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Adventures in the Yale Art Department

Bloggers are expressing shock, disgust, and outrage at this Yale Daily News article, which describes one Aliza Shvarts’ senior art project: “a documentation of a nine-month process during which she artificially inseminated herself ‘as often as possible’ while periodically taking abortifacient drugs to induce miscarriages.” The exhibition itself consists of video recordings of her “experiencing miscarriages in her bathroom tub” and a large cube featuring samples of her uterine blood pressed between layers of plastic sheeting.

Weird and gross, granted. (Go walk it off if you need to.) But as a piece of agitprop shock art, it treads some familiar Karen Finley, Robert Mapplethorpe-esque ground, which as we all know is candy for the undergrad art crowd.

When I was at Yale, I heard about a student who had sex with her boyfriend while menstruating, then hung up the bloody sheet as part of an art-department exhibition. And one year, I participated in a friend’s performance art project about “the seven stages of women”—I was lucky (I got “sickness”), but the girl who got cast as “puberty” had to spend three hours in a huge box of tampons while fake blood made from baby shampoo dripped all over her. Now, this is why Yale is actually a great place for young artists, particularly young female artists: They’re encouraged to take themselves, and their work, very, very seriously. Of course, that means you get a lot of juvenile stunts (though that performance art piece, as a whole, was pretty moving), but if you’re not going to take your work seriously, why even bother doing it? I’m glad Yale inculcates that kind of earnestness, and I believe Shvarts when she says that she wanted to “inspire some kind of discourse.” But I don’t think she gave much thought to what, exactly, the “message” of her piece was supposed to be—though she claims that it does, in fact, have one. Is that cube a shrine? A cautionary tale? A memento mori? I don’t know, and I’d be surprised if Shvarts knew, either. Muddled thinking usually leads to boring art.

All that being said, plenty of people—including many of the women at Slate—think the whole thing might have been staged. First of all, artificial insemination isn’t that easy—or cheap. And what are these “herbal” drugs Shvarts claims to have taken? But even more damning: How could her adviser have possibly sanctioned this project, much less given Shvarts the green light to go ahead without a doctor’s supervision? Doesn’t that seem like grounds for an immediate dismissal, or at least a tenure reassessment? Call me naive, but I have a little more faith in that professor’s common sense—she must be in on the joke. Right? Right?

 Read the rest of the Aliza Shvarts conversation on XX Factor.