1. Are you a feminist?
I am feminist, neo-feminist, post-feminist and alter-feminist.

2. Do you consider your work to be a feminist project?
My work cannot be resumed to that but, of course, it explores that question. When you work with the body, and with your own body, you combine the intimate and the social; feminist struggles have made it abundantly clear that the body is political, and this awareness has become a major historical issue.

3. What is your political/ ideological aim?
I don’t want to tell people what they should do or should not do. I try to go against all formattings such as machismo, sexism and phallocratism. From the very start, my work questioned the social and religious pressures to which the body is subjected. I pinpointed the ways in which violence is done to bodies, especially to women’s bodies.

4. Do you think you have/will ever have achieved this aim?
I wouldn’t consider it an aim, I try to pinpoint and question, but I can’t know if the message was understood or not.

5. Why do you consider Omnipresence the most significant of your surgical performances?
I was the first artist to use aesthetic surgery as a medium and deviate aesthetic surgery of its purpose: getting better and younger. I wished an operational gesture which had never been made and set up an intervention which was not considered to bring beauty. I decided to use the literalness of the performance to express the violence done to the body, especially to women’s bodies.

My series of performances was created to give a figure to my face. It is an artwork that lies somewhere between figuration, disfiguration, and refiguration, in a body that is sometimes subject, sometimes object—sometimes having a body, sometimes being that body—playing on my presence and my representation, even attempting to unsubscribe from tradition, in order to challenge a society that designates the models we should integrate, be they those of art history, of magazines, or of advertising—the woman we should be, the art we should produce, the thoughts we should think.

The surgical operations were performed between 1990 and 1993. The seventh operation-performance, carried out in New York on November 21, 1993, was based on the concept of Omnipresence, as it was transmitted live by satellite to my gallery—the Sandra Gering gallery in New York—and to the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris, the McLuhan Center in Toronto, the Banff Multimedia Center, and a dozen other places with which we were in contact via interactive broadcast technology. For me, it was the most significant and successful operation.

6. How would you react to critics who say that your work is simple exhibitionism?
My surgical operations caused many rumours, including that I already had 164 operations! The newspapers harmed very much my work, as if surgical operations were all my life! I think that my work is very complex and that it is very easy to reduce it to headlines of scandal newspapers. For most of the artists, it is the same thing, one stops on a work or on an image and the depth of the entire work or certain periods is ignored. One needs distance and analysis, and not everyone is able to do so. The ignorance affects mostly my surgical operations which actually scared. But there were moments my life of artist that were different, I am a normal artist when I am not in an operation room, the aesthetic surgery is not my job, I only attempted it from 1990 to 1993! People usually accuse me of being very narcissistic, exhibitionist, but they don’t say to others! I also believe it is very specific of the visual arts field. When someone tries to show something else from what it could be, detractors say that it is too narcissistic or too exhibitionist. But when some popular singers play with their body, almost masturbates in front of their public, gives a maximum in front of 20.000 spectators, no one will say it is too narcissistic, too exhibitionist, disgusting… It is really a rigid way of seeing things. It does not matter the starter used by the artist and/or the action, what really counts it is what is produced, and if that brings something interesting.

7. What are the significance of the supposed religious references in your work?

I did not have a religious upbringing. I grew up in a family of libertarian anarchists, Esperantists, nudists, and anticlericals. My first contacts with Judeo-Christian culture date from the beginning of my artistic career, when I explored images from art history to observe what was said and shown of women in other times. Meanwhile, I took a critical look at the way women were presented in advertising, in the press, and in the movies in my own day, through the eyes of a rebellious adolescent with artistic ambitions. For centuries, Western art served almost exclusively to illustrate and propagandize Judeo-Christian religious beliefs. Christian education exercises spiritual control over both faciality and landscapity.

I produced several series of works based on images representing saints, Madonnas, and virgins—images of religiously integrated women, presented as models to which I was supposed to conform. I used these images from a critical distance.  I invested them, slipping into them the way you slip your fingers into a glove puppet, exaggerating what they say, or making them say something else. I appropriated them for myself, and tried to decode them, breaking down images in order to recreate them in a secular context. I used them both for my self-construction, and as material for the construction of my art works.

God is not a hypothesis of work or life for me! Because of Christianity, we can make portraits and images, which is not the case of all the religions. And I used it, I could even say, almost outrageously with the approach that I am un-representable, un-figurable. I am not considering myself as a goddess of course, but I always had the impression that; with all the representations, everything I made in my work, whether in photograph or video etc, it was a way of investigate, turn around all the possible images of me.

8. Orlan is a theatrical identity you have created, what is your relationship with that persona?
I choose this name after a psychoanalysis session, when I noticed that I signed my cheques with the name “Dead”. I understood then, after the intervention of the psychoanalyst who pointed the anomaly, that I would never be in this state of slow death again, and that is when I gave myself another civil identity. I then selected a name neither female nor male; this name contains my claim to transgress the taboos and to be in margin of gender models to return to this paramount Eros, the Eros of the myths, where there is not yet masculine or feminine, nor even asexual.

9. Where did the inspiration for ‘The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan’ come from?

This series of surgical performances has two titles: the first, “The Reincarnation of SAINT ORLAN”, was chosen to do away with the fiction of a saint called ORLAN, and the word reincarnation was chosen in opposition to resurrection. In 553, the Council of Constantinople condemned reincarnation, especially because there was a preference for reincarnation over paradise.
The second title is “Images New Images”, as this series of surgical operation-performances was designed to refigure my face, and thus to create a new image for myself that would itself produce new images, creating a kind of sfumato between presentation and representation.

I was inspired to take action in this way when I read a text by Lacanian psychoanalyst Eugénie Lemoine Luccioni (from reading to taking action). As an epigraph to all my surgical operation-performances, I therefore read this extract from her book “The Dress” which can be summarized as follows : “Skin is misleading … in life, one only has one’s skin… There is a mismatch in human relationships, because one never is what one has… I have the skin of an angel, but I’m a jackal… the skin of a crocodile, but I’m a puppy dog, the skin of a black person, but I’m white, the skin of a woman, but I’m a man ; I never have the skin of what I am. There is no exception to the rule, because I am never what I have.”

When I read this text, it occurred to me that we are beginning to acquire the means to bridge this gap, especially with the help of surgery… that it is therefore becoming possible to match the internal and external image, and to appropriate one’s incarnation.

Every surgical-operation-performance was constructed around a philosophical, psychoanalytical, or literary text : Eugénie Lemoine Luccioni, Michel Serres, Hindu Sanskrit texts, Alphonse Allais, Antonin Artaud, Élisabeth Betuel Fiebig, Raphael Cuir, Julia Kristeva…