ORLAN,
MesuRage de la Place Saint-Lambert
, Liège, 1980
ORLAN
MesuRages d’institutions et des rues
ORLAN (*1947, France) has created an extensive oeuvre since 1965 using her own body as artistic material. Through photography, video, sculpture, installation and especially performance, she explores and manipulates the relationship between the individual and the social body and between the living, imagined and culturally-coded body. By using the strategies of radical appropriation and transformation, she claims the right to change the imagery of the (female) body as well as the body itself. She has acquired international notoriety through facial cosmetic surgeries staged as live performances, in which she re-creates herself as a hybrid being based on different art historical models.
artist's website:
www.orlan.eu
One of her earlier, less known works is the series
Actions ORLAN-Corps: MesuRages d’institutions et des rues
, in which she uses her body to measure numerous public spaces, streets and cultural institutions in Paris, such as the Centre Pompidou. In
MesuRage de la Place Saint-Lambert
, Liège (1980) she uses a section of the large Sain-Lambert square in the historical centre of Liège which has just been cleared by construction as a stage for her performance. As in her previous actions, she wears a white garment made of cloth from her trousseau, which she washes in front of the audience at the end of her performance. In this ritualistic act of measuring public space and inscribing the female body onto it, ORLAN’s body (an ‘ORLAN-corps’) becomes the standard unit of measurement. The dictum of man as the measure of all things, as found in the teachings of the ancient architect Vitruvius and illustrated by Leonardo da Vinci in his famous drawing of the Vitruvian man, is challenged by this radical, subjective and feminist interpretation.
Courtesy ORLAN studio
Document media
Photographs
Issue date
1974-1983
Relations
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen (CUE 1)
Tags
his/herstory
,
inscription
,
measuring
,
public space
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abstraction
activism
aggression
aging
appropriation
authorship
be-coming
beauty
body control
body object relation
cabaret
capitalism
childhood
collectivity
conflict
consumerism
craft
dance/choreography
de/construct identities
death
desire
destruction
dis/ability
dis/appearance
dreamscapes
durational performance
exhaustion
extended body
failure
fashion/glamour
femininity
flesh
fluxus
fragmentation
gaze
happening
health/illness
his/herstory
housework/carework
human/non-human animals
in/visibility
inscription
institutional critique
intimacy
labour
language
laughter/humorous
lecture performance
manifesto
masculinity
masquerade
mass media
maternity
measuring
metamorphosis
migration
military
music
mythology
nationalism
nature
networks/affiliations
normativity
pain
painting/drawing
participation
patriarchy
pleasure
pop
post-communism
precarity
private/public
public space
queer
queer/drag
racism
re-enactment
repetition/seriality
resistance
ritual
roleplay
score
sexual violence
sexualities
skin
sound
state oppression
stereotypes
the common
therapy
torture
touch
trash
violence
voice
voyeurism
vulnerability