The only word that I can think to describe this “art project” is Satanic. Basically, a Yale student gets pregnant, takes “abortifacient” drugs, and then films the remains after the forced miscarriages.
The artist is certainly well within the mainstream to defend herself the way she does. “The goal in creating the art exhibition, Shvarts said, was to spark conversation and debate on the relationship between art and the human body.” If you believe art is all about “being provocative” and “expressing yourself” and “politics,” her actions make perfect sense. For at least 100 years, art has been replete in nihilism, aiming for greater and greater degrees of purity in expressing the artist’s “will.” Jackson Pollock, the cubists, the Dadaists, der Blaue Reiter, abstract expression–all are animated by the same anti-concept of art and human life. All of these artists and their associated “schools” deny the existence of beauty and instead laud the goal of artistic authenticity.
Anything that might constraint the pure, Promethean efforts of the artist must be abandoned. Traditions, aesthetic standards, popular notions of beauty, moral considerations, and the commands of God Himself would deny the artist his sacred autonomy. So they are all abandoned in the name of art untainted by anything. Art as pure will, viz.:
This quest for novelty and art divorced from ordinary feelings, including moral sentiments, was a major criticism Tolstoy had of the nascent modern art of his day. When art becomes divorced from any connection with the community and any recognition of beauty or common feelings of morality, it becomes a play thing of the idle rich.
Worse, the rich are easily bored and have for at least 100 years been less religious than the despised “peasants.” In this milieu, art became increasingly–indeed, manically–novel, and the most direct road to novelty was decadence. Solshenitsyn–another favorite Russian of mine–trashed this trend in a 1993 essay:
But in the 20th century the necessary equilibrium between tradition and the search for the new has been repeatedly upset by a falsely understood “avant-gardism” — a raucous, impatient “avant-gardism” at any cost. Dating from before World War I, this movement undertook to destroy all commonly accepted art — its forms, language, features and properties — in its drive to build a kind of “superart,” which would then supposedly spawn the New Life itself. It was suggested that literature should start anew “on a blank sheet of paper.” (Indeed, some never went much beyond this stage.) Destruction, thus became the apotheosis of this belligerent avant-gardism. It aimed to tear down the entire centuries-long cultural tradition, to break and disrupt the natural flow of artistic development by a sudden leap forward. This goal was to be achieved through an empty pursuit of novel forms as an end in itself, all the while lowering the standards of craftsmanship for oneself to the point of slovenliness and artistic crudity, at times combined with a meaning so obscured as to shade into unintelligibility.
I intend to write more on this subject soon. Let’s just say, I’m positively not shocked, not even a little, by this episode. In a well ordered age, elites provide moral leadership; in a disordered one, they are on the leading edge of decadence.
We marvel at how Ancient Romans watched gladiators and slaves publicly tortured in their Coliseums, but our own elites take pleasure in artistic scatology and de facto snuff films.
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How did bad circus side shows become (allegedly) art?
Well, *I’m* shocked. Not surprised. Shocked.
I can’t help but notice that the girl has a name that sounds as if she would describe herself as a “secular Jew.”
Interestingly, Yale was the scene of a lawsuit on the part of Orthodox Jews who wanted to live on campus because of the immodesty of living on campus. They lost.
So, Yale is a place where religious Jews are not allowed to practice their faith fully, but a atheist-Jew can publicly go insane with community support.
Excuse me, “off campus.” The Orthod. Jewish kids wanted to move off campus.
I call BS publicity stunt. No way this is real.
“I believe strongly that art should be a medium for politics and ideologies, not just a commodity… I think that I’m creating a project that lives up to the standard of what art is supposed to be.”
The “standard of what art is supposed to be”… hmmm. I need a moment to wrap my mind around that concept. There appear to be many standards. In classical Greece and Rome, as well as the studios of the Renaissance, the standard seemed to be more a purpose: the attainment of grace and beauty – inspiration, even – from imagination and effort, in dead stone and paint. At one time, that’s what they meant, I think, by the term “aesthetic.”
Or there’s the standard – or purpose – of covering that chipped plaster in the bedroom wall with an assembly-line landscape. Or bargain-basement pseudo-Arthur Rackham. Works for me.
On the other hand, and despite what she claims, Ms. Shvarts’ standard seems to be pulling freakish – and mildly disgusting – pranks to provoke a reaction from an audience already stupified by the relentless indoctrination that artists know more – feel more, dammit – than do they. It’s all about politics and ideologies, man; art is just a “fabricator” for those essential human provinces.
Except… when the attendant politics and ideologies lose the hot air propping them up… and collapse… we’re left with freakish pranks.
Where’s the line for grace and beauty?
