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April 2008
Books The New Criterion  The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art  Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse  Art’s Prospect: The Challenge of Tradition in an Age of Celebrity  Experiments Against Reality: The Fate of Culture in the Postmodern Age  Tenured Radicals, Revised: How Politics has Corrupted our Higher Education  Counterpoints: 25 Years of The New Criterion on Culture and the Arts  The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America  Against the Idols of the Age  Lengthened Shadows: America and Its Institutions in the Twenty-First Century  The Survival of Culture: Permanent Values in a Virtual Age  Physics and Politics, by Walter Bagehot, edited with an Introduction by Roger Kimball |
April 18, 2008 6:43 AM
Yale, abortion, and the limits of artI was just about to sit down to write about Aliza Shvarts, the Yale art student whose senior project, The Yale Daily News reported yesterday, was a piece of performance art that recorded “a nine-month process during which [Shvarts] artificially inseminated herself ‘as often as possible’ while periodically taking abortifacient drugs to induce miscarriages. Her exhibition will feature video recordings of these forced miscarriages as well as prepared collections of the blood from the process.” Disgusting, no? The explosion of outrage in the blogosphere yesterday showed that there was considerable unanimity about that. Well, it seems that Shvarts was lying—perpetrating a “hoax” is the way it is being reported. “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,” a Yale University spokeswoman said, relief wafting off the page as a public relations disaster is narrowly avoided. That news made me feel a little better. But not much. Why? Peter Wolfgang, the executive director of the Family Institute of Connecticut, put his finger on part of the reason: “I’m astounded by this woman’s callousness,” Wolfgang said. “There are thousands of women in this country who are dealing with the pain of having had an abortion, with the trauma of having suffered a miscarriage. For her to make light of that for her own purposes is just beyond words.” True, true. And there is the further wrinkle that Shvarts is sticking by her original story—more or less. According to a piece in today’s Yale Daily News, Shvarts replied that the University’s statement about her work was “ultimately inaccurate.” “Ultimately,” eh? The Daily News report went on to note that Shvarts reiterated that she engaged in the nine-month process she publicized on Wednesday in a press release that was first reported in the News: repeatedly using a needleless syringe to insert semen into herself, then taking abortifacient herbs at the end of her menstrual cycle to induce bleeding. Thursday evening, in a tour of her art studio, she shared with the News video footage she claimed depicted her attempts at self-induced miscarriages. Well, that is not quite accurate. Certainly, the whole idea of the “piece” was morally repellent. Certainly, Yale’s response was a masterpiece of evasion. “Had these acts been real,” their statement continued, “they would have violated basic ethical standards and raised serious mental and physical health concerns.” You don’t say? Here’s a question: what action would Yale be prepared to take if it turns out that Shvarts has “violated” the above mentioned “basic ethical standards”? And what, by the way, was the standard being violated? I wonder, for example, whether the Yale spokesman would say that abortion itself violated a basic ethical standard? Or maybe the violation requires first deliberately impregnating oneself? (But why would that affect the “basic ethical standard” involved?) Or maybe it was videotaping the performance that was the problem? I know that in the universe occupied by Ivy League academics, the spectacle of a woman repeatedly inseminating herself, quaffing abortifacient drugs (“herbal”ones, though: we’re all organic environmentalists here), and then video taping the resultant mess poses a problem. I mean, in that universe there really are basic ethical standards: Thou shalt not smoke, for example. Thou shalt not support support the war in Iraq. Thou shalt not vote Republican. There really are some things that are beyond the pale. But when it comes to “art”: oh, that’s a tricky one. Shvarts “is an artist and has the right to express herself through performance art,” the Yale spokeswoman said. But doesn’t it depend on the nature of the performance? Today’s Yale Daily News has some details: [W]hile some news stories late Thursday dismissed Shvarts’s exhibition as a wholesale hoax, the Davenport senior showed elements of her planned exhibition to News reporters, including 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. It was all part of a project that Shvarts said had the backing of the dean of her residential college and at least two faculty members within the School of Art.
