ORLAN: CRYING WOMEN ARE ANGRY
Joana Baygual
“I gave my body to art”
ORLAN
“Crying women are angry” is the first exhibition of the French artist ORLAN at the Rocío Santa Cruz gallery in Barcelona. ORLAN is the main representative of what she herself calls “Carnal Art” or “body modification” and which refers to works where the self-portrait is the main subject and object of the work, in the classical sense, but using any technological means. , scientist or doctor that we can access in these times. In this Carnal Art, the body is reconfigured and de-constructed as a political weapon to highlight and put into crisis the stereotypes associated with women in today’s society, and always, with the History of Art as the plot line of the works of she. Her body is the work of art.
The title of the exhibition “Crying women are angry” part of a series of works with the title The Weeping Woman (1937), that Pablo Picasso painted of his lover Dora Maar.
In the main portrait of The Weeping Woman, we see Dora with terrible suffering on her face, with tears in her eyes and a handkerchief in her hands. This work is contemporary to the Spanish Civil War and coincides with an event that happened in those days. Dora Maar found out about the death of her father, which caused her a lot of pain. This is what Picasso will represent, the agony and sadness of Dora Maar, a metaphor for the suffering of Spanish women due to the bombing of Guernica and the Civil War.
Dora and Picasso’s relationship was very stormy and destructive. Dora was very intelligent but emotionally fragile. She was also a great artist, photographer, painter and sculptor who met Picasso when he was still with Marie-Therese Walter. She mistreated Dora, both psychologically and physically, and got her to give up art to dedicate herself to it. Years later she Dora she would say «I was not Picasso’s lover; he was only my master». In Patrick O’Brian’s “Picasso”, the author defines him as a successful phallocrat.
ORLAN in these works puts himself in the shoes of Dora Maar and of all women in general who have been mistreated by men. Through digital technology he elaborates a series of collage portraits (Self-hybridizations) in the style of the cubist era of The Weeping Woman, adding his features, his eyes, hands, nose, ears and frontal prostheses. He also adds the handkerchief to accentuate the pain and impotence.
The “they are angry” tagline in the exhibition title is part of ORLAN’s contribution to the new series of works currently in the gallery. She invites women to scream and stand up to abuse and misogynistic relationships. The women of ORLAN are crying with rage and courage for the insults they have suffered.
ORLAN since its inception has been a very performative and deeply feminist artist, who has not hesitated to use science, new technologies, biotechnologies, augmented reality, AI and robotics, as well as more traditional techniques such as photography. , video, sculpture, collage or even painting to carry out his works. The medium used is not so important to her, but that this medium adapts to what she wants to transmit and how she wants to materialize it.
Since its beginnings when she was 16 years old, she has been creating herself. Her body belongs to her and she develops her art based on the belief that the body has always been changeable. She modifies it and in these transformation processes she is very close to the thought of Donna Haraway, inserting implants as horns or whatever she considers pertinent to expand her body. She self-hybridizes to create a mask that generates a new figuration different from the image she has been given.
He does not modify his body in a search for beauty or youth. He says that beauty is solely a matter of dominant ideology, here and now. Each era exerts a different pressure on the idea of beauty and on the bodies of women, according to certain standards and if you do not meet those standards, you are left out of society.
With her works, she highlights the mercantilism of art, the two antagonistic gender stereotypes that have characterized women, such as saint and harlot, otherness and miscegenation, with the concept of different beauty according to different cultures and the concept of muse.
In his work The reincarnation of Saint Orlan He underwent five aesthetic operations where he transformed some of his features into the features of women painted in masterpieces of Art History. She was given the forehead of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa; the eyes of Psyche, by the French sculptor and painter Gerone; Diana’s nose attributed to the School of Fontainebleau; the mouth of Boucher’s Europa and finally, the chin of Botticelli’s Venus. All this documented and transmitted via satellite television to different museums and places in the world and with a very theatrical staging. A synonym of operating room is Theater of Operations, which in turn has military, battlefield connotations. She was always anesthetized by epidural injection, she kept her awake and conscious during these operations.
His operations cannot be considered modalities of the Body Art of the 60s because he does not seek to feel pain but what he wants is for his body modifications to generate debate.
These characters from art history were chosen not for their artistic beauty but for what they represented historically. Also to show that the concept of beauty is changing in different times and what may be beautiful and attractive in one period will not be in another. Beauty is a cultural stereotype that can be changed and revised, and she uses this to disturb the viewer as she is not worried about appearing ugly and bloated, with post-op scars, bordering on the abject. For her, her body is political. In the end, after the surgeries, the artist’s face became a synthesis of the history of painting. A painting made by the gaze of male artists.
We can say that ORLAN’s work questions the limits between art and science. As if she were Mary Shelley creating her Frankenstein, ORLAN creates herself and gives her body to the world of art, so that we are very aware of the prejudices and stereotypes that surround us on issues such as gender, race or class.
Coming soon “Women who cry are angry” will be presented again in Madrid this 2023, at the Círculo de Bellas Artes, during the PHotoEspaña festival.
Bibliography:
CAWS, Mary Ann: Dora Maar with and without Picasso. A biography. Ed. Destination, Barcelona, 2000.
LEFT, Paula: Picasso and women Barcelona, Ed. Belacque, 2003.
O’BRIAN, Patrick: Picasso. Ed. Gustavo Gili, Barcelona, 1982.
HARAWAY, Donna: Cyborg Manifesto, Ed. Chaotic Books, Madrid,
ORLAN, Crying women are angry. Rocío Santa Cruz Gallery, Gran Vía de les Corts Catalanes 627, Barcelona. From March 15 to May 20, 2023.
More information:
https://rociosantacruz.com/exposiciones-rsc/las-mujeres-que-lloran-estan-enfadadas/