New Media in Art, 58-68

In this section, I was most interested in the section on the artist Orlan. As I've said previously, I really love Marina Abramovic's work. I know that she is known for really extreme performances and putting herself in dangerous positions and risking injury, but Orlan is a different kind of extreme performance artist. Her performances that involve using plastic surgery to sculpt herself into historical ideals of beauty is intense and powerful, not to mention expensive and I'm sure painful to go through the recovery period each time. It really makes me think about the lengths that people go to on a regular basis to try to achieve these ideal standards of beauty, but these standards differ from person to person, culture to culture, and era to era. Her work was really interesting to read about and I think I want to look her up more to see what other work she's done.