Orlan

I caught the first few minutes of a lecture at OCAD by the French artist Orlan. I was pretty impressed that she came to OCAD, because she's an essential figure in contemporary art history course, which I've attended a lot of. "The body is political" she began, and in a thick French accent, ran through her artist's statement. Her famous plastic surgeries, where she remade herself as women painted by art masters, commented on the artificiality of beauty. From Wikipedia:

"from 1990 to 1993 she conducted her series of nine surgery-performances. These were filmed and broadcast in institutions throughout the world, such as the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Sandra Gehring Gallery in New York. Orlan's goal in these surgeries is to acquire the ideal of beauty as suggested by the men who painted women. When the surgeries are completed she will have the chin of Botticelli’s Venus, the nose of Gerome’s Psyche, the lips of François Boucher’s Europa, the eyes of Diana from a sixteenth-century French School of Fontainebleu painting and the forehead of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. Orlan picked these characters, “not for the cannons of beauty they represent… but rather on account of the stories associated with them.” Diana because she is inferior to the gods and men but is leader of the goddesses and women; Mona Lisa because of the standard of beauty, or anti-beauty, she represents; Psyche because of her fragility and vulnerability within the soul; Venus for carnal beauty; Europa for her adventurous outlook to the horizon, the future."