BioArtists

Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 24. Chapters: Chris Burden, Eduardo Kac, Francesco Monico, Genco Gulan, George Gessert, Heide Hatry, Hunter Cole, Joe Davis (artist), Ken Rinaldo, Marc Quinn, Natasha Vita-More, Olga Kisseleva, Orlan, Pietro Antonio Bernabei, Robert B. Lisek, Shawn Brixey, Stelarc, T. Ryan Gregory, Victimless Leather. Excerpt: ORLAN (born Mireille Suzanne Francette Porte) is a French artist, born May 30, 1947 in Saint-Étienne, Loire. She changed her name herself in 1971. She lives and works in Los Angeles, New York, and Paris. She was invited to be a scholar in residence at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, for the 2006-2007 academic year. She sits on the board of administrators for the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and is a professor at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Cergy. Although Orlan is best known for her work with plastic surgery in the early-to-mid 1990s, she has not limited her work to a particular medium. In 1964, while in her home town of Saint-Étienne, she started the "Marches au ralenti" ("Slow motion walks"), in which she would walk as slowly as possible between two central parts of the city. From 1965 to 1983, she performed the "MesuRages", in which she would use her own body as a measuring instrument, called the "Orlan-body". In this performance, she would measure how many people could fit within a given architectural space, using her "Orlan-body" as a unit of measurement. In the "MesuRages," and in later work, Orlan made great use of her "Trousseau".The sheets from her trousseau that was provided by the family for the young woman, to show her prowess as housewife in sewing and embroidery for the new household into which she'd be wed, were re-purposed by Orlan in a number of projects. From 1964 to 1966, Orlan made a series of photographic works known as the "Vintages." She destroyed the original negatives, and only one copy of each photograph remains. In this series, she posed naked in various yoga-like positions. One of the most famous pictures of this series is "Orlan accouche d'elle m'aime." From 1967 to 1975, she undertook a new series, the "Tableaux Vivants." In 1971 she "baptized herself" Sainte-Orlan. In 1977, her performance "The Artist's Kiss" (Le baiser de l'artiste), during the FIAC in Paris, became a huge scandal. Outside the Grand Pala