Body III - Orlan , "Omniprescence" - by Ava

Omnipresence (1993)

• 9 plastic surgery operations in 1990-93
• performed before live audiences
• remained awake, read and spoke during operations
• planned and executed, directed and edited by Orlan

• Omnipresence is her 7th operation
• took place in New York in November 1993 transmitted live via satellite to her New York gallery, Paris, Banff, Toronto and other sites
• Viewers could communicate with her during the performance
•The Omnipresence video and photographs record the entire surgical process




ISSUES EXPLORED

1. To challenge traditional perceptions of beauty
•an expression of the sublime and grotesque, eccentricities carved into human flesh and sculpted in living bone
•celebrates bodies combined with technology

2. “Self-sculpturing”/ creating oneself
•the idea of giving birth to oneself but at the same time that birth was a split, a cloning, a play on identity and otherness
•By surgery people can change their faced, bodies, skins, colors and, which are innately determined by human genes
• people can change genders by nowadays technology
•a way of refiguring yourself. It involves the idea of not accepting what is automatically inherited through genes

3. To challenge the concept of suffering/ pain
•she was under local anaesthetic 麻醉 during the operation
•kept smiling, speaking and reading
•she thinks pain is outdated



Her face a few days after the 7th surgical operationa


























Omnipresence No.2

• Created in conjunction with the 7th surgerg
•16 meters long
•Made out of two horizontal rows of images

•Bottom row: Orlan’s features digitally combined with different classic beauties from the art historical canon
•Top row: Orlan’s photographs of her face gradually healed after the operation.

• Meaning:

-“machine-body” vs. “ machine-computer”

- Questions the historical and contemporary notions of physical beauty

- Contests the distance between the real and the virtual

Drawings done by Blood (1993)

• drawn with Orlan’s blood during her eighth surgical operation performance
•Involves the use of abject object
•Functions as forceful material evidence that her body is her artistic tool

Relevant works about body

Self-Hybridization series (1999)

African Self-Hybridization series (2000-2003)

• Facial features combined with the features found on artifacts from pre-Columbian (Olmec, Aztec, Mayan) civilizations and masks from some black African civilization

• Meaning: to unearth the incredible diversity of esthetic ideals across time and space
-Explores the non-Western conceptions of beauty
-Reveals the West’s imposition of its canons of beauty onto other cultures
-Implies the replacement of a set of aesthetic principles from one hegemony to another