Chicana Ways - Aletta

AnyBody's Concerns 6(2003)
director of a self-conceived surgical spectacle and
gesamtkunstwerk, including specially designed robes for
herself and for the medical personnel involved, and, last but
not least, in the aesthetics of corporeality set out in her
Carnal Art Manifesto: "Unlike "Body Art", from which I set it
apart, Carnal Art does not conceive of pain as a means of
redemption or as a source of purification. Carnal Art is not
interested in the plastic-surgery result, but in the process
of surgery, the spectacle and discourse of the modified body
which has become the place of a public debate" (cited in
Kerejeta 218).
25 This transformative aesthetics also revolts people by
its citation of conventional norms of ugliness and monstrosity
(Baxmann). In her 1993 surgical performance Omniprésence,
which took place in New York and was broadcast live to a forum
of intellectuals at the McLuhan Center in Toronto and to the
Centre Pompidou in Paris, Orlan had two silicon implants in
the form of horns inserted into her temples. The spectacle did
not fail to shock the viewers, who witnessed an extremely
brutal operation involving Orlan's skin being cut open and
moved by surgical instruments in close-ups. The artist
herself, however, appeared totally unaffected by the cruelty
and pain she suffered and when asked about the impact of pain,
she merely shrugged and said: "Art is a dirty job, but someone
has to do it"; "Of course, there are several injections and
several grimaces ... but I just take painkillers like everyone
else" (Orlan cited in Davis 463). In her almost arrogant
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