My Body, My Face, My Art:

A New Body to Come in Saint Orlan’s Carnal Art

Li-ching Ma, PhD student, National Taiwan University, Taiwan

I. Introduction

In the postmodern world, body and face become imaginary, virtual and at the

same time bear mystery for humans to decode. Operating Theater is one of the radical

and shocking forms of the corporeal art. The French performance artist Saint Orlan

presents her own body and face as one-of-a-kind art performance in light of modern

technology such as cosmetic surgery and computer composites. To put her Carnal Art

Manifesto into practice, she started the project The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan in

1990, inclusive of nine operations and a series of performances to refigure her

face/body.1 Her “Carnal Art” puts emphasis on revealing facial/bodily disfiguration

and refiguration during the surgical performance. All the cuts, stitches, the sewing and

the fold are contributing clues to Orlan’s metamorphosis in becoming. This is why she

claims: “This is my body . . . This is my software.” Working on her body (or software)

is opening her flesh interiority to the world, a dissipating of political/gendered body

and a weaving of her affective intensities and asignified immanence.

To begin with, the definition and spirit of Carnal Art should be clarified. In

Orlan’s Carnal Art Manifesto, she makes it clear that what such art expressed is an

insurgent representation of contemporary corporeality. Distinct from Body Art that

conceives of pain as (spiritual) redemption and purification, Carnal Art espouses in

1
There are two titles for the series of surgical performance. The first is The Reincarnation of Saint
Orlan, with which the intentional use of “reincarnation” is against “resurrection” of bodies. The second
is Images New Images with its purpose as Orlan addresses is “putting a face on my face, and thus
creating for myself a new image to produce further new images, resulting in a sort of sfumato between
presentation and representation” (Orlan 41; orig. italics).
 Ma 2

cosmetic surgeries, the disfigured and refigured body in modification places its

appalling spectacle and intriguing discourse at the core of a public debate and

contemplation. It is not merely (self-)mutilation; rather, it transforms corporeality into

a new language never spoken and coded. This radical art performance, addressed by

Orlan, is not against aesthetic plastic surgery but “against the standards it carries and

which are inscribed particularly over women’s skin” (Orlan, Donger and Shepherd 29).

Aside from cosmetic surgery, it participates in modern developments in biology as

well as medicine through which it radically questions the status of the body whereby

ethical issues can be poignantly posed. Parody, the baroque and the grotesque are the

best embodiment of Carnal Art as opposed to “social pressures exerted as much upon

human bodies as upon bodies of artworks” (29).

Orlan, with her noted slogan “remember the future,” performing and fighting to

the utmost possible degree in the arena of Carnal Art, is an exceptional figure to

challenge social givens and dictates in different stages. In remembering the future

imagined, created and conducted, she rams home her corporeal argument:

The skin is deceptive . . . in life one only has one’s skin . . . there is an error

in human relations because one is never what one has. . . . I have an angel’s

skin, but I am a jackal . . . a crocodile’s skin but I am a puppy, a black skin

but I am white, a woman’s skin but I am a man; I never have the skin of

what I am. There is no exception to the rule because I am never what I have.

Reading the text La Robe (The Dress) by Eugénie Lemoine-Luccioni, who is a

Lacanian psychoanalyst, Orlan sidesteps norms of modern/traditional art, carrying out

the artistic revolutionary evolution to address bloody questions in her anatomic

micro-performance on the body/face.2

Orlan criticizes ideal beauty through her grotesque bodily disfiguration and
2
Lemoine-Luccioni, Eugénie. La robe: Essai psychanalytique surle vêtement. Paris: Seuil, 1983. 95.
 Ma 3

rewrites art history through animal face or futuristic cyborg body. This paper, by

employing Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s conceptions of body without organs,

becoming a molecular woman, aims to present a dynamic picture of how Orlan’s

defaced performance delineates the possibility and potentiality of posthuman (female)

subjectivity. Her Carnal Art in this respect foretells a new body to come—the birth of

a molecular woman. With micro movement of aggregating desires and releasing

intensities, molar women are metamorphosing, shattering their fixed position in the

binary system. This new body claims emancipation of the politicized and gendered

body, and accordingly acclaims a body of “becoming-whatever-possible.”

