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Brainstorm: Lives of the Mind Laurie Fendrich

Art for Shvarts' Sake

Aliza Shvarts (Yale ’08) made a senior project consisting of an installation/video/performance piece that supposedly documents her repeatedly inseminating herself, over the course of nine months, and then inducing multiple miscarriages.

The volatile mix of contemporary art, abortion, and campus free speech lit up the blogosphere and caused an uproar on campus. Surprise. Ms. Shvarts’ show was supposed to go up today, April 22nd, right next to all the other senior art projects. As of this post, Yale is saying it won’t happen unless Ms. Shvarts agrees to publicly admit that her piece is fiction and to promise that there won’t be any real blood in the installation. (And just a few decades ago, mere abstract painting caused college deans to have palpitations!)

Last week, Helaine Klasky (Yale’s version of Bush spokeswoman Dana Perino) insisted Ms. Shvarts was merely pretending to do all the things her piece claims she really did. “The entire project is an art piece, a creative fiction designed to draw attention to the ambiguity surrounding the form and function of a woman’s body,” said Ms. Kalsky, who ought to consider working a second job as a label-writer for the Whitney Biennial.

As far as Ms. Shvarts is concerned, the fact that her advisers knew what she was up to means they “supported” her, which in turn translates for Shvarts into her project being “university-sanctioned.” She adamantly denies her piece is a fiction: “No one can say with 100 percent certainty that anything in the piece did or did not happen.” She adds that she didn’t know if she was ever pregnant and that the “nature of the piece is that it did not consist of certainties.” Whatever its other faults, Yale, it seems, is quite effective in teaching its undergraduates that we live in very uncertain times.

Ms. Kalsky — not to be trumped by a young art student on the career make — responds that Ms. Shvarts’ denial is part of her performance. (Hey, somebody is either lying, or this “uncertainties” business is spreading like Kurt Vonnegut’s Ice-9.)

Kalsky then adds that Yale was “disappointed that she [Shvarts] would deliberately lie to the press in the name of art.” (Didn’t some guy named Picasso say that art is a lie that reveals the truth?)

For those of us in the contemporary-art business, the Yale squabble isn’t all that interesting. Ms Shvarts’ undergraduate project sounds so, well, so undergraduate. Contrary to what a lot of people may think, her project wouldn’t make it into a serious contemporary gallery and, if it did, it wouldn’t get much traction with the press or the public. Ms. Shvarts’ project is getting attention mostly because it’s at an elite university, where it has students, professors, administrators, and college flacks running to the free-speech and culture-wars barricades. Almost everyone in the art world has been there and done that, a long time ago.

The real stuff — e.g., performance works by such artists as Carolee Schneeman, Ana Mendieta, Karen Finley, Chris Burden or Annie Sprinkle in the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s — was bitter, shocking, risky, and always on the line. It took place in funky, rented venues, and not the cushioned halls of ivy. Sometimes it was stupid, but sometimes it was powerful and moving.

The dispiriting part about Shvarts’ tempestuous teapot isn’t really the art — whether it’s morally offensive, or not, or good, or bad — but the fact that putatively edgy art projects are really guided to completion by faculty advisers who inexorably turn what was once upon a time a fierce counter-voice to culture into soft, risk-free, pseudo-avant-garde exercises in calculated offensiveness.

Posted at 08:10:19 AM on April 22, 2008 | All postings by Laurie Fendrich

Comments

  1. Violating boundaries that people are not often conscious of or cognizant of is one of the 64 primary functions of all arts, throughout history. It is a way of making groups and societies conscious of unconscious commitments, habits, limits, purposes operating somewhat harmfully because never examined and consciously improved or challenged. This is a vital function of art and there is risk to it as one person’s judgement of a boundary worth violatingly-making-conscious is another person’s sacred inviolable cow. Any individual artist or gallery cannot reliably tell which of such works are “art” and which are meretricious. Research, mostly by Simonton, has shown that creators and curators NEVER learn better what is art and what is not. It takes time, historically long periods of it, in most cases, for consensus to appear in the form of canonical works in a field.

