Two Shades of Outré, Research Paper Example

In this paper I compare the t? moko of the native M?ori people of New Zealand with the performance art of the Frenchwoman known as “ORLAN” (who always spells her own name in all capital letters). My thesis starts with a pretty easy assumption: that both art forms can be called outré, a word meaning strange, unusual, or shocking. (I remembered the word from Edgar Allen Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue, a story I read back when I was in middle school.) But beyond having that quality in common, the art of t? moko and Orlan’s work differ in ways that go beyond the obvious connection of both art forms being mostly about the human face. First, some background, starting with the cultural contexts of both art forms.

The T?  Mokos

Although t? moko is a part of the Kirituhi skin art and is known mostly for those who apply it to their faces, it is not just a tattoo. It deliberately scars the skin as well as colors it. By definition, only a member of a M?ori tribe can have a t? moko. It is a taonga (a token of treasure or honor) that reflects the wearer’s genealogy and status within his or her tribe, almost like clothing does or tries to do and sometimes actually does (Maori Culture). If a foreigner gets it done — and this happens and will probably be imitated more and more — then what you see is what you get. It exists outside of its culture and can only display, not signify anything definite using a visual language. Although an outsider — a Westerner — could copy a genuine t? moko, it would be a kind of visual lie, sort of like those tattoos of Chinese ideograph “letters” that Westerners get.

An example is a man I once saw riding the bus. (He’s the reason I selected this topic.) At a glance you could tell he was an ex-con and would probably be back in prison soon. His entire face was tattooed with a homemade-looking prison-ink tattoo, not at all professional looking or artistic. I didn’t know it at the time, but in thinking about it now I realize it was a kind of imitation t? moko. Whether or not the con knew that himself, it probably meant something to him, but nothing anyone else could know without hearing the backstory from the guy himself.

T? moko face-art declined in the face of the conquering culture of British New Zealander colonists, but lately has come back into use as a way of reasserting the wearer’s tribal heritage. In this it seems to mirror the popularity of tattooing among young, educated Western middle-class people today, after having been nearly always seen as a sign of membership in a marginal subculture, like that of sailors and prisoners. Seen today, a t? moko is outré for three reasons.

First, our face is the most recognizably human part about us. To change your face is to make a dramatic statement. But second, today even truly native M?ori can hop on a plane or boat and be in Australia within hours, and from there take another flight to any capital city in the world. This was not true of the older generations of natives with t? moko-art. They were much more isolated, and so they were safe with their chosen form of art and self-expression. They were freaks only to the few Westerners who ever saw them. This probably goes double for women with t? mokos. It may sound sexist and controversial, but it must be “easier” for a man to be handsome with a full-face t? moko than it would be for a woman to be beautiful with one.

The third reason is the exceptional skill required of t? moko artists, both the original ones who used a chisel and mallet, but especially those today who use needles instead. This raises a question: can something outré be beautiful? The answer would seem to be yes, but it is a beauty that attracts as much as it repels, like certain kinds of colorful but poisonous insects and flowers.

Orlan

Before starting this paper I had heard or seen pictures of M?ori facial art (although not the term t? moko). But Orlan was totally new to me and I almost wish she still was, although nobody said education was supposed to be pretty. She is a “performance artist” who goes around performing public acts, although some might call them stunts. (She once used her body as a unit of measurement, and with great ceremony marked off her body length with a piece of chalk, lying down unit by unit until she had circled a building. The video, called ORLAN: MesuRAGEs,

is available on YouTube.)  She was born in 1944 in France and is said to live in Los Angeles, New York, and Paris; is clearly no starving artist; is or was married, and serves on various artistic boards. She calls her personal artistic style “carnal art”, which has involved so far a total of nine medically unnecessary plastic surgeries, performed publicly on her fully conscious self. According to her Carnal Art Manifesto, she and her form of art is “not against cosmetic surgery, but rather against the conventions carried by it and their subsequent inscription” (Jeffries). Her most famous operations involved changing her face: her mouth is now at least intended to be shaped like a subject’s in one of François Boucher’s paintings; her forehead, sporting two matching cheek implants looking like “nascent antlers”, is supposed to look like that of the Mona Lisa; and her chin like that of Botticelli’s Venus. This facial transformation obviously crazy-mirrors the t? moko of the M?ori people, but the cultural context is radically different.

As a Western artist of at least some fame, Orlan’s facial surgeries are meant to convey some kind of artistic statement. Like the guy on the bus I described, what that statement is requires explanation. It is entirely personal, but Orlan is not unique. There have been other radical performance-artists. In 1971 — the year Orlan changed her name from Mireille Suzanne Francette Porte — another performance artist named Chris Burden had himself shot in the arm with a .22 rifle. (A short film of the event, called Shoot can be seen on YouTube.) Two years later he had himself crucified to back of a Volkswagen. One gets the picture, more or less.

I think that the difference between t? moko and Orlan (and others) is at least partially one of narrative. The t? moko requires no narrative to justify itself. It signals exactly. It can be understood within the native cultures of the land that came to be called New Zealand, and it can be quickly understood by outsiders, Western and native alike. There is plenty of narrative about t? moko, but that narrative stands apart from the art itself. But in the case of Orlan, the medium contains only part of the message. Without added commentary and explanation — a lot of words — the “art” is just a stunt, and maybe just a pretty boring one too.

There is a similarity linking t? moko and Orlan: the skill of the t? moko artist and the skill of the plastic surgeons who altered Orlan’s face. And there is a kind of moral problem creeping in on both sides. Technically, the original t? moko artists were not just tattoo artists because they scarred the skin as well as colored it. Today, a lot of t? moko is tattooing — electric needles are used (Rihanna had a traditional one chiseled into her hand and wrist — which she then had tattooed over). I’ve always wondered about the moral perspective of tattoo artists who, with their customers’ approval and money, proceed to radically change those customers’ appearances, most of them for life (although technology now exists to at least partially remove tattoos). I think that just about all of such artists confront that problem — if it is a problem for them — by being heavily tattooed themselves. But a surgeon who performs unnecessary operations like the kind that Orlan paid for has got to be violating the Hippocratic Oath, which states “do no harm.”

I think that is the real point about native t? moko and Orlan: one did no harm to either the M?ori artist or wearer and the other did, both to Orlan herself and to medicine. T? moko is about identity, Orlan is about self. Both are outré to me, but only the former is culturally real.

Works Cited

Jeffries, Stuart. Orlan’s art of sex and surgery. 1 July 2009. 20 January 2014. Theguardian.com

Maori Culture. 2014. 21 January 2014. http://www.newzealand.com/travel/media/features/maori-culture/maori-culture_ta-moko-maori-tattoo_feature.cfm