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.

'ORLAN' is a study of ORLAN's pioneering art. The book covers her entire career in performance and a range of other art forms. It describes and analyses her various innovative uses of the body as artistic material.

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.

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.

The Art of Understanding Art reveals to students and other readers new and meaningful ways of developing personal ideas and opinions about art and how to express them with confidence. Offers an inquiry—unique among introductory art texts—into the learning process of understanding and appreciating art Examines the multiple issues and processes essential to making, analyzing and evaluating art Uses cross-cultural examples to help readers develop comprehensive, yet personal, ways of looking at and thinking about art Includes an annotated glossary of the 'Art World', institutions and individuals that play a role in defining art as well as diagrams, textboxes callouts and other visual elements to highlight information and enhance learning Richly illustrated with over 40 images Suggests innovative class assignments and projects useful for developing lesson plans, and offers an online companion site for additional illustrations and information

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.