Orlan at Stefan Stux Gallery

The electronic world has caused a displacement of our physical selves. We have negated the constraints of our physical moorings and extended our nervous systems across the globe exposing our inner experiences. We have turned ourselves inside out and discarded our flesh and bones. St. de Exupery's Little Prince stated, "…what is essential is invisible to the eye." In the electronic world the “essential” is now visible on our computer screens. What we do with the inessential, our bodies, might explain the rise of tribalization in our culture. And with it the rise of extreme forms of transformative beauty. The body is a vessel, something to mold, to form, to color and finally discard. It is not essential, but it can become a powerful symbol.

Technology, based in the Western visual tradition of geometry and sequence, married to the idea of the symbolic, has provided a really decent living for many a surgeon willing to face an aesthetic corpulent conundrum. The technological world prefers to super-attenuate our ruder features honing us down to bland planar photogenics. We hanker to attain the "Golden Ratio" of 1 to 1.618 – the mathematics that makes us beautiful, graceful and uneventful. Our Hollywood godhead is full of these Olympian successes. The other side of this "Golden Ratio" is the "Extreme Ratio" where a kind of bodily mannerism determines what is beautiful. Tattoos, scarification, implants and such create a hybrid, a surreal Dionysian form. These hybrids are ritualistically tied to a rougher kind of Godhead. This hybridization makes one in-human rather than super-human.

Orlan uses this as her jumping off point. She combines the contemporary search for goddess beauty with the primitive urge to attain Godhead. In these works she photoshops the images of idols from different primitive cultures and blends them with her own Hollywood altered features creating a contemporary goddess hybrid. This hybrid is always the unreal, the unformed and the incomplete. By removing physical certainty she upsets the question of media beauty. She understands that it is the combination of the surgical and the ritual that leaves us ill at ease. We've seen this dis-ease before in the frightening televised reality of her plastic surgery performances. It is this dis-ease that wields great power. It brings up issues of life and death, and the fascinating mythology of the metamorph moving beyond fleshy constraints. These digitized works replace that physical ritual with electronic programming morphing "what is essential" into something visual. Orlan glamorizes this hybrid and creates a disturbing new upscale pinup.

Orlan also wants to aesthetisize and normalize this beauty and does so by usurping Andy Warhol's portrait technique. The colors in each cibachrome are flat and bright, the forms are simplified and made essential. Through digitization the hybrid portraits hint at a Hollywood glamour and a lack of emotional risk. These goddesses do not have super powers; they merely show up and look strangely ravishing. The classic photo screened beauty is made hard and thorough with this primitive idolatry, yet all the supra-natural power of religion is strangely lacking. They are as blank and ravishing as Warhol's candy portraits of the rich and famous.

Orlan has also attempted a life-sized sculpture. I found this less convincing and uninteresting. Maybe if it attempted to be slicker, more like the Murakami sculptures, it would have carried the implications of the photos into three dimensions. As it is, it looks like a clumsy attempt at hybridization, rather than a surreal programming amalgam. Still it is just one of a series, maybe there are better ones to be seen.

 

MStone©2005