{"product_id":"orlan-strip-tease-all-about-my-life-all-about-my-art-everyday-press-2024","title":"ORLAN — Strip-Tease: All About My Life All About My Art, The Everyday Press, London, 2024","description":"\u003cp\u003eA nearly 400-page autobiography that began with ORLAN refusing to let somebody else tell her story.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn 2019, during a public conversation at the Sorbonne’s Richelieu amphithéâtre, writer and curator Donatien Grau suggested that ORLAN write her autobiography. When someone in the audience offered to write it for her, she declined. On 17 March 2020 — the first day of France’s Covid lockdown — she began writing it herself.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe French edition, \u003cem\u003eStrip-tease: tout sur ma vie, tout sur mon art\u003c\/em\u003e, appeared with Gallimard in 2021. Three years later, the English-language edition arrived through The Everyday Press, the small London publishing project founded by artist and bookseller Arnaud Desjardin around an interest in the book as an object. The translation is by Rainer J. Hanshe, founder of Contra Mundum Press and translator of Baudelaire, including \u003cem\u003eMy Heart Laid Bare\u003c\/em\u003e and \u003cem\u003eParis Spleen\u003c\/em\u003e. It is an unusually apt pairing: a translator long occupied with confession, self-exposure and literary performance working through ORLAN’s own version of the striptease.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe book itself performs that title rather literally. Biography, performance, image and self-invention are repeatedly laid out and taken apart. Section headings including “ORLAN BEFORE ORLAN” and “ORLAN TRULY ORLAN” treat the artist’s name less as a stable identity than something continually produced.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAnd then there is the back cover.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA colour portrait shows ORLAN with hair divided precisely between platinum blonde and black, blue lipstick, rings covering both hands, her fingers raised toward two small protrusions above her eyebrows. They could be mistaken for makeup or styling. They are not. They are the visible implants produced through the surgical performances ORLAN undertook between 1990 and 1993 — works that radically collapsed distinctions between body, image, performance, medicine and authorship. Decades later, the evidence remains physically present on the person writing the autobiography.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe front cover stages another ORLAN entirely: monochrome, ceremonial, draped in fabric, a white bird balanced on each hand, while ORLAN occupies almost a third of the cover in uncompromising yellow capitals. Inside, photographs move between costumes, performances, constructed identities and the artist’s own account of becoming them.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThat is what makes this particular book more than a retrospective autobiography. ORLAN is not looking back at a body of work from a safe distance. The archive and the author remain materially attached to one another.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe surgeries ended in 1993. The evidence is still on the cover.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e17 × 24 cm · 399 pages · Softcover, perfect-bound · Black-and-white photographs throughout · ISBN 9781912458240 · The Everyday Press, London, 2024\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eCondition:\u003c\/strong\u003e Unread. Clean covers, tight spine and no visible creasing.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"The Everyday Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":54378083549522,"sku":null,"price":65.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0991\/5636\/1554\/files\/Orlan.STRIP-TEASEALLABOUTMYLIFEALLABOUTMYART.2024cover.jpg?v=1787604620","url":"https:\/\/thenewrare.com\/products\/orlan-strip-tease-all-about-my-life-all-about-my-art-everyday-press-2024","provider":"The New Rare","version":"1.0","type":"link"}