    Americans are especially intolerant, in recent generations more so, due to de-education of everyone by banal idiot reporters in the mass media, and due to a brutality of parenting and schooling and daily life in America. It is not a pretty picture of nice place to live. We can expect that American reactions to attempted art works will become more and more vicious, self-censoring, and self defeating—the death knell of an entire culture, unfortunately. This work at Yale is just demonstrating various constituencies lacking the courage, guts, and risky-embracement needed for art. Once you give yourself over to caring overly whether one work or not is “it”, all art is lost. Art is a risk, some risks turn out okay others, most in fact, do not. If you cannot play this game politely and civilly, you are no longer a civilization, just a continuing brawl of brutes, uneducated buffoons pretending to be faculty, students, media, and citizens (and religious groups). May the worst man win!!!!! Slouching to New Haven to be born!!!!

    — Richard Tabor Greene · Apr 23, 05:33 AM · #

  2. Another interesting article. I agree with Fendrich on both counts—the calculated offensiveness of the project and that art be allowed to shock and offend. I’d even go so far as to agree that ‘great art’ (whatever that is) is also probably not going to be found in the Ivies. It’s for that reason that I found Shvarts’ comment, “Sure, some people will be upset with the message and will not agree with it, but it’s not the intention of the piece to scandalize anyone” rather disingenuous.

    — madamesmartypants · Apr 23, 05:38 AM · #

  3. “Contrary to what a lot of people may think, her project wouldn’t make it into a serious contemporary gallery and, if it did, it wouldn’t get much traction with the press or the public.”

    It’s interesting how many people discussing the controversy have been willing to judge the artistic quality of the project without actually having seen it.

    — Peter · Apr 23, 06:48 AM · #

  4. Peter – yes, I suppose… but I think that Fendrich has enough to go on to make this judgement. Do we really have to see the work to consider the concept lame? Would a good execution save a problematic concept?

    — heART · Apr 23, 08:29 AM · #

  5. As an exercise by an undergraduate in an undergraduate environment, the project under discussion seems to explore the terms of its own status and the contours of the conceptual divisions made between producer, product, and consumer, to use terms I typically try to avoid using. As such, any attack from outside the university should be understood properly as an attack on the university. Similarly, an undergraduate project should be judged, as it seems the professors of the art program have judged the project under discussion, as an undergraduate project at an elite university today, not as anything else, including an art work at an alternative venue in decades past, as Prof. Fendrich does toward the end of her blog.

    — Jesse · Apr 23, 08:31 AM · #

  6. How come it was OK for outsiders to praise Maya Lin’s undergraduate art project (remember?), but it’s not OK for them to criticize Ms. Shvarts’s. If the senior show of which Ms. Shvarts’s project was to have been a part is closed to the public, then Jesse has a case. But if it’s in a space to which the public has encouraged access—especially if there’s any publicity for the exhibition, e.g., a flyer—then she really doesn’t. Oh, I suppose one can always special-plead that the work is the product of a mere lil’ ol’ undergraduate and ought to be considered with TLC. But the reported nature of the piece, and its forces-the-viewer-to-confront, etc., nature would rather seem to obviate that.

    — LuckyJim · Apr 23, 10:33 AM · #

  7. “Ms Shvarts’s undergraduate project sounds so, well, so undergraduate.”

    That nails it. When I was in Art School in the early 1970’s, there was a fellow who painted with his own body fluids and excrement. He had exceptional talent, bur yes, it was for attention. He soon got it as they carted him away one morning. Took 4 officers. It was a side reminder of mental instability as his last painting remained on its easel for a few weeks in the painting department.

    None of the teachers (professors) headed his calls for help, thought it was “cool” that he was so outside, and as long as he was producing, then he is a good student.

    However, undergraduates need to know that in the art world, experience and time may cause them to be a better artist, and mere ideas and poorly executed at that will not constitute quality art, no matter how much your teachers, profs or mentors tell you so.

    — Ear to the ground · Apr 23, 10:55 AM · #

  8. This just in, artists employed by universities. Film at 11.

    — Dennis · Apr 23, 11:08 AM · #

  9. People are talking about it. Critics are analyzing it. Deconstructionists are masturbating. Moralists are wagging fingers. Landlords and epistemologists are dancing on the heads of pins. Firemen are washing the entrails to the side of the highway. Fundamentalists see Jesus on the Temple door. It must be art.

