The media circus surrounding Aliza Shvarts, a senior art major at Yale, has sparked a national protest in response to her senior thesis presentation. Documented over a nine-month period, Shvarts artificially inseminated herself as often as possible, and then took legal, herbal remedies to induce a miscarriage, according to the Yale Daily News. According to Yale Daily News, "the tapes depict Shvarts, sometimes naked, sometimes clothed, alone in a shower stall bleeding into a cup." She designed a giant cube to hang from the ceiling, wrapped in plastic with the blood from her miscarriages between the sheets. The videos would be projected off the cube, and off the walls of the gallery.
Peter Wolfgang, the executive director of the Family Institute of Connecticut, has deemed the stark imagery "callous." Seeing the blood and video installations may bring up painful memories of miscarriages for those who have experience them.
Women's rights advocates have fought hard for women to legally be able to have abortion as an option. If abortion is legal, and a woman's body is her own, what's stopping a person from intentionally getting pregnant multiple times and performing self-inducing abortions? And what's stopping her from documenting the process for art?
Morals.
Her entire performance art may have just been to lie to the press about her actual project, just to get people talking. According to the Yale Daily News, spokespeople for the university have said it was all a hoax, but Shvarts maintains that it was not.
The project is not anything new. Abortion has always been a subject for artist commentary, as it is a sensitive subject. Art is a means of communication, and if a discussion was what Aliza Shvarts wanted, she got it.
If Shvarts's intent comes from a poorly thought out statement, her message may have gotten lost. To many people, her project seems like shock art. Yale may be trying to distance itself from a PR disaster. But it might not be that easy, as Shvarts has said that two professors in her department and the dean of the art school backed her project.
If that's the case, the university should be demonized as well for failing to advise Shvarts against permanently harming her body.
How Shvarts really carried out the project, miscarriage or menstruation, is beside the point. The discussion that was sparked has played right into Shvarts's hands.
Photo: Courtesy of Laron Fomby
