The real problem with Aliza Shvarts’s abortion project.
This is the Sex Issue, so no one really wants to read another article about Aliza Shvarts and her “abortifacient herbs.” And that very fact — the fact of your discomfort, reader — is why I’m writing this.
You see, the normative Harvard Independen Sex Issue — indeed, the normative sex-based publication — doesn’t include lots of prose on the unpleasant subjects of aborted matter and artificial insemination. This one does. The ambivalence of readers towards this article reflects back on a whole culture focused on the act of sex rather than the ambiguity surrounding sex’s association with reproduction.
…That’s how I would describe this article if I was Aliza Shvarts, anyway, although I couldn’t quite figure out how to work in “heteronormative,” “ontology,” and “destabilize the locus.” Shvarts had no such trouble in her explanation. “It creates an ambiguity that isolates the locus of ontology to an act of readership,” Shvarts wrote in the Yale Daily News. “It is the intention of this piece to destabilize the locus of that authorial act, and in doing so, reclaim it from the heteronormative structures that seek to naturalize it,” she says.
I have to say this clotted, scholarly explanation offends me more than the piece itself. The category of art that has been described as “transgressive,” into which Shvarts’s work can be placed, has a valuable place in the world of art — or perhaps it’s more accurate at this point to say that it once had a valuable place in the world of art.
One of the pioneers of the genre, Chris Burden, went to Yale in the ’60s. Burden had himself crucified on the hood of a Volkswagen Beetle and was shot in the left arm from a distance of five meters.
Naturally, Burden also found himself in trouble with institutional authorities; he was taken to a psychiatrist after his famous self-shooting. But there’s an important difference between Burden’s work and Shvarts’s — in Burden, it is always clear that the things people are witnessing are really happening. In the VW Beetle crucifixion piece, for instance, the fact that Burden was lying on a Beetle and that he was being crucified Jesus-style undoubtedly meant something. But the real point — the thing that’s brought across most clearly in Burden’s art — is how artificial the boundary between “art” and “real life” is. It hardly matters what gobbledygook Burden cooks up to explain himself; the fact remains that he’s being nailed to the hood of a car, and people of good conscience are supposed to stop these sorts of things.
And yet, they don’t. Burden made the point most strongly by placing himself prone under a sheet of glass in a museum. Burden’s plan was to remain motionless under the sheet until someone intervened: how long would it take before someone crossed the magic border of “art” to alleviate real human suffering and real danger? The answer: 45 hours.
John Waters, whose work is more familiar to the public, creates the same sort of discomfort in his trilogy of trash films. In Female Trouble, the drag queen Divine throws a “happening.” After bouncing on a trampoline and being declared “the most beautiful woman in the world,” Divine yells, “Who wants to be famous? Who wants to die for art?” One excited youngster yells, “I do!” Then Divine pulls out a gun and shoots him dead. No one needs an explanation of ontology, loci, and heteronorms to understand the satire in that scene. But to get the supposed point of Shvarts’s installation, you practically need a degree in gender studies; I still don’t understand where “heteronormativity” fits in.
Burden and Waters want to get people to stand by while terrible things happen. Who wants to die for art? Who wants to be a murderer? Shvarts doesn’t make the viewer complicit in her project; the viewer never has any choices to make at all. When we watch Waters’ masterpiece Pink Flamingos, there’s at least the choice of turning off the television and writing a Congressman. Plenty of people made that choice, but plenty of people didn’t; they went to midnight screenings of the film, toting jokey barf bags for use during the most graphic and disturbing scenes. The choice with Shvarts is much less interesting. It’s a choice of outrage or annoyance, and which reaction you choose has no consequence. There simply isn’t anything to be done about it.
The point Shvarts is making about reproduction and gender norms is banal and unclear. The choice between outrage and annoyance is also banal. I am annoyed rather than outraged, because I have a biological rather than spiritual concept of the ethics of abortion (and I think that Shvarts should receive academic credit; her advisors led her to expect credit, and it’d be unfair not to give it to her).
Whatever Shvarts did or did not abort had no consciousness. Shvarts harmed no one but herself. So I don’t think that what Shvarts did was an offense against God and nature. Instead, I think it was a pointless stunt. And I’m not on such a high horse that I’m going to pooh-pooh the large group of people who were simply disgusted. The reactions of pro-choice people are not, as has been alleged, interesting. Condemnation from pro-choice people is natural, because Shvarts’s project runs counter to their goal of providing safe reproductive services to women. The reactions of pro-life people are even less interesting, for obvious reasons.
If Shvarts’s intention had been to place a frame around the disgusting appetite for guilty titillation that the American public can evince when aroused by something like this, then at least there’d be something to it —turning the camera back on the watchers. But that isn’t what it’s about, or the prank would already be over, and Shvarts would already be cataloguing and satirizing news coverage. Instead, it’s about “ambiguity“ and the art of making a spectacle of oneself while spouting jargon.
The ideas with which Shvarts has papered her project are too academic and contrived to be effectively conveyed using a box of menstruum. That’s the problem, at the root. When people take in Shvarts’s project, they don’t think about gender norms. They think about their upset stomachs.
Sam Jack ’11 (sjack@fas) thinks that art should imitate life.