This doesn't really have anything to do with le tiers instruit or operation opera, but I absolutely loved this passage, something about it struck me, and wanted to share it:
"Several years ago, French multimedia artist Orlan spent the night at my place. Before retiring for
the night, she asked me if I had any makeup remover. I shall never forget how we stood shoulder
to shoulder before the bathroom mirror, each removing the masks we used to face the world, two
middle-aged women, me with wrinkles around the eyes and creases at the sides of my mouth and
she with her horned implants, swollen lips, and translucent skin, the results of her many cosmetic
surgeries. As she wiped the dark purple from her lips and the silver glitter from her horns, I
couldn’t help thinking about Freud’s concept of the uncanny
opposite
bonding experience and yet the difference between our faces
of aging, the surrender to time and gravity, whereas hers the result of unbending intent. Horns do
not normally grow out of the human head, nor do faces inherit a disparate collection of features
from classical art.
I wondered how my then 3-year-old son might react to Orlan in the morning. Would he recoil
in fear at her two-colored head, hair half black and half bright yellow? Would the matching thick
round black and yellow glasses remind him of an owl’s eyes? Would he want to touch the horns
on the sides of her head?....When I awoke the next morning I found the two of them talking playfully, my son
unbothered by her appearance."The article spends a bit of time discussing Orlan's Medusa piece, but there is definitely some pertinent information to this blogging assignment in it. Something I found interesting was that, in 1978, Orlan was about to go give a performance, but was instead rushed to the hospital due to an ectopic pregnancy. On her way to the hospital in an ambulance, she decided she wanted to film the surgery and send the tape in place of her performance. "Her transformation of deathly emergency into artistic opportunity reveals the manner in which she creatively came to terms with loss—the loss of a child—by replacing it with birth—the birth of a new art form incorporating medical technology." (Knafo) So this event is what planted the seed for her series of cosmetic surgeries that began in 1990.
Okay, enough with all of this aside jibber jabber. On to Le Tiers Instruit!
Orlan is quoted as saying, ‘‘I am in the process of creating a psychological self-portrait’’ which to me, pretty much explains why she chose to read the texts she did during her surgeries. They were always philisophical books, or psychoanalytical books, so it seems to me that while her body was being modified to fit her perception of herself, simultaneously, her mind was being trained to become what she wanted it to be. Le Tiers Instruit is a philisophical book about education, about conditioning and training someone to be a member of society. Serres asserts that true education takes place somewhere between what we are familiar with and what is foreign to us, somewhere between science and humanities. I think just these two points explain why Orlan would have chosen this text for her piece. Firstly, in reading about training someone to be a member of society, or educating someone to be a member of society, while she is in the midst of cosmetic surgery - something that the majority of people choose to undergo to make them fit in, to make them more acceptable in the eyes of western society. There's perhaps a contradiction present there, or perhaps the two ideas go exactly hand in hand. Education and conditioning affect both the way we percieve physical perfection and the way we are supposed to act, think, and react. We are a culture that cannot separate what is "outside" from what is "inside", and maybe this is something that is inherent in nature. Serres' sense of true education, and the point that Orlan is making seem to mirror one another. If true education is somewhere between what is familiar and what is foreign, Orlan is forcing us to see something that is familiar - cosmetic surgery - used in a way that is foreign. In doing so, she makes the point that the way we use cosmetic surgery - to make our boobs bigger, our waists thinner, our faces more symmetrical, is a bit disturbing. This constant striving towards "perfection" a la Barbie is pretty messed up. She shows us another possibility for the way such surgeries can be used.—umheimlich, unhomey—and its—heimlich, familiar and of the home. We were engaged in a very conventional femalewas uncanny. Mine was the result
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