Today the Yale Daily News published a story on art major Aliza Shvarts’ senior thesis project , “a documentation of a nine-month process during which she artificially inseminated herself ‘as often as possible’ while periodically taking abortifacient drugs to induce miscarriages. Her exhibition will feature video recordings of these forced miscarriages as well as preserved collections of the blood from the process.” Controversy has risen around the senior’s project among many who find her work unethical, even among pro-choice populations, as in the case of Sara Rahman ‘09 who holds the opinion that “Shvarts is abusing her constitutional right to do what she chooses with her body.”
Shvarts states in the article that she stands by her project and believes she’s “creating a project that lives up to the standard of what art is supposed to be.” Shvarts intends for the project to provoke inquiry into the connection between art and the human body and insists the piece was not intended to shock or scandalize.
But a press release from Yale states, “The entire project is an art piece, a creative
fiction designed to draw attention to the ambiguity surrounding form and function of a woman’s body.” It seems Ms. Schvarts used art’s potential to scandalize an audience for the purpose of creating meaningful dialogue around important issues.
Of course, this sort of tension between an artist’s intentions and the audience’s reactions is nothing new in the world of contemporary art. In 1999, the Brooklyn Museum exhibit “Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection” featured works such as Damien Hirst’s “A Thousand Years” composed of flies, maggots, a cow’s head, sugar, and water; another Hirst work, “This Little Piggy went to Market, This Little Piggy Stayed Home” a split pig carcass floating in formaldehyde; Marc Quinn’s, “Self,” a bust of the artist made from nine pints of his frozen blood; and, most controversial, artist Chris Ofili’s work titled “The Holy Virgin Mary;” it is this work — a depiction of a black Madonna adorned with elephant dung and sexually-explicit photos — that was deemed by New York’s Mayor Rudolph Giuliani “anti-Catholic.” The exhibit garnered national attention when the city acted to revoke the museum’s lease and remove its municipal funding unless it took down the show. Read more about this landmark exhibit, which incited national debates about public funding of the arts and censorship, on NewsHour’s report from October 8, 1999, “The Art of Controversy”.
[Online NewsHour: The Art of Controversy -- October 8, 1999]