II. Body without Organs: Defacement and Disembodiment

In terms of Deleuze and Guattari, body without organs (abbreviated as BwO

hereafter) is not against organs but organism, signification and subjectification, and is

empowered through its intensities on the plane of consistency, pre-history and

pre-rational state. BwO is “nonstratified, unformed, intense matter, the matrix of

intensity” and it leads intensities to pass (ATP 153). In Orlans’ first work, Orlan Gives

Birth to her Self, Orlan provokes the idea of God as well as scientific genes, and

thereby pronounces a self producing system of autopoiesis—giving birth to oneself

which is “a split, a cloning, a play in identity and otherness” as well ((Orlan, Donger

and Shepherd 184). Another series Body-Sculptures proceed self-sculpting,

self-making. The surgery performances later continued the sculpting spirit as a way of

disfiguring and refiguring herself. In so doing, Orlan elevated her body and face to a

level that “violated dominant aesthetic criteria (184). Evidently Orlan’s performances

as such are exemplifying Deleuze and Guattari’s argument to lodge on a bodily

stratum, experimenting with opportunities offered, in which Orlan’s corporeality finds

potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight,

experience them, produce flow conjunction here and there, try out
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continuums of intensities segment by segment, have s small plot of new

land at all times. (ATP 161)

Orlan is actualizing her BwO via leading a white wall and black-hole face (which is

only conceived of meanings in signification) to asignifying and asubjective

movements. Through de-/re-construction of her little flesh anatomic machine, she not

only challenges signifying and subjective programs but opens her organic body/face

to detect inner pieces. Faciality escapes from the signifier-signified face, reverts to its

unexplored region where is no interpretations so that becoming-

imperceptible and becoming-clandestine are possible.

Face, compared with other body organs or parts, is rather exploited/enunciated

with its one and only facial features. The face is an object/instrument that indicates

something. This something in a face is twofold—an old something to construct

organism, subjectification and signification or a new something of body natural

demeanor to create “a pure Power and Quality” (Deleuze, Cinema I 90). Such new

something in a transitory face of Orlan, overpowering, shocking, stunning, enchanting,

leads us to feel the world anew. In 1990s she began a series of cosmetic surgeries,

among which the most provocative one is to “deform” classical beauty of Plantonic

and reform her ideal self-portrait through a computer composite image, based on

features borrowed from those ideal women in famous works of art. Orlan broke what

was also questioned by Georges Bataille: the composite image is the representation of

“the necessarily beautiful Platonic Idea,” in which the scheme that “beauty would be

at the mercy of a definition as classical as that of common measure” is challenged

(55). The criterion of common beauty, Orlan conceived of in her project, included the

ideal forehead portrayed in Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, the eyes in Gerard’s Psyche, the

nose in Fountainebleau’s Diana, the mouth in Boucher’s Europa and the chin in

Botticelli’s Venus. She meticulously picked up these icons on account of not only their
 Ma 5

sublime feminine beauty but also the stories associated with them. Mona Lisa, well

noted as Da Vinci’s self-portrait, embodies transsexual feature that “there is some

‘man’ hides under this woman” (O’Bryan 18). Psyche represents the desire for love

and spiritual beauty, while Diana is characterized as an aggressive/adventurous

heroine unyielding to males. Europa, swept away by adventure and dreams, looks

toward the horizon and anticipates an uncertain future. Venus, apart from her carnal

beauty, symbolizes creativity. Orlan puts her face in the patchwork of the goddess’s

historical trace, endowing it with grotesque hybridity in/out of category and

definition.

Orlan’s face, de-faced, de-territorialized, de-chirstfaced, de-whitefaced, is no

longer reduced to only white wall and black holes. Her face is the “perfectly

constructed female face working against the notion of perfection attainted through

Christianity” (Clarke 199). Her facial cosmetic surgery opens the open and conveys

creative productivity/enunciation of a face, unprecedentedly. It is neither deified nor

feminine, neither universal nor particular. It is (dis)individualized; it is an event with

intensive forces flow in becoming whatever possible. With surgical probe-heads

(knife, needles), it subsequently dismantles the strata, penetrating the wall of

significations, and leaking out of the holes of subjectivity. Together with affective and

intensive assemblage, this machine in its revolted intention creates rhizomatic line of

flight towards deterritorialization.

