Between 1970-1980, Orlan developed a complex iconography of the persona of St Orlan. In contrast to works such as Le Baiser and Documentary Study that used flesh as an explicit medium, the tableaux vivants that she produced whilst interrogating the image of the saint centred on the power of Christian iconography and the representation of the sacred and transcendental. The production of St Orlan's iconography, however, does not inherit any of the taboos and moral mores from Christian tradition: carnal art is intended to be blasphemous in its negation of a single, paternal authority and the propositional construction of the idolatrous image of Orlan. Whilst the elaborate costumes that the artist used to drape herself drew attention to the exoteric aspects of the saint's body, the idea of the skin and the body as a garment or dress {robe) was developed significantly during this period. The extrapolation of the notion of the body, and particularly the skin, as a temporary robe has led directly to the surgical project of "The Reincarnation of St Orlan", the artist's most ambitious and risky project to date. The shift in register from the profane and sexualised body of the whore represented in Le Baiser and MesuRAGES and the grotesque body that is displayed in Documentary Study to the transcendental imagery of the saint explored anew Orlan's rejection of the maternal (the whore and the saint are non- maternal figures). The rejection of the maternal is not the same as the negation of the maternal in the phallocentric symbolic, but is a rejection of all that is repressive and stifling about the role of the maternal/woman.
The Baroque aesthetic dominates the production of 'sacred' images during the period in which Orlan worked extensively with the image of herself-as-saint. The Baroque:
"provided a context for exploring how art uses imitation and artifice to solicit the senses, and provided a means for testing art's capacity to suggest what lies beneath the surface of things" (Cros et al 2004:85). From the perspective of performance analysis, Orlan's use of performance as a medium in the production of her sainthood's iconography indicates that her deconstruction of art history cannot be divorced from a deconstruction of the artifice of theatre and its scopic qualities. Theatre, like visual art, uses imitation and artifice to 'solicit the senses'(Cros et al 2004:85). The production of St Orlan's iconography is a dual exercise in constructing the image of the saint whilst simultaneously deconstructing the robes and veils that produce the saintly body as such. That is, artifice is used deliberately in order to expose the way in which artifice functions performatively to produce the image/identity. Performance is thus a means of constructing and deconstructing the varied personae of St Orlan. This two-streamed approach befits the construction of the Baroque aesthetic of the double or fold. The fold is a central motif in the iconography of St Orlan where the doubled surfaces or folds in drapery are significant to Orlan's incorporation of duality in her work.
During the development of the iconography of St Orlan, the artist performed several instalments in the series entitled Drapery-The Baroque. I cite the first performance in this series in order to outline the actions that she undertook for other performances. In 1979, at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, Orlan arrived at the centre in a shipping crate used for artworks. She then appeared in a plexiglass display chest of the type conventionally used for the exhibition of untouchable reliquaries. She was draped in trousseau sheets. The folds of her gown were held by nylon threads attached to the plexiglass box. Assistants could make the drapery roll and flow around the saint's "mystic body" (Cros et al 2004:62) by pulling on the nylon threads intermittently. The threads were cut and then the body of the saint was transferred to a wooden plank and carried ceremoniously like a coffin through the space. The procession was reverentially slow.
Orlan then rose up and began spinning, unrolling the drapery around her face and the linen around her arms. She unravelled a rag-doll that had been incorporated into the folds of her garment. Orlan describes the unravelling of the bundle: "[I] unswaddled a bundle resembling a little child made of forty metre ribbon made of the same fabric. Inside was a painted bread sculpture with a blue crust and red crumb, which I ate in public often to the
point of vomiting" (Orlan in O'Bryan 2005:8). The unravelled fabric was then pulled taut to make a long train or rope and the saint's hair was unveiled. The saint then disrobed and, without her mysterious costume of drapery, was transformed (or revealed?) to be mortal and secular. The Orlan-body rolled and crawled on a red carpet in which she then wraps herself to become a red ball. The audience witness the demystfication of this saint "who arrived in magnificent drapery reminiscent of Bernini's ecstatic [Baroque] statues [for example, the well known Ecstasy of St Theresa ] only to turn everything into rags" (Cros et al 2004:64). The mystery of the saintly body is thus shown to be the effect of conventionalised artifice.
