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About the Author
Laurie Fendrich, a painter who lives and works in New York, is a professor of fine arts and the director of the Comparative Arts and Culture Graduate Program at Hofstra University. Her writing has focused on the place of art and artists in society and the education of young artists, but she has also written essays questioning the viability of beauty in a post-Darwin era, the meaning of abstract painting, and the tyranny of outcomes assessment. She will blog about university life, the arts. and culture.
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Psst! Art Students!
I want to save everybody some time and effort here. You don’t want to have to reinvent the wheel, do you? For all you Aliza Shvarts wannabes, scan the following list before you start your next art piece. Most of the good ideas have already been taken.
Tying two guns to his temples in a performance piece: André Breton, back in the good old Dada days.
Killing catfish in a museum gallery: Newton Harrison (1960s)
Shooting a dog as a performance piece: Tom Otterness (1980s)
Living in a locker for 5 days: Chris Burden (1960s)
Having yourself shot: Chris Burden (1970s)
Having yourself crucified on a Volkswagen beetle: Chris Burden (1970s)
Crawling in his underwear across broken glass: Chris Burden (1970s)
Making prints with semen: Ed Ruscha (1970s)
Reading a scroll pulled from her vagina: Carolee Schneeman (1970s)
Having sex with a collector recorded on video tape: Andrea Fraser (recently)
Letting viewers view her cervix: Annie Sprinkle (1980s)
Canning his own excrement: Piero Manzoni (1960s)
Squirting paint out of his anus: Keith Boadwee (fairly recently)
Killing a chicken by wringing its neck on stage: Ralph Ortiz (1960s)
Sailing off in a boat to disappear forever: Arthur Craven (1920s)
Smearing herself with menstrual blood: (Can’t remember a name now, but there must have been lots)
Filling an entire room filled with tampons: Womanhouse, Los Angeles (1970s)
Cutting her own lips with a razor blade: Gina Pane (1970s)
Pretending to be raped on a gallery floor during an opening: Joy Poe (1970s)
Having endless plastic surgery on herself as a work of art: Orlan (ongoing)
Photographing himself with a bullwhip up his anus: Robert Mapplethorpe (1970s)
Diving out a second story window (maybe, could have been a fake): Yves Klein (1960s)
Masturbating under a gallery floor: Vito Acconci (1970s)
Suspending himself in a gallery by attaching hooks into his skin: Stelarc (1970s)
Having his back cut with a razor blade: Ron Athey (1990s)
Living tied to another artist for a year: Linda Montano (1980s)
Copying an entire novel onto canvas by hand: Al Ruppersberg (1970s)
Amputating his own penis, an inch at a time: Rudolpf Schwartzkogler (possibly faked) (1960s)
Living like a growling dog, in a cage, in a gallery: Can’t remember his name…Lassie something-or-other?…fairly recently.
P.S. I’m leaving out things like Tracy Emin’s tent, with the names of everybody she ever slept with, and Vanessa Beecroft’s nude women standing around a gallery, because they’re, so, you know, polite.
Posted at 12:37:20 PM on April 24, 2008 | All postings by Laurie FendrichComments
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An interesting list, but not one of these deals with the issues surrounding birth, motherhood, and abortion that Shvarts was — however sophomorically — attempting to address.
So unless you believe, incorrectly, that all performance art is merely about “shock,” you have to admit from your own list that Shvarts’s performance is original.
(Then again, it’s like telling a poet not to write about love or war, cuz ya know, dude, it’s all been done.)
— Luther Blissett · Apr 24, 06:04 PM · #
Well, it comes down to whether you think “shock” is the art’s end or its means. Given a) the current art world, b) the savvy of of Yale art students (true, Shvarts is an undergraduate and the real rocket to stardom at Yale is the graduate art program—but the lil’ sharpies do learn from their elders), c) the whole buncha works over the past 20 or 30 years that are about “birth, motherhood, and abortion” (their sheer numbers are probably what caused Fendrich to blank on particulars concerning “menstrual blood”), d) the song and dance about whether Shvarts’s work was fiction or not (no fiction = lots of shock), e) the media’s propensity to cover art for its shock value rather than its POV (this assumes that Shvarts wasn’t “aw, shucks” about media coverage), and f) cuz, ya know dude, we ain’t seen no poets hit the headlines lately on accounta no matter what they write about, mere words don’t have the shock value of real blood. (Is is real blood in that Yale piece, ain’t it?)
— LuckyJim · Apr 25, 06:41 AM · #
Ooops! I left off the “therefore”: Given (a), (b), ©, (d), (e) and (f), I’d go with “the art’s end.”
I guess I was in shock.
— LuckyJim · Apr 25, 07:42 AM · #
I love it. Fictional or not blood, abortion, naked female body parts—what a stew!!!! I love the people offended by that; I love the vulgar media slopping it up and repeating it ad nauseum; I love the witty detached scholarly judgements from on high cast upon it; I love the whole sloppy embarrassing effort of civilization to forget the animal nature of us all. Shocking—we are monkeys!! Absolutely shocking!!!! (Unless Baby Bush had already made that evident to us all—by giving monkeys a bad name).
— Richard Tabor Greene · Apr 28, 05:05 AM · #
I’ve never met anyone who wasn’t aware of our animal nature. It’s also a theme that’s covered in most religions, and I’d say that reminding us about it via art is redundant. In any case, Shrvats’s work is explicitly a denial that we are monkeys or constrained by our animal nature. She’s clearly in civilization’s camp.
— Ed Hynes · Apr 28, 09:54 AM · #
In an era when television viewing treats us to phrases like urine stream, erections lasting over four hours, and oily rectal discharge, and routinely gives us scenes that take place at urinals or sitting on a toilet, is anyone surprised that art tries so hard to present us with images that rise above the humdrum?
— first marci · Apr 28, 10:53 AM · #
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, 10:12 PM · #
Don’t forget that Bob Flanagan hammered a nail into his penis (1990s). And he did it, of course, to deal with the issues of birth, motherhood, and abortion! I mean, what could be more ‘original’?
— Steven Trull · May 1, 11:12 PM · #
“Living like a growling dog, in a cage, in a gallery: Can’t remember his name…Lassie something-or-other?…fairly recently.” Sounds like Joseph Beuys’ “I Like America and America Likes Me, 1974,” living in the gallery with a coyote for 3 days…
— Menachem Wecker · May 7, 04:08 PM · #