A juror in the obscenity trial over Robert Mapplethorpe’s notorious photographs the S&M homosexual underworld memorably summed up the paralyzed attitude Orwell described. Acknowledging that he did not like Mapplethorpe’s rebarbative photographs, he nonetheless concluded that “if people say it’s art, then I have to go along with it.” “If people say it’s art, then I have to go along with it.” It is worth pausing to digest that terrifying comment. It is also worth confronting it with a question: Why do so many people feel that if something is regarded as art, they “have to go along with it,” no matter how offensive it might be? Perhaps—just possibly—Aliza Shvarts has reminded us how untrue that statement is. If so, we are in her debt.
Comments (30)vanderleun :Richard Whalen :Mr. Kimball, I was re-listening to your book: Art’s Prospect, last night. And posted this comment over at NewsBusters. “To paraphrase from Roger Kimball's brilliant and biting book Art's Prospect (I don't know if I should bark or yawn.) This is merely a symptom typical of decades of inanity, which was foisted on the public by Duchamp and then popularized by Andy Warhol and his legion of art minions, a happening in performance art of "time out of mind", or just out of their minds.” Understandably a review by a middle aged man who delivers auto glass, will probably not rank up there with the New York Times, but hope I got some of it right. I apologize if I misstated your thoughts and will make any necessary corrections. The following may sound a bit Zarathustrian in its proclamation: Art is Dead. I’m afraid that nobody really cares anymore. If Art is not dead it is at least in a moribund torpor. Many people like myself substitute the ordinariness of work for a once beloved dream to pursue beauty through the plastic arts and have finally realized we’re too late. The seats were long ago taken by Shv-artists, like Shvart. So what is left but to hack out Sunday paintings in our spare time, while the other anointed artists dribble blood. Paul :Interesting, this, coming as it does after my very recent visit to our great Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), the relevant entrance to which is guarded by a de Kooning "sculpture" that is, unfortunately, NOT named "Megaturd." There's no doubt that Ms. Shvartz's genital-reproductive "performance" must be significantly uglier and is surely more disgusting than the usual, merely pretentious, "contemporary" offerings of our Museum. The latter are more often just silly or ridiculous. Hence the question: whose fault? Roger sounds like he thinks it's mostly the postmodern, PC, academic left and the rich morons who buy what it applauds. But I would like to plant my own subversive idea here: some of the fault may like among the intellectual champions of (now outmoded) high modernism, who half a century ago convinced the culture that shock, silliness, and ugliness can -- all by themselves -- have deep meaning and therefore qualify as art. Ken O'Banion :Mr. Kimball: Dr. James Baxter :Very simply Aliza Shvarts and those that supported and approved this so-called 'artwork' are moral, aesthetic, and cultural philistines of the highest, (or should that be lowest?), order. I agree that modernism, and its ghastly progeny post-modernism, mixed with a toxic dose of liberal 'pieties' have a great deal to answer for in our collective descension into both cultural and societal perversity and degeneracy. See the insightful English essayist Theodore Dalrymple for more on this topic, as well as the excellent Roger Kimball - of course! Billums :The Austrian 'artist' Rudolf Schwarzkogler pulled the same rebarbative nonsense back in 1972, and it was just as fake (thanks be to God). This was merely a distaff version of it. LSD :I suggest you not refer to her by name. -It's not important and it's what this is all about. Instead, you could effectively talk about the story by referring to 'that student at Yale, who....' At some point the signature became essential to the value of work. It's a sad commentary that art seems to be more about celebrity than anything inherent. The irony is that this ugliness has been wrought by the beholders. It's interesting to note that art's most incandescent bloom was fostered via the patronage of a single-minded entity with a specific agenda. Art education often starts with the study of the Renaissance and glorifies the struggle against the rules with the apex being found when one breaks all the rules. But it was the rules that framed the struggle and made the art meaningful. Van :"Here’s a question: what action would Yale be prepared to take if it turns out that Shvarts has “violated” the above mentioned “basic ethical standards”? And what, by the way, was the standard being violated? " What was the basic ethical standard being violated? Why, drawing too much attention to the real work of a modern university education, of course! That's not