Saint Orlan's 'hagiography' consists of the performative reiteration of dialectical images that are performed in the act of veiling and unveiling in the Drapery... series.
Orlan continued to disrupt and parody her own iconography into the 1980s through the Drapery... performances and in installations of video and photography. She did not abandon live performance during this stage, but she did concentrate more intensively on multimedia installations in which the image of her saintly persona was staged for photographic and video portraits. In these portraits or tableaux vivants, the expressive gesture is concretised in the still, photographic medium: in her tableaux vivants, Orlan presented herself in various poses as a Virgin Madonna figure, draped in extensive toile, face painted white and one breast exposed. The rhapsodic expression on her face and her stylised hand gestures (gesticulating heavenwards and to the earth) functioned to mimic ecstatic religious imagery whilst referring back to the profane and the corporeal. In the exhibition Skai et Sky and video (1984, see figs 14, 15), Orlan climbed atop a pile of cinder blocks, clad first in white leatherette (a material that she chose for its malleability and its approximation of the appearance of marble when photographed). Her body was draped with elaborate, sculpturesque folds, one breast exposed. A video monitor relayed particular body parts, such as a hand, foot or breast. In other photographs from this series, Orlan appears in black leatherette, brandishing a white and a black cross and then toy guns. She always has one breast exposed: the breast alludes both to the nursing Virgin Madonna and the mythical one-breasted female warriors, the Amazons. The dialectical image can be seen to function here again in the representation of St Orlan as the sacred and profane meet in the image of the saint.
Orlan extended the scope of her hagiography after she had visited India in the late 1980s and there purchased enormous billboards usually used to advertise Bollywood films.
On these billboards, she produced posters advertising films about the life of St Orlan- films that have never actually been produced. The credits for these fake films included names of supporters of her work and some actual film stars. The contradictions between truth and artifice manifested by Orlan's depictions of St Orlan, both in the tableaux vivants and the billboards, served to theatricalise the media that she used by creating spectacles in which cultural detritus such as plastic, polystyrene, fake marble and leatherette are juxtaposed with images of the sacred. This juxtaposition is typical of Orlan's use of the Baroque aesthetic. The duplicity of the baroque aesthetic as it is used by Orlan and the artist's preoccupation with the doubling of meaning undermine the fixity of the patriarchal word and contingent institutions of church, law and state. Orlan said of the period in which she developed the imagery of sainthood that: "I am shattering the shell, shattering the marble, breaking open the drapes, and really proposing a new image disconnected from the roots in which I gave birth to myself (in Ince 2000:16). This statement by the artist points to the process whereby her performance art practice actively engages with the "fold" via manifesting contradictory images. The fold, as in the folds of drapery that encase the saint, is an infinite becoming where surfaces are multiple and fold in upon themselves. Orlan's use of the fold as a visual and theoretical motif is certainly a feminist reclamation of the idea of difference that is represented in the fold's doubling of time and space (cflrigaray 1985b). Furthermore, I argue that performance is an effective mode of exploring this idea of the fold or multiplicity as, particularly in feminist performance art, the turn to the body as primary signifier indicates a reconstitution of the flesh in time and space. Orlan's project is not to re-produce the body via appeal to an 'authentic' female psychic morphology.
Clearly authenticity is an anomaly to her. Rather, the body remade via the fold (in the subject, in the robe or in the skin) is a hybrid creation. Indeed, today Orlan may be
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described as posthuman or a cyborg, although she nominates herself as a saint.""
As I move into the discussion of her surgical interventions in the following section, it will be important to analyse her work as intervening in historical constructions of the
" The term 'Posthuman' refers to the rejection of liberal humanism's internally motivated subject. The cyborg body is integrated with the machine- not entirely robot and not entirely biological entity.
flesh (particularly the skin). This historical analysis is contemporaneous with the production of emergent, feminist knowledges of the body.