ORLAN - Art, Beauty and Psychological Health

If we are not art, what are we?  If our lives are not artistic expressions, what are they?  ORLAN, a French performance artist, lives this out quite concretely, using her body as a canvas or pile of clay and performing her art by, among other things, filming herself during surgeries that have transformed her face and body, and reading out loud while these surgeries are performed.  The intent of the surgeries is to graft or apply parts of great works of art onto parts of her face – so, for instance, she has crafted her forehead to look like the forehead of the Mona Lisa.  The intent is not to become beautiful, but to embody these works of art and, I think, by doing this to embody - to concretely represent - what it means for her to be human - to articulate who it is that she is.

Danielle Knafo brought this literal body of work to the attention of the psychoanalytic community at a discussion group this afternoon.  She started the discussion by noting that, some years ago, ORLAN spent the night at Dr. Knafo's home as part of a project where Dr. K. was interviewing ORLAN – and Dr. K. was concerned that her son, who was three at the time, would be startled by ORLAN’s appearance in the morning when he awoke to find her in his home.  In addition to hair that is yellow on one side and black on the other, and big bold round glasses that make her look like an owl, ORLAN has implanted silicone under her skin to give her the appearance of having horns.  When Dr. Knafo found ORLAN with her son the next morning, they were playing together, and her son was clearly enjoying himself with ORLAN as he would with any adult with whom he was playfully engaged.

Dr. Knafo’s anxiety speaks to a fear that we have of the monstrous.  This was also spoken to by the discussant of the group, Dr. Ted Jacobs, a highly respected analyst, who posed two questions: “Is this art?” and, “Is she pathological?”  Though I think these are wonderful questions - they were also somewhat ironic.  Dr. Knafo had carefully related ORLAN’s artistic intent – ORLAN wants to escape the binary.  She wants to transcend being masculine or feminine (She describes herself as a transgender person who is changing from female to female), modern European or pre-Columbian American (Her current work is to transform her image, through computer enhancement, into various culturally defined images of beauty), and ultimately living or dead (she wants to have her body be preserved and put on permanent display in a museum when she dies).  Both questions posed to the group are binary – art or not, pathological or healthy – and both therefore would reduce her to being one or the other – they would give us, the viewer of her – a handle with which to designate her – a box into which to put her – and I think this undermines the effort (at least as I understand it at the moment) of her (and perhaps our own) art - an effort to transcend ourselves while fulling becoming ourselves.

I was reminded during the talk of something that I once heard about.  I don’t know if it is fact or fiction, but I do know that it caught my fancy so I will relate it.  Apparently in Japan there are people who use head to toe tattoos to become living works of art – the Birdman – a very colorful NBA player is very much on his way to doing this.  The problem is that introducing that much ink into the skin is toxic and these individuals die young.  Rather than having their art die with them, many of them have their skins removed and hung (in my memory it is like being hung on a hanger) in a museum where others can appreciate the artwork.

From Dr. Knafo’s careful description of ORLAN’s childhood, it is clear that there are ties between her life experiences and her artistic expression.  For instance, ORLAN experienced her mother as being largely unavailable, and thus that she herself was largely invisible, except when ORLAN became ill.  It is not hard to draw a line between feeling invisible as a child, becoming a performance artist and having people observe her surgeries.  But the question, to me, is whether this reduces ORLAN to simply repeating a childhood experience and enacting a continuing longing to be seen – which is clearly happening, or whether this gives us a window into the particular way that her artistic expression of something that is both incredibly particular and concrete -but also general – even universal – about the human condition, finds an avenue for expression.

I used to scoff at the notion that my becoming an analyst was determined by events in my childhood and the relationship between my parents and me was related to choosing a profession.  For what it’s worth, I still scoff at the idea that this determined my course.  I might have become a number of other things, and my early childhood experiences and relationships with my parents and siblings and friends would have put their stamp on the profession that I choose (come to think of it, I have chosen a number of vocations – clinician, teacher, researcher, middle manager, parent and spouse), and I have discovered through analysis proper and my own continuing analysis just how potent that stamp has been on each of my pursuits – that who I am has been shaped by those I am in contact with as I have lived out my life in manifold ways – but all of this is far from a linear relationship.

In so far as ORLAN has threads that connect her childhood experiences of feeling invisible and then becoming visible when ill with her using medical procedures to articulate herself, the connections are not as linear and simple as they appear to us with our 30,000 foot view.  As Dr. Knafo relates it, the idea of filming her surgeries first occurred when ORLAN was unable to perform at a scheduled time due to an ectopic pregnancy.  In the ambulance, on the way to the hospital, it occurred to her to film what was occurring as an alternative to the performance that she had planned.  This, in turn, led her to the notion of highly staged, aesthetically determined surgeries that also, necessarily included much blood and guts.  Even the still pictures that we observed were hard to stomach.  What is compressed into these images?  What is occurring inside of ORLAN and what is occurring inside of the viewer?

