Art Culture

Monday

Art Reviews, Controversial Art

Ms. Carry Art

How would you feel about viewing Aliza Shvarts’ newest artistic creation? It’s a mixture of performance art, language arts and visual art; in this work she artificially inseminated herself and forced miscarriages upon herself, with abortifacient medication, not once –not twice; how about as many times in nine-months as she could following the following procedure. Using a syringe, between the 9th and 15th days of her menstrual cycle, she would artificially inseminate her cervix within 30 minutes of collecting sperm from donors. There is a very graphic account of this in her words as a Yale Daily News article.

Before I continue, if you don’t know who Aliza Shvarts is, it’s time you learned. Aliza is not just a senior in Davenport College, Yale, with awards for citizenship and leadership; she is also an acclaimed artist on many levels and is even regarded as “the first great conceptual artist of the internet age.” Her newest creation is intended to be a large cube suspended in the center of a room. The cube will be wrapped in hundreds of feet of plastic-wrap; smeared in between each layer of plastic will be blood from her self-induced miscarriages. Vaseline will be smeared with the blood to preserve it. Then a video will be projected onto all four sides of the cube showing her in a bathroom in the process of miscarrying her potential children. This was her senior project.

Aliza believes “art should be a medium for politics and ideologies, not just a commodity.” That’s what’s she has done with her latest piece. The common opinion, however, is that her art trivializes abortion. A less found opinion is by the Madonna-inspired jewelry creator of Onch Hard Candy who created her own “art” of sorts in the form of a necklace. It’s called, “Aliza Shvarts,” and it costs $45.00 and doesn’t come with the chain.

Aliza believes that her repeated self-induced miscarriages are indicative of an ideology she has that creates ambiguity in the branch of metaphysics pertaining to nature and transfers it from an idea to something able to be read. Furthermore, she believes personally that the most important aspect of this art is being overlooked, although she recognizes the political aspect of it; she thinks that the fact that nobody can distinguish the mixtures of blood from each separate abortion is indicative of an amazing impossibility, “[and has] not been discussed thus far." She prides the ambiguity of the entire work because of its cause for dispute. Who is to argue that the ovum was fertilized or not? She argues that the blood itself is cause for dispute; who is to say that it isn’t blood; who is to say that it isn’t period; who is to say that it isn’t miscarriage? She makes a statement saying, “the act of identification or naming — the act of ascribing a word to something physical — is at its heart an ideological act.” Her art is a representation of this. She retains authorship of naming her blood, period or miscarriage as such and then it forms as such in the perspective of its viewers.

She defines her art even further saying that the entire miscarriage is seemingly nothing more than a “linguistic and political reality” derived from her act of naming or authoring the work (a gruesome 9-month escapade.) She deems the purpose of this work is to strike at the foundations of the view of the heteronormative structures that seek to neutralize the act in itself. “An intervention of our normative understanding of “the real” accompanying politics of convention.” This relates directly to me because in my blog I also try and stir people who seem to be in the dark about the impact perspective and reality has on the everyday, for everyday. She is directly challenging the forces that I simply allow to exist, but trying to teach awareness of it, regarding conventions of typical “normalcy.”

It’s a profound statement and perhaps this was the only way that she could make it. Wanda France, the president of the National Right to Life calls Aliza a serial murderer.

Yale calls her a performance artist. I call her an intellectual, an artist and a psychopath. What do you call her?