The French artist Orlan is infamous for performances during which her body is surgically altered. In nine such performance surgeries, features from Greek goddesses painted by Botticelli, Gerard, Moreau, and an anonymous School of Fontainebleau artist, as well as from da Vinci's "Mona Lisa, were implanted into Orlan's face. During her surgical performances, viewers witness a material tampering with the relationship between the face and individual identity, the original and the constructed, a historical critique of the association of art with beauty and the female body. Responding to Orlan's definition of her performance surgeries as "carnal art," C. Jill O'Bryan considers how the artist's ever-fluctuating reconstructions of her face question idealized beauty and female identity, persuasively arguing that Orlan's surgically reinvented face succeeds in both reinforcing and breaking apart corporeal subjectivity and representation. O'Bryan contextualizes Orlan's operations within the centuries-long history of public dissections and surgeries, lavish anatomical illustrations created to draw the gaze into the opened anatomy, Artaud's "Theater of Cruelty" in the early twentieth century, and contemporary works and performances by Cindy Sherman, Hans Bellman, and Annie Sprinkle. A compelling blurring of the line between feminist theory and art criticism, O'Bryan's close examination of Orlan's performance surgeries complicates and reconfigures the notions of identity--and its relation to the body--at the very boundary dividing art from identity.

Orlan is one of the most challenging and thought-provoking artists working today. Born in France in 1947, she began her highly unconventional career at the age of 17 with a series of works including staged photographs of her own body, which has become the characteristic expression of her creative voice.

Provides biographical and career information on more than 350 of the world's most prominent and influential contemporary (20th century) women artists. Includes visual art in the following media: painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking, collage, photography, ceramics, mixed media, electronic media, performance art, video, design, and graphic arts.

Artists especially from dance and performance art as well as opera are involved to an increasing degree in the transfer between different media, not only in their productions but also the events, materials, and documents that surround them. At the same time, the focus on that which remains has become central to any discussion of performance. Performing Arts in Transition explores what takes place in the moments of transition from one medium to another, and from the live performance to that which "survives" it. Case studies from a broad range of interdisciplinary scholars address phenomena such as: The dynamics of transfer between the performing and visual arts. The philosophy and terminologies of transitioning between media. Narratives and counternarratives in historical re-creations. The status of chronology and the document in art scholarship. This is an essential contribution to a vibrant, multidisciplinary and international field of research emerging at the intersections of performance, visual arts, and media studies.

Carnal Knowledge is an outcome of the renewed energy and interest in moving beyond the discursive construction of reality to understand the relationship between what is conceived of as reality and materiality, described as the 'material turn'. It draws together established and emerging writers, whose research spans dance, music, film, fashion, design, photography, literature, painting and stereo-immersive VR, to demonstrate how art allows us to map the complex relations between nature and culture, between the body, language and knowledge. These writings are unique in the field because they represent the authors' commitment to a new materialism through the creative arts. The questions they address include: Does the material turn in the creative arts take a different turn from continental epistemology, philosophy and the humanities? How does the agency of matter, the material nature of artistic practice and the notion of 'truth to materials' affect what we understand as the 'new materialism'? In engaging with these questions the book offers perspectives on the emergence of this exciting fresh field of new materialism.

The first full-length book of its kind to offer an investigation of the interface between theatre, performance and digital arts, Virtual Theatres presents the theatre of the twenty-first century in which everything - even the viewer - can be simulated. In this fascinating volume, Gabriella Giannachi analyzes the aesthetic concerns of current computer-arts practices through discussion of a variety of artists and performers including: * blast Theory * Merce Cunningham * Eduardo Kac * forced entertainment * Lynn Hershman * Jodi Orlan * Guillermo Gómez-Peña * Marcel-lí Antúnez Roca * Jeffrey Shaw * Stelarc. Virtual Theatres not only allows for a reinterpretation of what is possible in the world of performance practice, but also demonstrates how 'virtuality' has come to represent a major parameter for our understanding and experience of contemporary art and life.

Building on a hermeneutic tradition in which accounts of carnal embodiment are overlooked, misunderstood, or underdeveloped, this work initiates a new field of study and concern. Carnal Hermeneutics provides a philosophical approach to the body as interpretation. Transcending the traditional dualism of rational understanding and embodied sensibility, the volume argues that our most carnal sensations are already interpretations. Because interpretation truly goes “all the way down,” carnal hermeneutics rejects the opposition of language to sensibility, word to flesh, text to body. In this volume, an impressive array of today’s preeminent philosophers seek to interpret the surplus of meaning that arises from our carnal embodiment, its role in our experience and understanding, and its engagement with the wider world.

Arranged alphabetically from Magdalena Abakanowicz to Tadaaki Kuwayama, this volume provides a biography of the artist, a selected list of exhibitions, a list of public collections that include work by the artist, and more.

For Mark C. Taylor, the disappearance of depth we sense all around us is a change full of creative possibility. Taylor introduces us to a popular culture in which detectives - the postmodern heroes of Paul Auster and Dennis Potter - lift surfaces only to find more surfaces, and in which fashion advertising plays transparency against hiding. He looks at the current preoccupation with body piercing and tattooing and asks whether these practices actually reveal or conceal. The limitless spread of computer networks, the history of phrenology, the "religious" architecture of Las Vegas - all are brought within the scope of Taylor's brilliant analysis. Postmodernism, he shows, has given us a new sense of the superficial, one in which the issue is not the absence of meaning but its uncontrollable, ecstatic proliferation.

Art today is an increasingly multifaceted phenomenon, encompassing transgressive works that intervene in war and ecological disasters, in inequalities and revolutionary changes in technology. Carnal Aesthetics is a fascinating, new examination of this aspect of contemporary visual culture. Employing recent theories of transgressive body imagery, trauma, affect and sensation, it provides a fresh look at the meeting point between the politics of representation and the politics of perception through the prismatic lens of feminist theory. Acclaimed scholars analyse a wide range of seminal case studies coming from different media: digital photography, painting, video, film and multimedia art. They explore here a number of transgressive movements that significantly reconfigure the relationship between the body and the image. Unlike other books on the complex relationship between politics and aesthetics, Carnal Aesthetics seeks to provide a novel approach to art and culture by challenging the primacy of vision and by injecting an intersectional perspective into the fields of visual studies, film and media studies, as well as trauma studies. It is a significant contribution across these dynamic fields of exploration for scholars who deal with the socio-political nature of contemporary visual culture in their work.