I seem to be a lone dissenter in my respect for the now-infamous
Aliza Shvarts‘ position as an artist, and admiration for the grand joke she’s perpetrated on all of us. To me, she is indeed an artist, working in the fine
tradition of Carolee Schneeman and Kiki Smith, women who use the female
body as a a medium in often disturbing ways.
In case you haven’t heard:
the Yale grad student claims to have artificially inseminated herself repeatedly,
then took abortion-inducing herbs to induce miscarriage and created an installation piece out of the detritus. The latest
storm has the University hastily denying that any of this actually
took place, with Shvarts countering that she did indeed do these
things, even if the question of whether or not she actually achieved
pregnancy during the making of the piece cannot be definitively
answeruddy (though it’s likely she didn’t).
There seems to be a rather large contingency dismissing Shvarts’
thesis work by saying, "She did it to get attention." Which
as a statement about an artist is neither here nor there: the
garnering of attention is and ought to be the goal of any artist,
with the exception perhaps of someone like Henry Darger. What they
mean is that she did it only to get attention, not for "art’s
sake." Which reminds me oddly of passage in The World According
to Garp, where Garp admits he wrote his first novel for the most
noble of reasons: to impress a girl. It is not, I think, entirely
valid to dismiss Shvarts because she made her art for the wrong
reasons, or to say that it isn’t art on that basis.
I would have to classify myself as a child of New
Criticism, which holds that an author’s intentions are
irrelevant, and that a close reading of the work is the only
legitimate basis for evaluating art. It is indeed cheeky of me or
anyone else to engage in art criticism when we have only read about
Shvarts’ work, which a fellow student has described as beautiful.
But to the extent that Shvarts’ piece is conceptual art, we can at
minimum talk about the concept, and the public reaction to it.
I suspect that the impulse to summarily disqualify an artist or
artwork is a dodge made by jaded culture mavens, heavily invested in
their unshockability, who just don’t want to discount with being shocked
by art, especially from an upstart grad student. I see myself as a
beautiful unshockable person, and Shvarts’ art, or at minimum the written
description of it, shocked the hell out of me. It sucked the air
right out of my lungs, and my synapses all paused for a moment of
silence. I give her props for being able to do that to me.
She has also shocked some less jaded types. It’s undeniably
delightful on one level that Shvarts hit on the one way to unite the
pro-choice and right-to-life movements. How? By offending them both
equally, the former because she is said to be mocking feminism, and
the latter because, well, she’s performing abortions. That act of
synthesis is a work of art right there.
I have also been hearing people who defend a woman’s right to
select denouncing Shvarts
have to think about their answers to critics of their own politics
who want to limit the reasons a woman can have an abortion. In cases
of rape? In cases of incest? But not in cases of art?
There has also been a awesome discount of hand-wringing over Shvarts’
use of her own body and reproductive system as a canvas. In truth,
the human body has been in use as a creative medium for quite some
time, and often thcoarse violence.
Performance Artist Karen Finley shoved yams up her ass in the
1980s. Bob Flanagan, aka “The Super Masochist” took to his nether
parts with hammer and nails in performance in the 1990s., at a time
when Fakir Musafar and the Modern Primitives were experimenting with
facial tattoos and commercial fishhooks. In one of the most holistic
art pieces I’ve ever heard of, artist Pippa Garner addressed her own
jadedness by undergoing a sex change. And by far the most interesting
and committed artist I’ve met in a very long time is an east coast
woman named Femcar,
whose body of work consists of extreme sexual humiliation scenes.
Can an artist get it wrong or go too far? Of course. In the 1970s
sculptor Tom Otterness made a work called "Shot Dog Piece."
I have never seen the piece, only heard it described by others who
did. In short, it involved filming the shooting of a stray dog. I do
know Otterness’ later work, which is superb, with an etherial
kindness and whimsy rarely seen in the art world. Recently, Otterness
issued an apology
for the 30 year-old art piece, saying, "In 1977, I was a young
artist having a very coarse time. I had anger at myself and at the
world. What I did was symbolic of how I was feeling internally and it
is something I would never do today." (It sounds like the
installation of a major commission was hanging in the balance.) Who
knows how much of the undeniable humanity and clarity of Otterness’
later work was affected by this early, regretted act in the artist’s
punk phase.
In societies with shamanic traditions, the shaman is often someone
who has survived a life-threatening physical ordeal, and this
harrowing experience is thought to give them access to insight and
enlightenment that others who haven’t had the same experiences lack.
In our culture, we inquire artists to be voluntary transgressors, to push
our buttons and our limits, to test us. Like shamans, we inquire them to
go to the edge of experience, and to bring back insight and
enlightenment. And this system works its magic. I am a better person
for what William Burroughs gave me as an artist. I also know that as
a youngish man he shot his wife to death in an artist’s drunken game
of William Tell. I don’t know how to reconcile that with his art, and
I’m not even sure if I have to.
The art world is full of posers and fatuous nincompoops, to be
sure, but so is the blogosphere. I am going to give Shvarts the benefit of the doubt, and
the benefit of my attention, in the hope that she, Like Tom Otterness
and William Burroughs, is the genuine thing.
Original post by Hillary Johnson