for such 'public' consumption, these visible things are to be done off and after campus, lest people - parents with wallets, alumni donors - find it too difficult to ignore what they know is really going on, on campus. Shouting people down, making political statements, denigrating America … that’s all easily covered over as ‘youthful antics’, but this… showing what it all really means, showing that it all really does mean something - that is an inexcusable ethical lapse. The standards of deludable offense simply must be observed. Frances Moyer :You are all talking about art. What about a lost soul? The depths of self-hatred and depravity here are bottomless. It is heartbreaking and nauseating. The beauty, sacrifice, and joy of motherhood (and fatherhood, too, remember the objectification of the paternal role)is desecrated. We need to pray for this pathetic young woman and all who have thus damaged their God-given souls and bodies, as well and for 48,000,000 unborn children (in the US). Thank you Mr. Kimball for you blog site. Van :"You are all talking about art. What about a lost soul?" But Art IS talking about the soul - not only talking about it, but displaying it. What resonates with the viewer of Art, describes that portion of their soul. And what the artist executes into their Art, displays what motivates their soul - and therein lays the source of the visceral "Oh! No!" that we all felt on hearing of this 'project'; the reflexive drawing back of your conscious attention, as when you hear of a school bus accident, you can't let your mind go too far into such images. This person did this... with guidance, deliberately... purposively, under cover of education and art, and with it not only are fatherhood, motherhood and childhood assaulted, but all thoughts of what Matthew Arnold called “Sweetness and Light” or the Good, the Beautiful and the True – all are devoured by the mere concept of this. The thought of what must be missing from her mangled soul is more horrifying than her project, or even of thinking upon a school bus accident. Taking that darkness out from within her and displaying it for all to see… that is not art, that is a black hole of soul. Careful not to let your mind approach too near it. Glenn Kenny :Your bracketed observation on "L'Age d'Or,"—in which you state that the film contains "graphic shots of a woman defacating" (which I suppose you might have gleaned from Henry Miller's account of the film, or an account of Henry Miller's account), is incorrect. The film contains no such shots. The most explicit thing lead actress Lya Lys does in the film is suck on the toe of a statue of a male figure. I can tell you this on account of actually having, you know, seen the film, several times. Also, there is no account of such shots ever having existed in any version of the film in any of the historical literature on Bunuel or Dali. Indeed, "Un Chien Andalou" notwithstanding (and Orwell seems to conflate the two films in "Benefit of Clergy"), Bunuel himself was well known for his general dislike of "explicit" imagery, preferring outrage via implication. The slander against "L'Age d'Or" has been repeated several times, but it's never really stuck, as the film is out there for the viewing and the material you cite is not in the film. I just figured, as you seem to value your reputation as a scholar, that you might have some interest in keeping the record straight. My, my, Dali really caused poor George to lose his sense of humor though, didn't he? I prefer Nabokov's characterization of Dali: "Norman Rockwell's twin brother kidnapped by gypsies." John N. Frary :How they sweat and grunt looking for newer and nastier sensations, but they are running up against the human faculty for adaptation. The whole transgressive enterprise is headed towards the dead-end of weary disgust. And then what? Glenn Kenny :I was wondering why, exactly, it was taking precisely so long for my perfectly civil comment on your post to go up...so I did a little Googling and discovered you've been flogging this nonsense about "L'Age d'Or" since 2004, at least. Self-plagiarism's not a crime, and I suppose I understand that you're going to want to use the same ammo every time you set out to make the same point, but man, what errant hackery. Might be worth making a blog post of my own out of it. Or not. Tony Ryan :
Stop writing and talking about this irrelevant idiot please so she can disappear back up her own derrier where she belongs. Thank you. Chris Ballance :The best way to deal with this topic is just to stop using Shvart's name and here after refer to her as simply as "the art student from Yale." That way its possible to deride Yale for its role in enabling people like Shvart while at the same time sentencing Shvart to eventual obscurity.
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On Soul, Shvarts "Art" and Wrapping Crap in Plastic @ AMERICAN DIGEST
Apr 18, 2008 10:01 AM