‘Performance artist” Pia Lindman is the Yale instructor who authorized and guided Aliza Shvarts’s proposed “abortion art” project for a senior art show in the 2007-2008 school year. Yale has once again engaged Lindman to teach during this academic year, to the university’s enduring shame.
Shvarts’s proposed project, as widely reported, consisted in repeatedly artificially inseminating herself, inducing possible miscarriages, and videotaping herself bleeding into a cup. Her plan was then to display her bodily fluids and presumably aborted fetuses in a plastic-wrapped ceiling installation, upon which she would also have projected the videos of said miscarriages.
As for the “scholarly” justification for this gruesome display, Shvarts explained in run-of-the-mill postmodern, victimological boilerplate that her intent was “to assert that often normative understandings of biological functions are a mythology … that creates the sexist, racist, ableist, nationalist, and homophobic perspective . . . .”
Under pressure from a public aghast at Shvarts’s plan, Yale eventually acted. University administrators acknowledged that the student’s proposal should never have been allowed and ruled that her exhibit would be cancelled unless she stated in writing that she had fabricated the miscarriages and pledged not to display human blood. Shvarts’s work was, in the end, barred from the exhibit. Thereafter, campus officials, in a show of backbone, declared they had taken “appropriate” — although undefined — punitive action against Lindman and another faculty member who had approved the project.
The only appropriate action for Yale would have been to fire Lindman for her deplorable judgment in approving a project that so trivialized abortion — and even constituted a potential biohazard. Lindman should have been fired, too, for her appalling lack of artistic judgment in not questioning, as feminist critic Charlotte Allen wryly observed, “whether plastic sheeting and videotapes of a naked undergraduate flaunting her presumed miscarriages add up to a work of art.”
Instead, a prestigious Ivy League university has once again endorsed a professor who conflates destructive — even potentially murderous — pornography with art, and who encourages her students to do the same.
The “aesthetic” and “scholarly” lessons Shvarts imbibed at Yale from Lindman and her ilk are far from aberrational. Art and literature departments across the country are infested by them. Charles Lane of the Washington Post recognized the kinship of Shvarts’s project with this broader academic fashion, calling her plan
. . . the reductio ad absurdum — or ad nauseam — of ideology and pedagogy that have been standard fare in the humanities at Yale and on many other campuses for years. Her supervisors . . . probably didn’t tell her no for the same reason that, in 2003, a New York University professor initially approved a student’s proposal to record two students having sex in front of the class. (The NYU administration later nixed it.)
The politicized obsession with race, gender and sexuality; the denigration of canonical works by “dead white males”; the callow mocking of convention; the notion that truth itself is merely a construct of power and self-interest — all characterize the study of art and literature in America’s colleges and universities. All were reflected in Shvarts’s rationale for her “installation.”
If this regnant “culture” in the academic humanities is one parent of Shvarts’s monstrous brainchild, a particularly destructive strain of performance art — body art — is the other. This widely varying “art” form, discussed in feminist Lucy R. Lippard’s 1995 book, The Pink Glass Swan, employs the artist’s own body, or other persons’ bodies, as subject and object of the artwork. Yves Klein, for example, has used nude women as “living brushes.” But the particular type of body art of which Shvarts conceived, contends art historian Lea Vergine, originated in 1962, in the “happenings” of the sadomasochistic Viennese school — in which practitioners subject themselves or others to discomfort, and even violence.
Examples of these “artistic performances” include Barry Le Va’s slamming himself into walls; Vito Acconci burning hair from his chest as part of an effort to develop a female breast; and Chris Burden throwing burning matches on his wife’s nude body. Recently, artists have displayed lice growing in their hair.
Women eventually took up violent body art, as well. Gina Pane has mutilated herself with razor blades, eaten until sick, and subjected herself to other tortures. In her erotic films, Rebecca Horn has surrounded herself with contraptions that resemble medieval torture devices. And Ana Mendieta has created cruel rape-obsessed works, wherein unsuspecting viewers enter a room or a wooded area to find her half-naked, bloody body.
This is the lineage of Shvarts’s sanguinary project — original only in that she, unlike most other female body artists, planned to use pregnancy and miscarriage as her principal medium. In her 1995 book, Lucy Lippard found this aspect of women’s performance art “curious,” opining that maybe “procreativity [would be] the next taboo to be tackled.”
Shvarts did not disappoint, tackling the procreativity taboo with a vengeance. To what extent did Lindman and other members of Yale’s art department tutor and encourage her in this repellent plan? Neither Shvarts nor Yale is telling. But one thing is certain: Yale’s failure to prevent Lindman and her kind from influencing impressionable undergraduates is testament to the university’s slavish cowardice in the face of a decadent and destructive ideological fashion.
– Candace de Russy is an expert on higher education who blogs at NRO’s “Phi Beta Cons.”