‘Change has now become the mantra of modernity.

Evaluate the post-modern discourse concerning cosmetic surgery, and its associations with Orlan’s ‘Art Charnel’.

Throughout the ages women in particular, have undergone pain to attempt to conform to the well-established cultural ideals of beauty and youth. This is clear in relation to procedures such as foot binding and the wearing of restrictive corsets, where women suffered discomfort and immobility in the name of particular fashions. The transformability of the individual was the promise of the Renaissance and became the political platform of the Enlightenment.

Since the end of the nineteenth century, Western society has replaced these practices with strict diets, exercise programmes and perhaps even more remarkably, cosmetic plastic surgery. With pain and infection removed or reduced, aesthetic surgery came into its own. Our society is bombarded with media messages and societal values that equate thinness and beauty with success and achievement. The patient/client who seeks the assistance of a cosmetic surgeon, believes that there is a desirable category of being, from which he or she is excluded, because of reasons that are defined as physical. The results

Gérads Psyche because of her need for love and spiritual beauty.

The aged body is considered to be ‘un-aesthetic, un-erotic, and pathological.’#

Cindy Jackson, like Orlan has an overall plan to transform herself completely. She changes one or two features at a time, randomly working her way from to the top of her body to the bottom back again. The most serious procedure she wanted was an operation to reshape her jaw. She knew of Leonardo’s theory and that the proportion or her chin was mathematically wrong in proportion to her face and wanted to change it. The operation involved the use of a circular saw to cut through the chin to disconnect it from the jawbone. The chin bone was slid backwards so it was in line with her upper lip as she had requested it. Holes were drilled in the bones of either side of the crevice and the surgeon threaded surgical steel wire through them to secure the chin back on to the jawbone.

3. Disappearance of the frontiers between public and private. There is an omnipresence of Orlan’s surgical operations as they are transmitted by satellite to the four corners of the earth.

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