We spent some time speculating about whether the next step in her career, these staged surgeries, was partly a means of mourning the child that was lost.  I think there are likely tendrils there.  In fact, a seemingly simple question turns out to have very complex answers.  ORLAN herself articulates very different aspects of her experience at different times, in different interviews, and under different conditions.  At times she denies that she feels pain (and she was given local anesthetics when she underwent these surgeries).  At other times, she acknowledges that the manifold surgeries have been assaultive on her body.  She did not begin this process until she was 43 years old – a time when the body does not bounce back like it once did.  Some of the post-operative images were of a person who had been attacked – something that is not unusual after facial plastic surgery.  Fortunately, we don’t remember trauma in its original form.  And it seems that ORLAN was using a variety of strategies to avoid the experience of pain in the moment (in addition to the medications, the ritual aspects of preparing for the surgery and planning and executing elaborate readings may have helped her enter dissociative states where she could be less psychologically present to the procedures than she otherwise might have been).  And her experience in the moment – and in memory – is, like all of our experiences, multilayered.

Our experiences as viewers are also multilayered.  There is, at least for me, horror, fascination, identification, rejection, and curiosity, plus much more.  I turned away from some of the images.  I have not included those in this post, but you can easily find them on the web.  But some of her images – especially those in which she morphed her image into other culture’s definition of beauty – were strikingly beautiful, or at least awe inspiring.  In these images she is clearly herself and clearly someone or something completely other.

Dr. Knafo pointed out that ORLAN anticipated, with her art, what we are approaching – a world in which our biology is no longer our destiny (something that Freud maintained).  We can alter our bodies – changing the gender from this to that – and we live increasingly non-bodied lives as we build, tend and cultivate virtual identities and relationships.  In the virtual world, we can construct ourselves with many fewer apparent constraints.  Even in the corporeal world, bodily decoration (tattoos) and augmentation are becoming the norm.  ORLAN herself (like Eric Ericson) created her name as means of more fully articulating herself and is in the process of doing this again, this time with a product naming consulting firm.  The ability to transform ourselves in these ways was viewed with some trepidation, I think, by most of those in attendance.  It seemed they thought this was a kind of manic flight from the reality of limitations that are part and parcel of being human.  My own experience was very much a minority one – that our internal lives are much bigger, grander and far more complex than our hum drum external world would indicate.  ORLAN, to my way of thinking, is, as it were, living the dream – becoming, first physically and then increasingly in a virtual way – a representation of what it means to be complexly, complicatedly human -  and therefore beautiful – including in our ugliness.  Ultimately, psychoanalysis is a means of transforming ourselves.  As psychoanalysts, we privilege the verbal, cognitively mediated transformation over physiological transformation, but I think that we are both, ORLAN (who has been engaged in at least two analyses) and the analysts, engaged in transformative work.

You see, Dr. Jacobs asked the question about art because he did not see beauty in what ORLAN was doing.  I think that Aristotle might have disagreed with him.  In the Poetics – a meditation on tragedy – Aristotle proposes that the theater allows us to confront, in part because we have the support of the rest of the audience all around us, those traumas, the deepest feelings of pity and fear, that we can’t otherwise tolerate, and, through confronting them, to experience an emotional catharsis.  Now I think therapists have found catharsis to be overrated, but ORLAN seems to think – or perhaps to enact – the potential for confronting various emotional experiences – the most central of which, Dr. Knafo pointed out, for ORLAN, is the idea that, at some point, and completely out of her control, a biological switch will be turned and she will die.  If there is a more universal fear than this, I don’t think Freud found it.  And if there is a more universal dichotomy – the living and the dead – I don’t think we’ve discovered it.  And yet we, tragically, can’t transcend it and so we, as one of the group pointed out, like Prometheus, are condemned to having a piece taken out of us each day.  At least ORLAN determines which of those pieces will go and under what circumstances.  And that can weave a sort of magical – one might say artistic - if sometimes ugly – spell.

So the opening question has new overtones for me: what does it mean to be healthy?  I think that if we define health as coming to grips with our mortal limitations and deciding to live our lives within the confines of those limitations, ORLAN is quite pathological.  But I also think that this definition of pathology doesn't acknowledge that our existence is monstrous - that the burden of being mortal - the burden of having flesh - is huge.  I think, then, that if we define life as a challenge - one in which we need to figure out how to channel our frustration at the limitations that we are confronted with into living the best life we are capable of living - ORLAN could be seen as the pinnacle of mental health.  Dr. Knafo's clinical experience, and that of her son, are that ORLAN is a reasonably psychologically healthy person - though she is a bit of a control freak.  My own and the group's recoiling at the images that ORLAN creates suggests that ORLAN struggles to channel her chafing at the limitations (some of the intensity of her emotional experience sloshes over onto the viewer - bruising him or her), but I think, on balance, she is able to destabilize herself (and us) in productive ways - at least I found the discussion she prompted in us to have been an afternoon very well spent.


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