Every day, a personality invites herself into the world of Élodie Suigo. Today, the contemporary and multidisciplinary artist ORLAN. Friday, May 26, 2023, she offers a first musical album, “The slow of the artist”.
ORLAN is a multidisciplinary visual artist. She practices painting, sculpture, photography, video, robotics, artificial intelligence, biotechnologies and even cosmetic surgery. Artist who first loves life, she has always opposed a lot of things such as natural, social, political determinism and all forms of domination, male supremacy, religion, cultural segregation, racism. She also assumes herself as a feminist and in 1977, she created The artist’s kiss at the International Contemporary Art Fair (FIAC).
Friday, May 26, 2023, she offers a first musical album, The slow of the artist, to bring the bodies together.
franceinfo: The first single, performed in duet with Sir Alice is called: I am slowsexual. It is written both in the feminine and at the same time in the masculine. Why this album?
ORLAN: What is really very important to me was, after The artist’s kiss, to bring the bodies closer together. To bring bodies together after physical distancing. Slow dancing is absolutely extraordinary to have a warm, soft body in your arms, with which you can have caresses, tenderness, sensitivity. I love slow and I realized that all my assistants, who are very young, have never danced slow. So I said to myself, we still have to do something for young people. We can’t leave them like this!
You have selected 20 slows that correspond to you. You rewrote the lyrics and entrusted the melodies to musicians like Terrenoire, Yael Naïm, La Femme, Demi Mondaine, Mimosa. Personalities that are strong, that are marked, just like yours. In the end, it is difficult to tell who you are. How do you see yourself?
Well, I advise everyone to listen to these slow songs because I wrote the lyrics for them. I think they say a lot about my work, about my work. It’s a striptease because, for example, with Terrenoire who worked on music by Monteverdi, I say something very important to me: “Not fragile. Sensitive” and that is very important!
How do you define yourself then?
I am a strong woman. I always say when I introduce myself: I am ORLAN, among others, and as far as possible. My name is written in capital letters because I don’t want to be put in the line.
So you have tried all your life to run away from the lines. The starting point of your work is the search for the body. You had plastic surgery, you took it on.
“I used the technique of cosmetic surgery to divert her from her habits and did surgeries that weren’t supposed to bring beauty, but instead bring horror.”
I had two implants placed that are usually placed on the cheekbones to enhance them on each side of the forehead. And indeed if I am described as a woman who has two bumps on her head and you don’t see me, like here on the radio, you can think that I am absolutely horrible, monstrous, etc. Indeed, at the beginning, it was an absolutely incredible controversy saying that it was not art, that their eyes hurt, that I was doing nonsense etc. And now, it’s mind-blowing, I savor…
You have become an icon.
I won because often I am told: “Oh ORLAN how beautiful you are!“I say: wait, you looked badly! Look, look, I have two bumps on my temples. They say to me: “Oh well, it suits you very well“. So, these bumps which were monstrosity have become organs of seduction… It’s my dé-ca-potable!
Did you sometimes regret wanting to make these bumps, at first, something shocking? Something that precisely seeks out the subject, the discussion, the debate?
Me, I never wanted to shock, but I really wanted to be a place where people talk publicly about what I’m doing, so I really wanted that.
There have never been any taboos with you, you have always assumed everything. In the beginning, there were those sheets with which you displayed your lovers’ sperm and then there was this Kiss of the artist, in 1977, which was a kind of turning point in your life. There is a before and an after. You have been threatened, you have received sperm by post for a very long time. We thanked you from the school in which you taught. It hasn’t been easy with your family either. Do you sometimes wonder if it’s worth it?
“What is important to me is that my works are not decorations for apartments, but that they are essential works that make people think, both myself and others.”
Yes, when I see all the chain reactions, when I see that at present all my works are studied whether in colleges, in high schools, in art schools and many in private collections… Me, I’ve never made a work to sell, but for the moment, they are selling.
What is it to be slow sexual.le?
It’s adoring the slow and then letting go of your desire, your sensuality and also this desire for hugs, body exchanges and benevolence.