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ORLAN (born Mireille Suzanne Francette Porte)  is a French contemporary artist best known for her work with plastic surgery in the early to mid-1990s. She is known as a pioneer of carnal art, a form of self-portraiture that utilizes body modification to distort one's appearance. She adopted the pseudonym "ORLAN" in 1971.

Currently, she lives and works in Los Angeles, New York, and Paris. She sits on the board of administrators for the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and was previously a professor at the École nationale supérieure d'arts de Cergy-Pontoise.

Early works
ORLAN's career as a performance artist began in 1964, when she performed Marches au ralenti (Slow motion walks) in her hometown of Saint-Étienne. During these performances, she would walk as slowly as possible between two central parts of the city. A year later, she produced MesuRages, in which she used her own body as a measuring instrument. With her "ORLAN-body" as the unit of measurement, she evaluated how many people could fit within a given architectural space. This was the first time she utilized her Trousseau, a set of household goods and other items traditionally provided to a young woman by her family upon her marriage, in a performance piece. Her Trousseau was re-purposed in a number of subsequent projects.

Between 1964 to 1966, she produced Vintages, a series of black and white photographic works. She destroyed the original negatives of these pieces, and today only one copy of each photograph remains. In this series, she posed naked in various yoga-like positions. One of the most famous pictures of this series is ORLAN accouche d'elle m'aime. She produced a body of work entitled Tableaux Vivants between 1967 to 1975, which she based off the works of prominent Baroque artists like El Greco and Gericault. In reference to Baroque art, she used inmates as models, wore exaggerated faux-Baroque costumes, and drew inspiration from Caravaggesque stereotypes. In 1971, she "baptized herself" Sainte-ORLAN, adorning herself with billowing black vinyl and white leatherette. Color photographs of Saint ORLAN were later incorporated into photo-collages, videos, and films tracing a fictive hagiography. Like her Tableaux Vivants, much of her work involving Saint ORLAN was directly inspired by Baroque art.

During the 1977 FIAC International Contemporary Art Fair in Paris, ORLAN executed controversial performance piece The Artist's Kiss (Le baiser de l'artiste). Outside the Grand Palais, a life-size photo of her torso was turned into a slot machine. Spectators could see the coin they inserted into the torso descend down into a groin before being awarded a kiss from the artist. The following year, she created Documentary Study: The Head of Medusa, in which the artist displayed her sexual organs during menstration under a magnifying glass. The installation was organized in Aachen, Germany on occasion of an International Symposium of Performance Art at the Ludwig Forum for International art. The piece's titled was the statement by Sigmund Freud that "at the sight of the vulva, even the devil runs away," which he articulated in his short, posthumously-published essay entitled "Medusa's Head."

In 1978, she founded the International Symposium of Performance in Lyon. In 1982, she collaborated with artist Frédéric Develay to create the first online magazine of contemporary art, Art-Accès-Revue, on France's precursor to the Internet, the Minitel.

The Renaissance also explicitly returned to architectural models and techniques associated with Greek and Roman antiquity, including the golden rectangle as a key proportion for buildings, the classical orders of columns, as well as a host of ornament and detail associated with Greek and Roman architecture. They also began reviving plastic arts such as bronze casting for sculpture, and used the classical naturalism as the foundation of drawing, painting and sculpture.

The Age of Enlightenment identified itself with a vision of antiquity which, while continuous with the classicism of the previous century, was shaken by the physics of Sir Isaac Newton, the improvements in machinery and measurement, and a sense of liberation which they saw as being present in the Greek civilization, particularly in its struggles against the Persian Empire. The ornate, organic, and complexly integrated forms of the baroque were to give way to a series of movements that regarded themselves expressly as "classical" or "neo-classical", or would rapidly be labelled as such. For example, the painting of Jacques-Louis David was seen as an attempt to return to formal balance, clarity, manliness, and vigor in art.

Examples of classicist playwrights are Pierre Corneille, Jean Racine and Molière. In the period of Romanticism, Shakespeare, who conformed to none of the classical rules, became the focus of French argument over them, in which the Romantics eventually triumphed; Victor Hugo was among the first French playwrights to break these conventions.

Classicism in architecture developed during the Italian Renaissance, notably in the writings and designs of Leon Battista Alberti and the work of Filippo Brunelleschi. It places emphasis on symmetry, proportion, geometry and the regularity of parts as they are demonstrated in the architecture of Classical antiquity and in particular, the architecture of Ancient Rome, of which many examples remained.

In the 16th century, Sebastiano Serlio helped codify the classical orders and Palladio's legacy evolved into the long tradition of Palladian architecture. Building off of these influences, the 17th-century architects Inigo Jones and Christopher Wren firmly established classicism in England.