In 1896, after watching a performance of Ubu Roi-- arguably the most bodily explicit theatre of its day--William Butler Yeats was moved to write: "After Mallarme, Chavannes, after my own verse...What more is possible? After us the Savage God."1

In 1995, describing her reconstructive plastic surgeries in progress, the French multimedia performer Orlan--arguably the most notorious bodily explicit artist of the decade--wrote: "When my operations are finished, I will solicit an advertising agency to come up with a name and logo; next I will retain a lawyer to petition the Republic to accept my new identity and my new face. It is a performance that inscribes itself into the social fabric, that challenges the law, that moves toward a total change of identity."2

In 1998, upon hearing I was going to write about the contemporary politics of the explicit female body in performance, my friend Cathy was moved to warn me: "Just remember, sometimes it's still better to be a goddess, than a cyborg. "

I know that as a self-proclaimed "techno-feminist", Cathy half-jokes here, inverting Donna Haraway's famous line, "I'd rather be a cyborg than a goddess" to worry over the performance politics of Orlan. After all, it was Haraway who first challenged feminism's pathological need to worship goddess figures at the altar of "the natural body", insisting to feminists that the natural body, if it ever existed to begin with, is no more.3 These days, it is the cyborg--the body containing both organic and technological components--that "is our ontology; it give us our politics."4

And yet in her joking, Cathy voices an anxiety shared by many feminist theorists today regarding the dangerous politics of performing the sexually and technologically explicit body of the 1990's. On the one hand, if (as feminism would have it) the personal is political, and (as Haraway argues) the woman is now the cyborg, what performance could be more political than Orlan's? Here is a woman who stages her cyborg-body's medicalization for the world community to critique. Nevertheless, for all its spectacle, Orlan's face has yet to bring one discernible change to the plastic surgery industry, or to art-historical ideas of feminine beauty, by way of the surgeon's knife.

It is between Yeats's modernist warning, and my friend Cathy's postmodern one, that I'd like to situate this essay, noting that regardless of the promises offered by new technologies, when it comes to the explicit female body in performance, times have both changed, and remained frustratingly the same. Historically, those who have celebrated the shock of the explicit performing body--what Yeats calls, "the Savage God"--have been aligned squarely within the progressive avant-garde of their age. According to the old saw, political conservatives are the ones who object to the "obscene" body in performance; for them, its specter invokes shame at best, abject horror at worst. Liberals, on the other hand, champion what they call the "explicit" body in performance, claiming it a source of immanence and transcendence; a shocking icon of life, elevated to the status of art.

But as any feminist can tell you, history demonstrates that all bodies, all icons, and all shocks aren't interpreted equally. Early in her career, the French performance artist Orlan realized that it's not enough for a feminist artist to shock in her explicit body work; to have the desired political effects, she discovered, her body must produce the right kinds of shock. One day, riding in an ambulance to have an emergency operation, Orlan found what she was looking for.5

In 1990, Orlan began a series of plastic surgeries designed to progressively sculpt her face into a combination of the Mona Lisa, Diana, and Boticelli's Venus. In her seventh operation, entitled Omnipresence, a female surgeon's knife cuts into Orlan's face, while her image is broadcast via satellite to thirteen galleries around the world, with accompanying audio and fax documentation.

Aware of international costs of maintaining white women as the avant-garde's savage goddesses, Sue Ellen Case reads Omnipresence of an indictment of the first world capital currently required to maintain "universal" feminine ideals of beauty. Orlan employs multiple technologies--medical, sartorial, communications--in order to make her body, and her changing physical identity, a spectacle in every sense of that word, and to chart the costs of that spectacle. For this reason, Omnipresence is as much about the politics of communications technology, argues Case, as it is about the female surgical body.6

Nevertheless, as Tanya Augsburg relates, the feminist critiques embedded within Orlan's performances are often forgotten by the world at large, who tend to ask not, "Is this art?", but rather, "Is she mad"?7 Reserving judgment on both Orlan's art and her sanity, I see her work more as a limit case for the political possibilities of explicit feminist performance in the 1990's. In a kind of postmodern joke on both Donna Haraway and the goddess feminists of the 1970's, Orlan calls her entire project "The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan."8 From goddess to savage, from cyborg to saint: so the logic goes. But this logic is flawed.

Orlan proposes that when we watch her performances, we do so dialectically; we ought to "do what you probably do when you watch the news on television."23 When Donna Haraway watches the news, she sees the cyborg bodies of South Korean workers, producing the silicon used for surgical implants (and for computerized broadcast technologies.) She sees, as well, the specter of first world women, celebrating successful plastic surgeries and agonizing over sonograms which indicate their bodies as not quite "right". In short, she sees a international network of cyborgs, linked by technologies that both pleasure and discipline their lives. 9

Orlan, it seems, sees only herself. Less than fifteen years after Haraway wrote "Cyborg Manifesto", Orlan has achieved fame for displaying her body, not as the cyborg of the nightly news, but rather as the cyborg who becomes a goddess, thereby missing Haraway's political point completely. Reading Orlan through Haraway, we might say that when it fails to rival the shock of modern technologies itself, the shocking spectacle of the explicit female body has finally reached its point of diminishing political returns. What's more, as technologies--sexual, medical and otherwise--continue to require more from the bodies they survey, it won't be long before the only shocking explicit bodies left, are dead ones.

