From Marcel Duchamp’s “Rrose Selavy” series to Orlan, the artist’s self-portrait has come to represent the socio-cultural context of the individual as much as it depicts a dimension of the artist’s consciousness or psychology.
Duchamp’s transvestite alter ego Rrose allowed his to explore volatile gender issues of the early 20th century. Orlan, using her own face as the media and the scalpel as the tool sought the vanity of vanity, the ideal of beauty that can only be sought and never attained…