Orlan is one of the most famous artists to use the body as an art medium. She makes alterations to her own body through plastic surgery, a very controversial practice. Orlan does not do this to make herself more beautiful, she does this for her own self, she wanted to redo her image in a different way. Which is opposite than why women would want plastic surgery. Orlan brought attention to this project by having her surgery filmed while she was awake, she gained infamy from feminists, but her message resonates a thought to female artists. Plastic surgery, to Orlan, was a medium or playground to create an artistic idea. So can it be that other mediums like this can be changed from its purpose to something more?
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2009/jul/01/orlan-performance-artist-carnal-art
The Guerrilla Girls are a group of anonymous female artists who are activists that want to promote more female artists in museums and galleries. The Guerrilla Girls do many cool projects with different issues but the one project they keep tabs on is the number of solo female artists in the MET Museum. Their work "Do women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum?" is essentially a call out to the museum for their lack of interest in female artists, and large interest in female nudes being exhibited in the galleries. What they did was create these posters with a photoshopped female nude "Odalisque" by Ingres with a gorilla mask as the head. They go back every 10 years to see if the statistics have changed, and so far the Met has made no greater improvement. What I like about this work is not only is it a call out, but also a new interpertaion of the traditional female nude, that speaks against on how traditional art portrays women's bodies unrealistically.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/09/arts/design/the-guerrilla-girls-after-3-decades-still-rattling-art-world-cages.html?_r=0
Valie Export is an artist who has gone pretty bold with her artwork, especially in her work entitled "Action Pants: Genital Panic" in which she would expose a real women's body to the public. For this performance she walked into an art house in Munich wearing crotchless pants that show her genitals and a leather jacket and her hair disheveled. She challeneged the public to look and engage the body of real women instead of the fantasy created bodies of women. What amazes me is how she chooses to address the issue of a real woman's body vs the desired depiction of a woman's body. She didn't want to perform this in a museum because she felt it was too conservative for her, she feels that performing in the streets would open up new explanations and ideas for thinking. She wanted to change people's way of thinking. Valie Export expresses her body in a more crazier and "smack in your face" type of way, to get her point across that women are nothing like the fantasies society makes up.
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