Barbara Oettl
University of Regensburg, Germany and CISC – Cologne Institute of Conservation Sciences
From Virtual to Literal Cyborg: ORLAN’s ORLAN-oïde
To think about our future as carnal and transient human beings in a biopolitical and technohumanized age driven by medical, digital, technoscientifical and transcendental probabilities of life-enhancement, means at the same time to think about who we are and for how long. For the French-born multi-media and performance artist ORLAN it means zigzagging along a non-chronological time-line within her lifespan, putting into practice these promising and visionary biopolitical and technoscientifical prospects of breeding and cloning, of de-constructing and re-constructing, of virtualizing, immortalizing and doubling her body as well as her multiple selves.
Her scheduled agenda from a virtual to a literal cyborg follows a path that leads the artist from a Virtual Cyborg to a Literal Cyborg in an age in which the idea of crossover is not elitist anymore. ORLAN’s first variation on the cyborg is her digitally treated photographic series of pre-Columbian and African Self-Hybridations (1998-now) in which she warps her facial features into non-Western standards. The second step she takes are literal changes of her body and face with the surgical performances The Re-Incarnation of St. ORLAN (1990-1993) that are not only meant to diversify her looks but at the same time to collect her flesh, fat from liposuctions and blood in reliquaries. Consequently, ORLAN’s follow-up works deal with the in-vitro breeding and crossover of her own DNA with the cells of other human and non-human beings: Hence, The Harlequin’s Coat (2009) and other performances morph bodies and identities all at once. Her latest version of the “technohumanist figure” is her robot-hybrid ORLANoïde, an ORLAN-lookalike and – as Donna Haraway would describe it – an “enhanced command-control-communication-intelligence system (C3I)” that can be communicated with and is capable of deep learning.
ORLAN’s work touches on medical, technical as well as ethical problems on our paths from being virtual and becoming literal cyborgs, from redressing our images, our bodies and – following the battle into its next round – also identities.
Haraway, Donna. “Cyborgs to Companion Species: Reconfiguring Kinship in Technoscience.” (2003) The Haraway Reader, Routledge, 2004, pp. 295-320, S.299.
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Barbara Oettl has studied Art History, American and Italian Linguistics and Literature, and Art at the University of Regensburg, Germany, and at the University of Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, USA. Her dissertation WHITE in 20th Century Art. A Study on the Cultural History of a Non-Color has been submitted at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, in October 2007. The publication was shortlisted for “best-dissertation 2008”. Her “Habilitations”-thesis titled Existential Experiences: Infringing on Taboos as a Strategy in Contemporary Art was accepted at the University of Regensburg, Germany, in January 2018.
In addition, she has published books on Alvin Langdon Coburn, Richard Serra, Piero Manzoni, and Anton von Werner. Further writings deal with mediaeval German paintings, the history of Reformation, color-theories and ‘Farbfeldmalerei’, historical and contemporary photography, Gender and Body Art, Bio Art, Land Art and Earthworks, Concept Art, art in the public space as well as the new materialism in modern and contemporary art and the politics of transgression in the art world.
For the winter term 2014/15 Barbara Oettl was guest professor and Head of the Department of Art History at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Germany. In 2015/16 she was assistant professor and is still member of the teaching staff at the University of Regensburg.
Barbara Oettl is alternately teaching at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, at the University of Regensburg, and presently at CICS – Cologne Institute of Conservation Sciences at the Technische Hochschule Cologne.
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