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24/5/2007

Orlan

Musee D'art Moderne de Saint-Etienne Metropole, Saint-Etienne

Le Récit

Curated by Lorand Hegyi and Eugenio Viola

From May 26 to August 26, 2007, the musée d’art moderne de Saint-Etienne Métropole devotes to ORLAN the greatest retrospective ever organized on the artist’s work ; “ORLAN: Le Récit.” It is an opportunity for Michel Thiolliere, senator-mayor of Saint-Etienne and president of Saint-Etienne Métropole, and Lòrànd Hegyi, director of the Musée d’Art Moderne, to pay homage to the artist on the occasion of her sixtieth birthday in her hometown of Saint-Etienne. For the vernissage on May 25 and to celebrate the thirtieth birthday of “Le Baiser de l’Artiste”, ORLAN will present a performance Hybrider et Recycler especially conceived for the exhibit in collaboration with Andrea Crews.

Since the mid-sixties, ORLAN has journeyed through the most important art movements of her time as an extraordinary protagonist. “Her work – unclassifiable – moves beyond the many “posts” and “isms” of art history, and her unique style has always been that of a complex, irreverent, ironic, blasphemous, iconoclastic artist, for whom the provocation of flesh, the reverse of the body, art and life, the play of identity, the constant oscillation between the real and the virtual, reach the heights of poetry,” states Eugenio Viola, co-curator of the exhibit along with Lorand Hegyi.

With a wide angle on the artist’s life and work, Le Récit builds a bridge between her past – a past summoned by the present of her research –, and a future that promises to be long and fertile. Illustrating the various stages of ORLAN’s work, this retrospective beckons a rediscovery of the history of the artist’s body poetry, from the precious first plastic works of the early sixties when she began exploring the concept of “body-sculpture,” to the works linked to the feminist movement, passing through the artist’s reinterpretation of Judeo-Christian iconography. A number of previously unseen works presented as part of the exhibit bear witness to an-depth study of the baroque metaphor in general, and of Bernini’s Saint Theresa in particular. This “hagiographic” declension of the “Art Corporel” (bodily art) is symptomatic of ORLAN’s artistic journey.

The retrospective also touches upon the artist’s surgical-operation-performances conceived as original and provocative answers to the crisis of performance. In the early nineties, ORLAN transformed an operating room into an artist’s studio where an artwork was produced, thus inaugurating the mutating paradigm of contemporary art - a progressive return to “bodily” themes - in a direct relationship with new technologies and biotechnology. The appropriation of plastic surgery as a creative art form, both as subject and object of the performance in which the “oeuvre-action” integrates the artist’s body, marks the passage of bodily art into carnal art in ORLAN’s work. In the Self-Hybridation series (Pre-Colombian, African and the more recent ones on Native Americans), ORLAN continues her digital journey through the infinite possibility of physical identity.

By using various canons of beauty and aesthetics from different times and places, the artist creates “living” totemic figures, almost tangible in their virtuality, fascinating in their disturbing appearance and seductive in their artificial otherness. Finally, the musée d’art moderne de Saint-Etienne Métropole presents Le Plan du Film, a work in progress begun in 2001 based on a concept by Jean-Luc Godard. The idea ? To make a film “backwards,” as a destabilizing synthesis made up of autobiographical facts and fictional elements. The exhibition catalogue1 revives ORLAN’s entire story, filtered through her impact on the media and the reception of her work. The highlights of her artistic career are retraced through reproductions, book covers, catalogues, and magazines devoted to her over the past forty years. The catalogue includes a series of original essays written by specialists (Lorand Hegyi, Eugenio Viola, Jeorg Bader, Marcela Iacub, Donald Kuspit, and Peggy Phelan) who analyze the relationship between the work of ORLAN and various themes of contemporary society (politics, sociology, culture, psycho-analysis, media...).

Thus, Le Récit connects ORLAN’s past and future works, revealing the intrinsic coherence of her multifaceted artistic research, striking in its extraordinary capacity for profound inquiry which allows the artist constantly to renew her work and to remain at the cutting edge of innovation. It is that perpetual quest which characterizes this artist’s journey, and precisely what makes her one-of-a-kind in the vast horizon of contemporary art. Alongside this exceptional retrospective, the musée d’art moderne de Saint-Etienne Métropole will focus on space age design. A selection of the museum’s collections illustrating the appearance of new materials in the sixties and seventies will be displayed from May 19 to November 14, 2007, at the same time as Italian design objects bearing witness to the esthetics of the sixties/eighties.

A few facts on ORLAN …
ORLAN was born on May 30, 1947 in Saint-Etienne (France). She lives and works between Los Angeles (with the Getty Research Institute and the ACE Gallery), New York and Paris. Since 1965, ORLAN has worked with photography, video, installation, performance and sculpture. In 1977, her performance entitled Le baiser de l’artiste presented at the FIAC in Paris caused a scandal. In 1978, she founded the « Symposium International de la Performance de Lyon. » In 1982, she launched Art-Accès Revue, the first magazine of contemporary creation on Minitel, following which she authored Manifeste de l’Art Charnel. From 1990 to 1993, she conceived nine surgical-operation performances, in Europe and in the United States, all of which were filmed and transmitted via satellite to institutions throughout the world, including the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. In 1999, ORLAN accepted a teaching position at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts de Paris-Cergy.

In 2003, Jean-Jacques Aillagon awarded her the title of Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. In 2005, she obtained a residency from the AFAA at the ISCP of New York. ORLAN has been awarded numerous prizes, including the Arcimboldo Prize for digital photography, the first prize of the GriffelKunst in Hamburg, and the first prize of the Moscow Photography Festival.

ORLAN has participated in many exhibitions in the United States (MOCA and LACMA in Los Angeles, PS1 in New York, Milred Kemper Art Museum in St Louis), Italy (Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, Exhibition Center in Rome), France (Centre Georges Pompidou, Centre National de la Photographie, Palais de Tokyo, Maison Européenne de la Photographie, C.C.C. in Tours, FRAC des Pays de la Loire), Germany (Kunst Museum in Ahlen), in Austria (Kunsthalle and MAK in Vienna), Luxembourg (Casino de Luxembourg), Switzerland (Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne), Spain (Fundacion Miro in Barcelona, in Vitoria, in Salamanca), Russia (House of Photography in Moscow), and in Asia (Seoul Museum of Contemporary Art, South Korea, the Franco-Japanese Institute in Yokahoma, Japan).

ORLAN has also participated in numerous Contemporary Art Biennials : Paris, Venice, Istanbul, Lyon, and Sydney. ORLAN is represented in Paris by the Michel Rein Gallery, in Milan by the B&D Gallery, in New York by the Stephan Stux Gallery, and in Seoul by the Sejul Gallery. ORLAN is a regular guest lecturer in universities and other institutions. Numerous television and radio programs, as well as university studies, have been dedicated to her. Her work is featured in numerous private and public collections.

Vernissage on May 25, 2007

Musée d’art moderne de Saint-Etienne Metropole
La Terrasse BP 80241- Saint-Etienne Francia

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