In her book Unmarked, Peggy Phelan has argued against the avant-garde shock politics of visibility, urging feminists to consider new technologies, not for more "exposure", but rather to effect "an active vanishing, a deliberate and conscious refusal to take the payoff of visibility."10 Last year, I sat in darkness, watching and listening as artists Sharon Lehner and Tina LaPorta took Phelan's praxis, and made it performance.

"The room is dark," begins My Womb The Mosh Pit, Sharon Lehner's voice echoing from a microphone somewhere off-stage.11 "I look at the monitor," she says. On cue, the room suddenly floods with light. Computerized grids of female bodies, rendered by digital artist Tina LaPorta, are projected over the walls. Superimposed within those multiple grids is a single sonogram.

"It takes thirty minutes," Sharon narrates, "to measure and inventory the body parts of this fetus: the arms, the legs, the stomach, the liver, the lungs, the kidneys, the brain." When Sharon confesses, "I find looking at the fetus in my body to be unbelievably pleasurable," I suddenly realize it's her body at which I've been gazing. Momentarily intrigued, I struggle to make out the body parts Sharon tells me are located right in front of my eyes. After a while, however, I realize that if I am supposed to be Sharon in this performance, it's not working.

I hate pregnant women who gush. "After the examination," Sharon gushes, "the technician offers me a few snapshots from the collection stapled to my medical records. I forget about girl names, report to my friends, call my family." "Whatever," I think, wondering instead what kind of 3D modeling technologies LaPorta uses to make the endlessly turning grids on the walls.

"Exactly ten days before I aborted a ten-inch fetus from my body in the company of medical strangers," Sharon's voice booms above my head, "I laughed with wonder at what looked like a naked baby boy." Suddenly, I realize I've been seeing things all wrong: what I thought was some advertisement for fertility is actually a picture of a body that no longer lives, narrated by a woman I can't see. As if to complicate things further, I later find out that the sonogram image I've been staring out isn't from Sharon's body, at all.

My Womb is explicitly feminist, yet resists both liberals and conservatives who equate sonogram images with fetuses, and fetuses with infants. "I bonded with an image, I aborted an image, I grieve an image," Sharon insists, except that the image displayed isn't the image for which she grieves. In a brilliant reversal of the tactics of the religious Right--who champion the "rights of the fetus", thereby erasing and/or interchanging women's bodies--My Womb instead claims a right of motherhood without birth, and uses technology against itself, grieving an anonymous sonogram.

When Sharon confesses her desire to "look again for that bleep on screen", I think I understand, musing on my last round of technological joys: the arrival of my school loan check; a much-desired "negative" sign on a recent early pregnancy test; the announcement that a friend's T- cell count has risen.

By displaying and displacing the truth-claims of reproductive imaging systems, My Womb challenges the avant-garde's easy correspondence between vision and transcendence, and questions what an "explicit body" truly is, in this day and age. But this performance does far more than critique the avant garde. I'd go so far as to say that because it eschews mythologizing, and instead tells an ordinary cyborg story of an ordinary cyborg woman, My Womb points to a new feminist aesthetic: one that emphasizes the contradictions and ambivalence within the lives of everyday technological women here, and now.

For each of us, the technological is personal, the personal is political, the political--depending, as it does, on the "truth" of the representational-- is mutable. Orlan's notoriety aside, the avant garde's goddess/cyborg dyad is officially over, if it ever really existed to begin with. For feminists using new media to make art commenting on our lives in this technological age, I offer one warning: sometimes it's still more precious to be a woman, than a goddess or a cyborg.

Endnotes

1. William Butler Yeats, The Autobiographies of W.B. Yeats. (New York: Macmillan, 1958), p. 233-4. As cited by Rebecca Schneider in The Explicit Body in Performance. (New York: Routledge, 1997) p.126.

2. Orlan, "Intervention," Chapter Nineteen, The End(s) of Perfomance, ed. Peggy Phelan, and Jill Lane. (New York: New York University Press. 1997) p. 326

3. Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto" in Cyborgs, Simians, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. (New York: Routledge, 1991) p. 149-181.

4. Ibid., p. 153.

5. Tanya Augsburg, "Orlan's Performative Transformations of Subjectivity," Chapter Eighteen, The End(s) of Perfomance, p.296.

6. Sue Ellen Case, The Domain-Matrix: Performing Lesbian at the End of Print Culture. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997) p.117-118.

7. Augsburg, p. 288.

8. Orlan, 316.

9. Haraway, p. 149-181.

10. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Poltics of Performance. (New York: Routledge, 1993) p. 6.

11. Sharon Lehner, My Womb The Mosh Pit., dir., Sharon Lehner, with Tina LaPorta. P.S. 122, New York, N.Y. 17 May 1997. Text and some images available here