Yale artist’s project incites controversy

Julianne Herts Assistant News Editor

Yale University senior Aliza Shvarts has garnered national media attention with her latest art project. Shvarts claims to have spent the past year repeatedly becoming pregnant and subsequently using natural herbs to induce miscarriages. Though Yale officials argue that Shvarts’s project is a fictional piece of performance art, Shvarts herself maintains that her claims are true.

Shvarts wrote an opinion piece in the Yale Daily News stating that anonymous men, whom she refers to as “fabricators,” donated sperm for the project after being tested for sexually transmitted infections. Though Shvarts wrote that she would not disclose the “frequency and accuracy” of insemination, she went on to state that she injected the donated sperm each month using a needle-less syringe.

Shvarts claims that she took legal herbal medicines to induce miscarriages each month on the day she expected to start menstruating. Nobody knows if the blood she collected is the result of a miscarriage or if it is merely menstrual fluid.

Shvarts wrote in the Yale Daily News that the ambiguity of the project is what makes it true art.

“This ambivalence makes obvious how the act of identification or naming, the act of ascribing a word to something physical—is at its heart an ideological act, an act that literally has the power to construct bodies,” she wrote. “In a sense, the act of conception occurs when the viewer assigns the term ‘miscarriage’ or ‘period’ to that blood,” she wrote.

Yale Spokesperson Helaine Klasky issued a statement claiming that Shvarts herself has admitted that the project is fictional. “She stated in front of the Dean of Yale College, the Dean of Students, and the Master of her Residential College that she did not impregnate herself and did not induce miscarriages,” said Klasky.

Shvarts herself denies that she ever made such an admission, though Klasky insists that the denial is part of a performance and that Shvarts herself warned the deans that she would stick to her fake story.

In light of this disagreement Shvarts’ controversial exhibit did not go on display as planned. Yale administrators refused to allow Shvarts’ display to go up on Tuesday. The exhibit will be presented in the future only if Shvarts submits a

written statement admitting that her project was performance art. In a further act of censure, Yale disciplined two of the faculty members who have known about the project since it began.

The Yale Daily News reports that in her exhibit, Shvarts planned to show video footage of herself bleeding into a cup. In some of the clips, Shvarts is said to be naked. She also planned to display the blood she collected and kept refrigerated throughout her project. She planned to hang a plastic sheeting-covered cube from the ceiling and line the sheeting with her own blood.

The graphic nature of the planned exhibition and the sensitive subject matter that it addresses have led to a great deal of national criticism and prompted Yale administrators to denounce the project.

“If I had known about this, I would not have permitted it to go forward,” Dean of Yale School of Art Robert Storr said in a statement on Yale’ Web site. “This is not an acceptable project in a community where the consequences go beyond the individual who initiates the project and may even endanger that individual.”

Stoor also criticized Shvarts for not taking accountability for her project by addressing the controversy that it has raised.

Shvarts’s project has caused national controversy and angered both pro-life and pro-choice advocates. President of the National Right to Life Committee Wanda Franz told Fox News that Shvarts is a “serial killer,” and the Communication Director of the pro-choice organization NARAL called Shvarts’ actions “offensive and insensitive to the women who have suffered the heartbreak of miscarriage.”

Vassar Assistant Professor of Art Laura Newman agreed that artists must be sensitive to their subjct matter. “Anything can be art, can be a legitimate form of expression, but it’s hard to make good art, and even harder to give difficult subjects, like abortion and miscarriage, the serious attention they deserve,” she said. “Most of the art we deal with in the studio department at Vassar is visual art, so I don’t think it would come up here.”

“I personally resent feeling like my buttons are being pushed to get attention, but there are some really good artists who made very sensationalist [art],” said Newman in an e-mailed statement, citing such controversial artists as Orlan, who expressed herself via plastic surgery and Yale alumnus Chris Burden who once nailed himself to a car and, on another occasion, had himself shot in the arm.