Grotesque Goddess

Linking with the idea of human disgust at appearance that is considered ‘Ugly’ the opposite of our notion of ‘Beautiful’, is ORLAN’s plastic surgery project, The Reincarnation of Saint-Orlan. This is a series of 9 procedures which are filmed and photographed at every stage.IMAGE
She describes it as “re-creating the self through deliberate acts of alienation.” The way she has reconstructed her face is both discomforting and horrifying. She is very brave to have become something that is visually not ‘feminine’ and also hardly recognizable as human. ORLAN wants to expose how the nature of female beauty has been falsely constructed using templates from Western Masters like The Mona Lisa and Boticelli's Venus and the facial features of Greek Goddesses such as Diana. She has ‘horns’ on her temples and various implants under her skin on her cheeks and chin. The contradiction in ORLAN’s work is that by using a combination of various features that are considered ‘Beautiful’ she has created something Grotesque. The images are from the website below prepared for a series of lectures by Professor E. Heckendorn Cook (2003)

http://oldsite.english.ucsb.edu/faculty/ecook/courses/eng114em/carnal.htm