The previous blog looked at australian transhumanist artist Stelarc, who merges the body with technology in order to enhance the body itself. While Stelarc engages with the body through hybridization of the body and technology, a French artist named Orlan has attempted to engage with the body by redesigning it in an aesthetic way. 
Her work conveys the way in which technology can offer us a choice. Although controversial, we are beginning to be able to create our own bodies. Many people, for years, have been able to redesign there bodies in an aesthetic way through plastic surgery, but Orlan seeks to push the body to the limit. She is interested, not in the body as it is promoted by the fashion industry, but instead thinks of the body as reconfigured as limit. She challenges the limits of aesthetic beauty.
Orlan has undergone a series of choreographed performances, in which her face is surgically morphed. While celebrating a technically and medically advanced culture, her intention is not to become 'beautiful', but to suggest that the,
"Objective (beauty) is unnattainable and the process horrifying". (http://www.digibodies.org/online/orlan.htm)
Orlan, who describes herself as a feminist, morphed different sections of her face to match the facial structures of seven icons of feminine beauty, as they have been portrayed by male artists. Two of the facial structures used were the forehead of DaVinci's 'Mona Lisa' and the chin of Botticelli's 'Venus'. Based on the fact that this would look quite ridiculous, it suggests that the male perception of the ideal feminine beauty is an impossible feat to conquer. The idea of ideal beauty is central to our society, with many people undergoing plastic surgery in order to attain their own perspective of there ideal beauty. Orlans 'performances' make us think about these processes and wonder, as technology evolves futher, will the redesigning of the body become even more extreme? We are beginning to see a world in which we are no longer following the process of evolution that is set out for us. We are taking our body into our own hands, it becoming a canvas for us to work on and change. Although plastic surgery has been around for years, artists such as Orlan are beginning to make us challenge the ides of what art is.
Although in the previous blog I question whether the hybridization of the body and technology was such a bad thing, as it brings us more enablement , I take a slightly different view on Orlans work. The fact that she conveys how ridiculous the idea of ideal beauty is, and the way in which her performances (surgery) show how horrific the process is, makes me wonder why we cannot just let our bodies evolve in the way in which they are meant to. Ofcourse, if I had a big issue with the way i look then it would be likely that I would feel a different way about this, but the fact is, if plastic surgery had never been around, then would our society be so caught up in the idea of the ideal feminine beauty as it is now?
