The World´s Most Disgusting Performance Artist and Barcelona´s Equivalent of the Soup Nazi

On Monday I had to teach my class about Orlan. If this means nothing to you, good. Don´t even bother reading on.

But if you don´t take that advice, be warned, the images below are kind of wierd and kind of gross, which is apparently why this ¨carnal artist¨ is ¨world-reknowned.¨

Orlan is an artist, except she doesn´t paint pictures, write novels, design buildings, cook profiteroles, or do anything that would actually require true skill or talent.

Instead, she mutilates her body and does loud, violent public stunts in order to, in her words, ¨shock and provoke¨ an audience. That bit about the audience is interesting, because that always seems like a spurious defense of one´s own artwork. Maybe that´s too broad an adjective, and maybe that´s okay, because art should be an inclusive, open genre of expression. However, there´s a difference between allowing crackpots to mutilate themselves for attention and sponsoring said mutilation with public money.

Orlan´s is most widely recognized for a serious of artistic operations during which she had plastic surgery to distort her face to make it look like various past forms of beauty, like the Mona Lisa. Somehow that translates into having surgery to to have a tumorous-looking ¨growth¨ on either side of her temples. During the surgical videos, the doctors were in costume, Orlan recites poetry, and in one, an African man dances around the operating table. It´s like a bad SNL skit (or maybe just an SNL skit, since they´re all bad).

She also does more ¨conventional¨ pieces like stanidng in front of a picture of herself nude (see:above) and having people drop coins in a slot between her boobs for a kiss. After she kisses them, she screams really loudly, or a siren goes off. I can´t remember which. Maybe both happened. Either way, you kiss her and then something really obnoxious happens. The piece was called ¨kiss of the artist.¨

This kind of nonsense always smells like an ¨emperor´s new clothes¨ kind of scheme. The emperor has a right to go out in public with nothing on, just don´t tell me the reason I can´t see the kashmir robe is because I´m not enlightened.

Teaching about Orlan was frustrating because the class was supposed to be learning about art, as in the landscapes in museums, or sculptures, not experimental nonsense gone horribly wrong.

I guess what makes her an artist, as opposed to someone confined to an asylum, is that she is self-conscious about her work. But even then, that might be a bit too presumptuous. A more cynical evaluation would be that the difference between doing violent performance art inside a isolated cell and doing it with honorary professorships and public money grants is some combination of luck, knowing the right people, and cultural climate. The last bit isn´t necessarily true either, though, as she was born in France and became famous there but is currently doing a professorship in Los Angeles. I´ve already written more about Orlan than I ever wanted to again after Monday, so we´re done with her.

Thankfully the class had an appropriate reaction.

Maybe there is no culture clash after all.
New York City has the soup Nazi. And Barcelona has the sandwich Nazi.

There´s a cafe near the water, just by Port Vell (an artificial inlet built for the Olympics), which serves sandwiches to long lines of (mostly) Americans. The sandwiches are pretty good, very cheap, and are served cafeteria style, like Ben´s Chile Bowl or...whatever the name of the soup place is where the soup Nazi works in NYC. We´ve been there thrice now, and all three times, the staff has taken a very creative approach to serving people. The first two times there the cooking station was manned by this smarmy guy with blond hair who will serve any lady who gets there before a guy, regardless who first arrived. He smiles at them and laughs with them, all the while my sandwich gets pigeonholed for a few hours.
And I don´t hold this against the girls; its all on the dude, who said he was from Austria. I didn´t realize he spoke English and so I badmouthed him in the cafe line and he overheard me, so he gave me a death stare.
Then I saw him AGAIN on Calle Laeitana near my apartment the next day. We both exchanged looks of mutual hatred.
I don´t care if someone is just ¨nicer¨ to the girls than the guys. That is what it is. But when it affects me personally is when I get mad. I expect sandwiches to be made in the sequence in which they are ordered. Does this guy think he´s going to get laid because he serves them before the guys who ordered before they did? Maybe. It probably works too. After all, its a popular restaurant and all you need to do is get lucky once every few hundred times or so.
Whatever. I am DONE with that prick. And as good as the sandwich shop is, with only 3.5 weeks to go, I´m going to try sticking to more exotic culinary eats when I go out.

This blogpost was a little heavy on griping and social commentary than I would like, but I´ve been busy lately, with the course wrapping up, and the Mets losing every night. Starting tomorrow, I´ll have more time to be able to explore and write about the city, which is why I started the blog in the first place. Sort of.