Plastic Surgery as Performance Art?...

I did a very small project a little while ago in French class on a modern performance artist.

In my Googling, I found ORLAN. 

She is a French performance artist, photographer, sculpter, and--perhaps most notably--used plastic surgery as an artistic medium.

Not only does she alter her own appearance (to take on the features of women in famous paintings), but she also turns the OR into a stage, using props and costumes and other actors to make a theatric show. She also uses local anesthetics in order to stay awake during the surgery, to perform. 

When the surgeries are complete, she will have the chin of Boticelli's Venus, the nose of Jean-Léon Gérôme's Psyche, the lips of François Boucher’s Europa, the eyes of Diana (as depicted in a sixteenth-century French School of Fontainebleu painting), and the forehead of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.

In our discussions on plastic surgery and gender, I wonder how artists like ORLAN fall into place.