    — first marci · Apr 23, 11:40 AM · #

  10. Today Yale refused to put the “work” on display. Here’s an excerpt from today’s CHE coverage:

    “ Peter Salovey, dean of Yale College, issued a statement on Monday saying that before Ms. Shvarts’s work could be part of the exhibit, she would have to acknowledge that the abortions were ‘fiction.’ He said she would have to submit a ‘clear and unambiguous written statement’ saying that ‘she did not try to inseminate herself and induce miscarriages, and that no human blood will be physically displayed in her installation.’”

    While commentators are tossing and turning over the alleged academic freedom issues in this case, AHA is busily processing the circumstances in line with what the authors of the AAUP’s 1915 statement would have considered the “corresponding responsibilities” of academic freedom.

    Is this really just another Mapplethorpe exhibit?

    Keep in mind that Yale is a private, not a public institution, which has never formally endorsed the AAUP’s 1940 Statement — and was even investigated for censure way back in the first half of the last century when the AAUP was an honest professional association. (Today, the AAUP winks and nods at the Ivies’ daily violations of academic freedom and tenure principles in the matter of faculty tenure, for example.)

    Nevertheless, are there any other reasons, any responsible reasons for Yale’s position on this matter which might even “trump” the academic freedom card in the case of this exhibit?

    Yes, indeed.

    While the student has never been restrained from doing whatever she pleased to do (and she may even be a minor, with the legal complications that brings), if the university “accepts” this work in any formal manner then it has interesting legal dilemmas on its hands — different from the one most commentators are busy with.

    It’s called “exposure”. No, not the kind that involves body parts but the kind that involves lawsuits.

    For example: If the student had to seek prior approval for her project to be considered a sponsored activity, and if she told the university’s representatives, her residential college dean and her faculty advisor (a first-year contingent “lecturer” appointee), that the project was fiction, well, no “harm” could come to the student or the university.

    If she instead got “approval” and/or encouragement literally to possibly endanger her health by forcing abortions on herself in a Yale dorm room or lavatory without medical supervision, well — see where this is going?

    You bet I’d want that “fiction” assurance, if indeed it was given, in writing if I were the Yale administration.

    The “exposure” to “negligence” lawsuits, at the very least, would be a real danger — a danger which Yale would not wish to compound by its formal recognition of the “project” in a public exhibition.

    And has anyone forgotten the public health risks inherent in contact with blood and blood-contaminated products? What if a Yale employee, ordered to set up the exhibit, objected? And if his/her union should decide to sue? (Oh yes, remember, Yale has unions now, even of graduate student employees.)

    As with the famed “sex toys controversy” at New Paltz, where the NYS governor and some state officials were concerned that the president of the campus and the faculty permitted public exhibition of potentially obscene objects and actions — Was there even a parental advisory as in the recording industry? — and risked violating state or local obscenity laws if minors were “exposed” — well, let’s just say once again that academic freedom comes with corresponding responsibilities.

    I daresay we don’t know the half of the picture of what Yale is dealing with — but, of one thing we can be sure: Yale’s legal counsel isn’t exactly idle at this moment.

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 23, 12:43 PM · #

  11. As safe as yesterday’s New York Times, signifying nothing.

    — Kev · Apr 23, 11:42 PM · #

  12. The key word is ‘art’. Anyone can shock, surprise, or push boundaries. The question is, can you do it like Brahms or Picasso?

    — Observer · Apr 28, 07:36 AM · #

  13. Just as I have no objection to devout Muslim women following the orders of their male masters and keeping their ear lobes covered, lest they be spat upon or stoned, so I can tolerate public display these warped joke art exhibits.
    The first cause me to silently snicker, the other I try to avoid barfing.
    Where is former NYC Mayor Morality Giuliani when we need him?

    What a silly, weird and wonderful species we are. Astounding we still exist as we try so hard to obliterate ourselves and each other because of what we look like and believe – at least for a little while longer.

    — AW · Apr 28, 12:46 PM · #

  14. I’m quietly savoring the ironies of the fact that Yale v. Shvarts in Connecticut is basically testing the limits of Griswold v. Connecticut – where an 1879 state law forbidding “any drug, medicinal article or instrument for the purpose of preventing conception” was struck down, providing the basis of the right to privacy.

    Indeed, Ms. Shvarts could have read all about it in a Yale publication last spring: http://yalemedicine.yale.edu/ym_sp07/capsule.html

    Was she consciously “embodying” the abortion debate in this politically-charged pre-election atmosphere? Just which “bourgeoisie” was her target?

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 28, 10:08 PM · #

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