In terms of what she sharply states “few images force us to close our eyes. Death,

sufferings, the opening of the body,” Orlan exercises her body opening with incisive

acts to challenge the dominant gaze and proceed trans-form-ing her fixed category

into BwO (Orlan, “Intervention” 315). She takes charge of the shooting scene and

animates her dominant position: she subverts the status as a feeble and unconscious

patient by taking painkillers. While seeing Orlan’s body marked, cut and incised, the
 Ma 6

gaze of spectators, challenged, is no longer dominant. At that point, her body cut out

open is “messy and entangled, obfuscatory in its density and interrelation of parts”

(Bouchard 66). During the appalling process, viewers see the anatomy and collapse of

(politicized and gendered) body in opening deformed and in suturing reformed.

Additionally, Orlan displayed those after-the-operation souvenirs in her studio. These

left reliquaries including parts of her scalp with attached hair, pieces of her cut flesh

preserved in formalin liquid, fat suctioned from her face, and the blood-soaked

surgical gauze were sold at a high price on the Internet. Arguably this profane act in

order to “overcome the taboo of selling one’s own body” satirizes sacredness of Christ

body and denotes her resistance to theological ideology (Orlan, Donger and Shepherd

47). Worship of imaginary sacredness is reduced to a secular profanity “with humor”

but without “being a virgin or martyr: saint” (39). These reliquaries are real organs

without a body to fight against religious or phallocratic power because such power has

always rejected the body, “depreciated and discriminated against women” (38).

III. A New Body to Come: Becoming Molecular Women

Orlan, with her BwO, marks the progressive aspect of Deleuze in taking on “a

practice, a set of practice,” in which we grope like the blind, feeling unnamable

pleasure and thrilling defeats (ATP 150). Her BwO produces her new body to come,

constructing “flow by flow and segment by segment lines of experimentation,

becoming-animal, becoming-molecular” (161). With a knife cutting slice, slash and

holes, the abstract machine of cosmetic surgery to create universally uniformed

beauty is at work; on the other, movement of tearing the white wall, penetrating the

black holes, a firmly signified face or body is dismantled. Orlan’s mutation of monster,

goddess, cyborg or so are designated a new body of becoming a molecular woman.

Becoming, in Deleuzian diagram, is not to construct a form of identification as

such but “to find the zone of proximity, indiscernibility, or indifferentiation, where
 Ma 7

one can no longer be distinguished from a woman, an animal, or a molecule. . .

singularized out of a population rather than determined in a form” (Essays 1).

Transversal becoming, the key to the openness of life, is always in the middle, thereby

the border of becoming-being is oscillate whereupon becoming fluidly moving from

one to the other, back and forth between the point of territory and fluidity. Further,

Deleuze and Guattari give molar and molecular their shape as the case of becoming:

What we term a molar entity is, for example, the woman as defined by her

form, endowed with organs and functions and assigned as a subject.

Becoming woman is not imitating this [molar] entity or even transforming

oneself into it. . . . [On] the contrary, the woman as molar entity has to

become woman in order that the man also becomes or can become woman.

It is, of course, indispensible for women to conduct a molar politics with a

view to winning back their own organization, their own history, their own

subjectivity: “we as women . . . makes its appearance as a subject of

enunciation.” But it is dangerous to confine oneself to such a subject,

which does not function without drying up a spring or stopping a flow.

(ATP 275-6)

Molar politics confine women to a woman-against-man subject form and a molar

woman functions as an independent structure in society; nevertheless, it only works

presupposedly subservient to the patriarchal scheme. A molecular woman is contrarily

exempt from suffocation and subservience, “emitting particles that enter the relation

of movement and rest, or the zone of proximity, of a microfemininity” (275).

In the figure of mother, monster and machine and with the assistance of

computer digital technology, Orlan embarked on cybernetic traversals, in order for

situating her body in a nomadically molecular stance. Rosi Braidotti helps us better

figure out such conjunction. She suggests that female subjectivity be configured by
 Ma 8

alterity within women. Monsters implicates in between, the mixed, the ambivalent

based on its Greek root referring to teras—“horrible and wonderful, object of

aberration and adoration” (77). In contrast to male masculinity and rationality, women

connote the sign of irrationality and abnormality. With their body malformations, their

deviance and abnormality represent the difference from human norm; however, it is

with modern biotechnology that human beings manipulate genetic engineering to

create new artificial monsters. The horror and fascination of the female body are

analogous to a monstrous body; yet this posthuman body resists representation,

configure potential tropes for subjectivity rift with “the Promise of Monsters”

(Haraway 295). Donna Haraway espouses that in this promise cyborg is the most prior

and radical appropriation in its proliferation of hybrid and multiple identities: “The

Cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality,

pre-Oedipal symbiosis, unalineated labor” (150). As intervention and reproduction,

Orlan’s cyborg of (m)other-monster-machine implies deterritorialization in traversing

the bond of corporeality. In The Bride of Frankenstein, Orlan took up her

cyborg-composite project. Her body and face were synthesized as a Siamese twin,

who was joined at the shoulders and the hair, as a double and mirror image of herself.

