Orlan is best known for her plastic-surgery-as-performance-art pieces wherein she had parts of her body reconstructed to match the feminine ideal as depicted by male artists. She’s received the Mona Lisa’s forehead, the chin of Boticelli’s Venus, and so forth.
Long before she started with plastic surgery, she was still courting controversy, with an art vending machine:
In 1977 she was fired from a teaching job after she presented Le Baiser de l’Artiste outside an art fair in Paris. She sat behind a life-sized photo of her naked torso which operated like a slot machine. Customers inserted five francs between her breasts which dropped to her crotch. As it did Orlan leapt from her seat to give the customer a kiss. The performance prompted outrage. But the French art critic Catherine Millet likened the piece to “an X-ray of the frenzy of exchange of contracts in the contemporary art world where the merchandising of the artist’s personality replaces the merchandising of art”. Source.
