Not just a pretty face

Since 1990, the French artist Orlan has had her face remodelled seven times by plastic surgeons. Julia Stuart meets a woman whose appearance is her greatest work of art

It takes several minutes to fully digest the appearance of the woman who opens the white metal doors of this Parisian atelier. One half of her hair is black, the other white. Furious backcombing has produced a rather appealing towering cumulonimbus affair, with severe thunderstorms threatening one side of her head, and scattered showers the other.

More arresting still are the two silicon implants, normally used to enhance cheekbones, which protrude from her forehead like budding horns. Their owner, Orlan, the renowned French multimedia artist, has decorated them with sparkly silver gloop, the sort five-year-olds fight over in Claire's Accessories. There's a distinct lack of eyebrows, her lips are daubed Goth-black, and her eyelids lined with what appears to be Tipp-Ex.

Inside, on a workbench, is a sheet of framed glass that has been engraved with a text by the French philosopher Michel Serres. "What can the common monster, tattooed, ambidextrous, hermaphrodite and crossbred, show to us right now under his skin? Yes, blood and flesh," it begins. On the table next to it is a glass container, resembling a Petri dish, which will eventually be inserted into a circular hole in the centre of the picture. It contains scraps of Orlan's flesh. They resemble the sort of bacon pieces one tries to avoid at a salad bar. When the artist presented Madonna with a similar reliquary after the pair appeared on television together, the enchanted singer said it reminded her of caviar. Chacun a son goût.

The flesh was culled during Orlan's nine forays into plastic surgery, which she dubs "carnal art", during which she obtained the nose of a Fontainebleau sculpture of Diana, the mouth of Boucher's Europa, Mona Lisa's forehead, the chin of Botticelli's Venus, and the eyes of Gérôme's Psyche. The operations, during which the feminist was conscious (resulting in photos of her smiling to the camera as the surgeon separates her face from her skull) were a stand against societal pressures on women's appearance and concepts of beauty. Orlan will be in London tomorrow to show and discuss her work at the Victoria & Albert Museum in an evening devoted to our obsession with the body beautiful.

I sit down on a black leather sofa. On the wall, to my right, is a framed piece of bloodied gauze used in one of Orlan's operations, from which looms a ghostly image of her face. Next to it is a skull sent to her by David Bowie, a fan. To my left is a naked sculpture of the artist with mangy pubic hair resembling a wig from the wardrobe department of an amateur dramatics society.

As a child and adolescent, Orlan didn't recognise herself in the mirror. "I was very outraged by society," says Orlan, 55, her froideur lending the air an unpleasant nip. "There are so many reasons to be. And I looked like someone who seduced men, a pretty girl people liked to look at, and I found that very banal. I didn't understand that all the thoughts I had, which seemed to me to be very different from other people's, couldn't be seen on the outside."

She insists that her childhood was "normal", spent with "nice" parents. She does, however, admit to undergoing years of psychoanalysis. Certainly, there was conflict with her mother, who expected her to marry. (Orlan did eventually get married, in 1993, to a writer and art historian).

Her earlier work involved the use of sheets from her trousseau in a variety of artistic mediums. For one public performance, she highlighted splats of sperm on them with poorly done embroidery. In a subsequent performance, A documentary study: the head of Medusa, a huge magnifying glass showed her vagina while she was menstruating. One side of her pubic hair was painted blue. A video screen showed the face of someone looking at it; another, someone about to see it; and at the exit, Freud's text including the line, "At the sight of the vulva, the devil himself flees", was handed out.

In 1971, the artist launched herself as St Orlan (the name Orlan is fictitious – she adopted it at the age of 15) and her subsequent work depicted her as biblical and religious characters (often with an alluring breast on show). It was at a Newcastle arts festival, in May 1990, that she launched her surgical project, The Reincarnation of St Orlan. The idea came to her while reading a text by the psychoanalyst Eugénie Lemoine-Luccioni that described the skin as being deceptive. "I thought that with surgery, it was possible to bring together the internal and the external image," Orlan explains. The particular features were chosen for the womens' mythological or historical significance. The operations, each with its own theme and decor (including costumes by designers such as Paco Rabanne and Issey Miyake) were performed in France, Belgium and New York from 1990 to 1993. The seventh was beamed live to 14 galleries around the world. As the doctors snipped, sucked and stuffed, Orlan read out philosophical, psychoanalytic and literary texts. "The only pain was from the [local] anaesthetic," she says. "Like at the dentist, you grimace for a second and then it's finished."

Her new forehead so inspired the Belgian fashion designer Walter Van Beirendonck, that he had prosthetic bumps made for his catwalk models. There was also a rash of copycat surgical implants. "I found that very strange because I didn't want to start a fashion at all. I'm anti-fashion. But at the same time, it meant that I was understood," says Orlan.

One might expect the overall result to be gruesome, but Orlan remains very attractive. I tell her so. "That's your problem," comes the reply. What does she see in the mirror now? "I see myself and I like it... It does affect my daily life. I can't take public transport without masses of questions, sometimes aggressive, sometimes curious. And they ask for my autograph."

She would submit to the knife again if the artistic mood took her, finances permitting. As well as the reliquaries (the largest of which costs £18,000) and bloodied gauzes, she also sells the costumes from the surgical performances, videos of them, photographs, postcards and self-portraits painted with her fingers using her blood while on the operating table.

More recently, Orlan has produced a collection of digital photos of herself fused with portraits of pre-Columbians and Africans deemed beautiful by their societies, to show that beauty takes many forms. She is currently working on a project that involves reversing the commercial process of film-making. No film exists, but she has already produced posters and a soundtrack.

In death as in life, Orlan plans to use her body as her easel. She wants it to be preserved – either in resin or mummified – incorporated into an interactive video installation, and put on show in a museum. She is not ruling out approaching some of the museums in London. Quite what the British Museum would make of such an offer remains to be seen.

'Short Cut to Beauty' is at the Victoria &Albert Museum, London SW7 (020-7942 2211) Fri 25, from 6.30pm-10pm