Orlan
| ORLAN | |
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| Born |
Mireille Suzanne Francette Porte May 30, 1947 Saint-Étienne, France |
| Website | www |
Orlan (born Mireille Suzanne Francette Porte) is a French artist, born May 30, 1947 in Saint-Étienne, Loire. She adopted the name Orlan in 1971, which she always writes in capital letters : "ORLAN". She lives and works in Los Angeles, New York, and Paris. She was invited to be a scholar in residence at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, for the 2006-2007 academic year. She sits on the board of administrators for the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and is a professor at the École nationale supérieure d'arts de Cergy-Pontoise.
Although Orlan is best known for her work with plastic surgery in the early to mid-1990s, she has not limited her work to a particular medium.
About her importance in art history as a body artist, in "The Narrative" monograph (2007):
– "Revisiting Orlan's history, from the early sixties to the present day, means, above all, rediscovering the history of the poetics of the body, in which body art and carnal art are the fundamental stages. Real body and imaginary body, lived body and emotional body, mystic body and social body, diffuse body and hybrid body, all merge together in the ceaseless flow of references in Orlan's work."
In 1964, while in her home town of Saint-Étienne, she started the "Marches au ralenti" ("Slow motion walks"), in which she would walk as slowly as possible between two central parts of the city.
From 1965, she performed the "MesuRages", in which she would use her own body as a measuring instrument, called the "Orlan-body". In this performance, she would measure how many people could fit within a given architectural space, using her "Orlan-body" as a unit of measurement.
In the "MesuRages," and in later work, Orlan made great use of her "". The sheets from her trousseau (a set of household goods and other items traditionally provided to a young woman by her family upon her marriage) were re-purposed by Orlan in a number of projects.
From 1964 to 1966, Orlan made a series of photographic works known as the "Vintages." She destroyed the original negatives, and only one copy of each photograph remains. In this series, she posed naked in various yoga-like positions. One of the most famous pictures of this series is "Orlan accouche d'elle m'aime."
From 1967 to 1975, she undertook a new series, the "Tableaux Vivants."
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Wikipedia