The next came with her widely-recognized Self-Hybridization, inclusive of

Pre-Columbian, African and American-Indian. By appropriating ancient

physiognomic features of other races, coupling her flesh with the postmodern

electronic apparatus, she gave herself an exaggerated monstrous forehead, Mayan

nose, disfigured facial contour, all of which represent her envisioning sfumato of

hybrid identities. In Woman with Head, Orlan poignantly points out the intersection of

coding and decoding. Her head was virtually separated from her body to serve as

prosthesis, and inside a mirrored box her body disappeared magically. Her

disembodied head addressed the spectators and read the texts of Julia Kristeva. The
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thinking/talking head is not only to stigmatize male-led philosophy of cogito but to

mock the reduction of woman to her invisible body. But this also inverts her body

over invisibility to mobility and malleability. Orlan’s cybernetic transgression, in

mother/monster/machine conjunction, creates symbiosis between woman, machine,

and other. In this line she gets away from the stratum of molar politics and triggers

intrinsic alterity that renders a malleable split of the body into multiplicity.

IV. Conclusion: Remember Saint Orlan

Orlan dislocates her body/face on the operating table or in the technological

synthetic images, becoming-animal, becoming-Indian, becoming-African,

becoming-Mexican. Her BwO slips in everywhere and “between orders, acts, ages,

sexes and situates herself “to be between, to pass between, the intermezzo” with

malleability, indiscernibility and proximity in order for molecular production and

micropolitics (ATP 277). In this context, a molecular woman always oscillates

in-between zones of convention and experimentation, pains and pleasure, reality and

virtuality, the past/present and the future.

At the turn of the century, she raised high interest in biotechnology. Bio is an

ethical issue to ponder, but at the same time it brings body politics into heated debate.

Racial multicolors grown on her body by biotechnology was her first audacious step

in the 21st century. Orlan intends to experiment with scientists for growing skin by

hybridizing cells from her skin and dermis with black people. It is a real flesh

patchwork into actualization to grow a body with natural skin multi-colors.3 Orlan’s

fragmented and variable body/face predating the semiotic system is a political text,

both utopially and dystopially, to experiment on and to enunciate. In compliance with

modern technology, she explores a hidden trail in art to pose questions, to resist all

3
In an interview, Orlan spoke of her wild ambition in making use of bio-technology as her 21st century
manifesto. This cross-over project was previously motivated by Michel Serres’s Tier-instruitm and
performed in the fifth operation in 1993. But her ambitious project failed due to its great difficulty.
 Ma 10

fixed answers. This is her seditionary art to disturb the present and remember the

future. It is in her becoming-molecular that we witness a new body to come. What a

horror. What an in(-)human enunciation.

 Ma 11

Works Cited

Bataille, Georges. “The Deviations of Nature.” Visions of Excess: Selected Writings,

1927-1939. Ed. Allan Stoekl. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1985. 53-6.

Bouchard, Gianna. “Incisive Acts: Orlan Anatomised.” Orlan: A Hybrid Body of

Artworks. Ed. Orlan, Simon Donger and Simon Shepherd. London: Routledge,

2010. 62-72.

Braidotti, Rosi. “Mothers, Monsters, and Machines.” Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment

and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia

UP, 1996.

Clarke, Julie. “The Sacrificial Body of Orlan.” Body & Society 5.2-3 (1999): 185-207.

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and

Barbara Habberjam. New York: Continuum, 1992.

---. Essays Critical and Clinical. Trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco.

Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1997.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and

Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1987.

Halberstam, Judith, and Ira Livingston. “Introduction: Posthuman Bodies.”

Posthuman Bodies. Ed. Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston. Bloomington:

Indiana UP, 1995. 1-19.

Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New

York: Routledge, 1991.

O’Bryan, C. Jill. Carnal Art: Orlan’s Refacing. London: Minnesota UP, 2005.

Orlan. “Intervention.” The Ends of Performance. Ed. Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane.

New York: New York UP, 1998. 315-27.

Orlan, Simon Donger, and Simon Shepherd, eds. Orlan: A Hybrid Body of Artworks.

London: Routledge, 2010.