Comments on week 2 Readings

Reflection on reading of week one:

-Jasmine Rault: “Orlan and the limits of materialization”
-Fakir Mussafar: “Body play: State of grace or sickness”

What I got from the readings, after being absent for the two first classes of the semester is that the body is used as a medium of expression to push the limits of acceptation. The body is rarely used as “voice” for artists, the body is something that we take for granted because it is us: we use our body to make art but never use our body as the art piece. In the first reading, we learn about an artist who calls herself Orlan. Orlan is a video artist who films herself being cut open by a surgeon in front of a small audience. She wants to dramatize the volatility of the human body. It is a practice so unusual that it inevitably makes an impact on its viewer. But apparently, Jasmine Rault, the author of the text, thinks she is doing nothing new , “she is simply exaggerating the process by which bodies materialize as knowable subjects”. Orlan says that she has always been about challenging and changing social norms. I say that she is certainly challenging them but is not changing them at all. This type of art is too extreme and self centered: I see it as a partial suicide, you do something completely crazy hoping people will watch you and give you attention. People don’t learn by being grossed out, they learn when you let them do the thinking, not when you show them images of how intense you can get and how little self respect for nature’s gift you have.

The art of Fakir Mussafar is different. When I was reading his text, I felt like it was more of a personal thing then a show-off. He evens explains it to us how it took him a while before finding peers who were in the same mind frame as him. I don’t think that he first meant it as an art form, people can see his interventions and classify them as art if they wish, but everything he does is something done to learn more about himself. And people understood that, and wanted to learn about themselves the way he did. That’s why he takes it seriously, he and now his pupils worry about their pupils and make sure everything is well done and well thought before. Orlan worries about the sex difference in the surgeon cutting her up because she might be left cute…..

link: http://kidshealth.org/teen/your_mind/mental_health/cutting.html