# Now the UK has started to offer aesthetic tours for Americans as well. The British flock to Marbella in Spain whilst Russia is now competing for this market.# Also, a television programme some time ago showed voluntary surgeons visiting countries where the deformity known as 'harelip' is a common trait. Mothers pleaded for their daughters harelip to be corrected in order that there would be more of a chance for her offspring being acceptable' in the eyes a of a prospective husband.
There is a growing fashion in contemporary art for body artists to work with their own flesh in radical ways that involve medical techniques. Their rhetoric is that their body is their canvas and that they are inscribing their individual statement of self-portraiture in their appearance. One such artist, the French performance artist, known as Orlan, calls her approach "carnal art." From its origin on 30 May 1990 in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, Orlan was the first to declare that she was using a new method of making art, incorporating the radical use of surgery to transform her body. This technique was the polar opposite of a project like Cindy Jackson's (a surgically enhanced celebrity who I will discuss further later on) who strove to perfect beautification' of the body, Orlan's was a wilful attempt to contradict the culturally accepted standards of idealised beauty, replacing these with her own designs. # .
Self-titled at the age of 15, Orlan is a multi-media performance artist whose current radical project utilises the technology of plastic surgery as a medium with which to articulate self-transformation. Using photography, video and her own body, she has combined Baroque religious iconography, medical technology, theatre and mass communication networks to critique traditional notions of beauty. One of the most striking qualities of Orlan's work is the breadth of the critical reception it has drawn out across the entire spectrum of disciplines from the visual arts, to medicine, and from gender studies to philosophies of ethics.
