what one has ... I never have the skin of what I am.” The disembodied bloody hand injects a needle into her upper lip, and I have to look away.If ORLAN’s body is the medium, the author of the art being produced seems to be, to some extent, the technology acting upon it — both the immediate medical procedures taking place and the omnipresent communication apparatus documenting and supplementing the affair. In a review of one performance, the New York Times described the room in which it took place as the following:The show also includes a photographic record, accumulating at the rate of one picture a day, of the artist in recovery, her head bandaged, her face puffy, her eyes blackened. These images are contrasted with none-too-seamless computer photographs of her face fused with one or another of the five mythic women.Everything is being recorded. ORLAN presents us with a circus of technologies. Through camera technology, surgery becomes spectacle. The surgeries, in part a response to cosmetic surgeries already available to women, are made possible and necessary by the medical technology available. And yet, technology’s purpose here is subverted. That is to say, it has no real purpose.Technicism as a philosophical tradition argues that technology is valuable in that it is, as a whole, useful. It serves to complete tasks, solve problems, and even create. Egbert Schuurman describes it as “an ethos, the fundamental attitude we have introjected in our knowledge of and dealings with science and technology [that] promises to solve all global problems and to assure progress through technology and scientific-technological control.” While this is a more extreme approach, Schuurman is able to articulate the basic goal of technicism: improvement. Partaking in the meliorist idea that the world can be bettered by human action, technicism pinpoints technology specifically as a resource in catalyzing this betterment: technology — as machinery, as skill, as a method of organization — should, and will, make things better.This idea, that there is a ‘better’ toward which technicism believes technology to aim, is clarified by Schuurman: according to him, technicism operates according to “an extremely utilitarian worldview ... denying things quality.” Under technicism, then, a technology’s value is nothing more than the quantity of goodness it produces. A standard is established according to which a technology’s value can be judged. “Things are functionalized.” Technology is made moral.The idea of a moral direction to technology is key to the development of medical technology, where utility is most valued. The root of medicine, mederi, originally meant “to know the best course for,” and then, “to heal.” The idea of improvement is contained within the concept of medicine itself, and it is this goal of improvement that stands behind innovations in medical technology. The tools employed in ORLAN’s art — the scalpel, the suture, the local anesthetic she uses in order to remain conscious during the surgery, the technique of the surgeons themselves — participate in a moral tradition. Indeed, it seems absurd to claim that medicine could not be goal-oriented. And yet, a key point of ORLAN’s Carnal Art manifesto is as such:CARNAL ART IS NOT INTERESTED IN THE PLASTIC-SURGERY RESULT, BUT IN THE PROCESS OF SURGERY, THE SPECTACLE AND DISCOURSE OF THE MODIFIED BODY WHICH HAS BECOME THE PLACE OF A PUBLIC DEBATE“NOT INTERESTED IN THE PLASTIC-SURGERY RESULT” — this is a philosophy that ignores the ends of its ...

The Reincarnation of Saint ORLAN — Gadfly