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| ORLAN, at the Musée Grévin |
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For La Force de l’Art 02, ORLAN has chosen to work in the context of the Musée Grevin, Paris’s legendary waxworks museum, with its superb collection of historical and celebrity figures. Orlan harnesses her direct, bright, appealing, “first-person” approach – a feature of the contemporary scene for a number of years – to the latest technological innovations, to create powerful, strikingly communicative works. Celebrated for her use of her own body as the raw material for her work, successfully challenging the contemporary cult of appearance, Orlan here presents a waxwork creature bearing her features, alongside figures of a highly diverse range of celebrities, from Michael Jackson and Jean-Paul Sartre to Lara Croft and General De Gaulle. Her “mutant” being combines elements of cyber-technology, ethnic style, futurism and archaism. Sculpting Brushes Prototype lumineux n°1 is by no means an extra-terrestrial figure, but a post-human being, clearly female, whose voluptuous body conveys a sense of power and stability. Her skin and anatomy remain a mystery, however: at once closely similar to our own, yet different. ORLAN’s sculpture for La Force de l’Art 02 is a opportunity for visitors to rediscover the galleries of the Musée Grévin, substituting the traditional, fixed waxwork images of famous people with a sentient creature whose luminous parts respond to the viewer’s presence. By reinventing her body through this blend of temporal eras and hybrid forms, Orlan challenges the standardisation of social representations. Working in the context of a movement initiated in the mid-1960s, the artist uses the symbolic power of her public image to assert her determination to recreate herself freely, according to her own desires. Orlan refuses to present her waxwork double as an “angelic” figure, an immortal form capturing her current appearance forever, preferring instead to create an iconoclastic creature that reflects her mission to challenge and undermine our post-religious quest for immortality in celebrity. By encouraging interaction with the visitor, and by projecting herself into this plural, hybrid figure, she opposes the enforced power of the image with the power of imagination untainted by worldly concerns. The result of extensive research and technical innovation, Sculpting Brushes Prototype lumineux n°1 is an attempt to reappropriate the often de-humanising uses of technology. [C.C. S.] ORLAN ORLAN has always considered her own body as her preferred material for constructing her art work. A multimedia artist, she radicalizes performance art by using it to truly bring about the metamorphosis of her own face, creating her own hybrid "self-portraits" and in this way denouncing her act as well as the aesthetic and social pressures put on the female body by Judeo Christian religion and a culture of consumerism, in addition to the manner in which artworks are made common and ordinary. ORLAN was born in 1947 in Saint-Etienne. |