“Statement by Helaine S. Klasky — Yale University, Spokesperson
New Haven, Conn. — April 17, 2008
Ms. Shvarts is engaged in performance art. Her art project includes visual representations, a press release and other narrative materials. She stated to three senior Yale University officials today, including two deans, that she did not impregnate herself and that she did not induce any miscarriages. The entire project is an art piece, a creative fiction designed to draw attention to the ambiguity surrounding form and function of a woman’s body.
She is an artist and has the right to express herself through performance art.
Had these acts been real, they would have violated basic ethical standards and raised serious mental and physical health concerns. (http://www.yale.edu/opa/)”
Shvarts denies Yale’s denial (more or less):
“…Shvarts reiterated Thursday that she repeatedly use a needleless syringe to insert semen into herself. At the end of her menstrual cycle, she took abortifacient herbs to induce bleeding, she said. She said she does not know whether or not she was ever pregnant.
“‘No one can say with 100-percent certainty that anything in the piece did or did not happen,’ Shvarts said, ‘because the nature of the piece is that it did not consist of certainties.’
“This afternoon, Shvarts showed the News footage from tapes she plans to play at the exhibit. The tapes depict Shvarts — sometimes naked, sometimes clothed — alone in a shower stall bleeding into a cup.
“…Shvarts said the goal of her exhibition was to spark conversation and debate about the relationship between art and the human body.”
http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/view/24528
I wonder if the Yale administration would have admitted to a violation of “basic ethical standards” if we were simply talking about someone who engaged in frequent unprotected sex and took abortifacient herbs each month as a safe measure?
Somehow I doubt it. But I think that is very hard to deny that the cases would be substantially different. In admitting to the moral culpability of this “artist” I think many pro-abortion people are conceding much more than they realize.
I do think it’s interesting that in some abjectly immoral situatoin like this that even in an amoral place like Yale, morality comes in through the back door labeled as a “psychopathology” or “mental illness.”
Wow, you seem to have rapped our knuckles for saying that this girl is nuts.
You, on the other hand, called her garbage stunts “art.”
Apart from this, she reminds me a lot of the fighting white-trash girls on Youtube. They have one thing in common: exhibitionism. Beyond that, Schvartz can take advantage of economic privilege. But isn’t that OK in yoru book? Her parents were rich enough to send her to Yale.
By your own standards, doesn’t their wealth entitle them to buy her cred that the Youtube chicks parents’ can’t?
I don’t think Roach ever argued that wealth entitles any one individual to credibility. I think he’s been talking about a need to frankly acknowlede some obvious statistical norms that are associated with socio-economic class.
It is becoming clear from cases like this though that our culture is getting pretty good at tearing down many of the standards of conduct that created the differences in class.
My gut response to this was that she’s another of many with an immature obsession for shocking “Conservatives”, or her idea of a Conservative. Never mind the fact that practically everyone today has pretty much seen it all. Actually, in a strange, or perhaps not so strange, way, SHE strikes me as very “Conservative.” She is stuck, rigidly, in a role. But Artists since the 19th Century were not interested in playing a role, which they saw, rightly, as a violation of the Self. But, since they knew that you can hardly get by without playing a role, they did it ironically, and used it as a way of experiencing the Self. What they did may have “shocked” but it was not the intention. It seems to me that what they did was sane, mature, healthy and honest. They were the first people who truly saw life as dynamic, not static. From Casper David Fredrich to Malevich to Warhol, and everyone in between.
As long as they remained alienated they could better symbolize the self from the role. This is why Warhol refused to play the role of tormented Artist. For me, he was the last one. By the time he made it, so had Art itself. It was no longer alienated. Artists were Stars in a way Van Gogh never was. Alienation takes courage, lots of it. This girl isn’t alientated, she’s Polarized. And she isn’t courageous, she’s a silly, pretentious, and spoiled, coward preaching to her choir.
Oh, and another thing. When she mentions Art and Politics in the same breath, it’s a dead give away that she’s a boring fraud. Art has two essential aspects, the Formal, and the Semantic. The Semantic reflects a belief (or Politics) and the Formal, the rendering, or expression. The Semantic aspect is the explanation that controls the iconography of a painting; for ex. a religious painting of St. Christopher – his size in relation to the infant Christ on his shoulders, his staff, orb, etc. This is what the Church who may have commissioned such a painting would expect to see. The Formal aspect was the rendering by the particular Artist, and there was not a lot of latitude.
But neither is there with this lady. The only difference is that those involved in Religious painting from Church official to Artist were conscious of operating out of the beliefs of their Church and not seeing it at all as a form of expression for the Self. But this crackpot is so Historically ignorant that she actually does believe it. This in spite of the fact that she is conforming so rigidly to her PC Politics of Shock the Conservative (like an annoying child) that the poor thing doesn’t even realize that she has no Self to define, because she’s so preoccupied with conforming; something that, based on her notion of an Artist, you’re not supposed to do.
I have to say, I’m beginning to soften somewhat concerning this lady, simply because I find her pretentions so amusing.