The XX Factor: Slate women blog about politics, etc...

Still Not Buying It

Well, I probably should have known that something was fishy when the Yale Daily News reported that “[f]ew people outside of Yale's undergraduate art department have heard about Shvarts' exhibition.” Yale’s not a big campus: When I was there, we all knew that some girl was keeping live crabs from a Chinatown grocery store in her bathtub; I’m sure that, if someone was regularly “making art” in hers, people would be talking about it.

Dana, you asked if the artwork was successful or not, given what we know now. I think that, based on the criteria I mentioned in my last post, the answer is no. I still don’t get the sense that Shvarts had a compelling—or coherent—message to impart. What does it mean to “draw attention to the ambiguity surrounding form and function of a woman’s body”? That’s like a horrible parody of art school speak. What does it even mean? OK, “function” I sort of get: She’s giving a big middle finger to the patriarchal-hegemonic-essentialist-traditionalist view of women as vessels for childbearing. Very Handmaid’s Tale. But where does “form” come in? What—or whose—“ambiguity” is she referring to? Maybe we’ll get a clearer thesis when Shvarts formally presents the work next week.

NB: According to the official Yale statement, the project includes “visual representations, a press release and other narrative materials.” (Emphasis added.)

Called It!

Just after my post below speculating that the abortion-as-performance-art story was a hoax, a fellow Slatester sent around this press release from the Yale public relations office, stating that Aliza Shvarts never really impregnated herself or induced any home abortions, and that the entire thing was "a creative fiction designed to draw attention to the ambiguity surrounding form and function of a woman's body." The only ambiguity it brought up for me was the question of whether Shvarts was a liar or a lunatic. But it's not clear who at the university knew about this "creative fiction," and for how long—from the wording of the release, it appears that just today Shvarts was called upon to confirm to university officials that her project was a stunt. I'm interested to know what other XXers think: Was Shvarts' point simply to trick people into being horrified that a young woman might really have done this to herself (and, depending on your point of view about abortion, ended the lives of several incipient human beings in the process). And if so, was her piece a success?

Roe v. ...Yuck!

OK, I’m both resolutely pro-choice and a known oversharer on this topic, but that abortion-as-Yale-art-project item strikes me as genuinely repellent. It also strikes me as a scam. Though auto-insemination doesn’t always have to be high-tech and expensive (just ask any lesbian with a turkey-baster baby), it seems highly unlikely that nine months' worth of the most assiduous basting would result in four separate pregnancies and miscarriages. (Though the artist declines to specify how many times she knocked herself up, the description of the installation implies that that four separate filmed miscarriages will be projected onto that plastic-wrapped bloody cube suspended from the ceiling. Up for a jaunt to New Haven, anyone?)

And as long as we're getting technical, what's this wonderfully effective "herbal" abortifacient, apparently available without a doctor's prescription, with which the budding Duchamp supposedly induced her multiple miscarriages? And since an early-stage induced abortion can be indistinguishable from a menstrual period, who's to say the filmed miscarriages weren’t fake? The whole story rings false, particularly the notion that Aliza Shvarts’ adviser would sign off on a project that could endanger her student’s health and would almost certainly endanger her own job. Hoax or not, I guess Shvarts’ installation is an accomplishment by some negative measure: In a single attention-getting move, she’s managed to make the pro-choice movement, feminism, performance art, and Yale all look bad at the same time.

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.