The New Nation - Internet Edition

Zeenat Khan

All eight Ivy league Universities in the United States are known world wide for their academic excellence. The respective universities demand their students to be at their very best by pushing them constantly challenging them in various fields of learning. They also provide them with opportunities to push themselves to be their very best in their particular chosen field and explore their intellectual as well as their creative abilities. There is hardly any limit to what a student can or cannot do. But one student at Yale university in New Haven, Connecticut has taken that privilege to an extreme, which is creating quite a buzz throughout the campus and outside by now!

With two members of my immediate family having attended two of the Ivy league colleges, I retain a special interest in them and follow up on the news through their Alumni magazines that come to my mailbox every month, and their daily publications. Recently, something caught my eye. On April 17, 2008, the headline of the Yale Daily News read, " For senior, abortion a medium for art, political discourse". The same story was corroborated in the Washington Post, and soon after, many media outlets online. After reading the article, I could not believe how far a student is willing to go in the name of self-expression. Some of you may have already read or heard about this recent story about art major Aliza Shvarts '08. From the look of her senior year art project display, one could perhaps conclude that through her outrageous "experiment", she was simply trying to make a straightforward statement; however, the way she went about it is mind boggling to me.

To those of you who are unaware of such things happening on a relatively quiet Northeast American college campus in the name of art, the actions of Aliza Shvarts may or may not have an impact. According to theYale Daily News, Shvarts, who is a graduating senior, used her own body as her senior year art project. Apparently, over the course of nine months, she impregnated herself several times by artificial insemination. The article also notes she claims to have taken drugs meant to induce her subsequent, and alleged, miscarriages. She also kept a video diary of her self-induced miscarriages in her bathtub, in order to display them as part of her project. Finally, she preserved her blood for future exhibition. The final tangible result of her experiment was supposed to be a display, conceived as a large cube hanging from the ceiling that is "wrapped in hundreds of feet of plastic sheeting containing blood from self-induced miscarriages mixed with Vaseline in order to prevent the blood from drying and to extend the blood throughout the plastic sheeting."

Shvarts carried out this bold experiment on her own, without consulting any medical professionals. When interviewed for The Yale Daily News, Shvarts said the idea behind her controversial project was not to shock people but to generate a debate "on the relationship between art and body". She was quoted as saying, " I hope it inspires some sort of discourse." She was certainly right about the potential for debate. Throughout Yale's campus, both art and non-art majors, and faculty alike exploded over this bizarre art experiment. As expected, the student pro-life faction was bound to react, but even the campus pro-choice group expressed surprise, if not disbelief, about Shvarts' method of experiment. Over the next week, adding confusion to the controversy, it became unclear whether Shvarts, in fact, literally carried out the project, as Yale spokeswoman Helaine Klasky released a statement suggesting Shvarts' project was, in fact, "creative fiction designed to draw attention to the ambiguity surrounding the form and function of a woman's body."

Then Shvarts responded with her own statement, explaining the project was not fiction, while suggesting she created " an intentional ambiguity [between] both the act and the objects", so viewers would be unclear as to whether she was actually pregnant or not for each cycle of her experiment. She concluded, "Art should be a medium for politics and ideologies, not just a commodity." She thought she was "creating a project that lives up to a standard of what art is supposed to be."

I think Shvarts took a calculated risk that simply backfired. In order to get a reaction from her fellow students in the art department and the world, she crossed various moral and social boundaries that are not often breached. As a result, she alienated many people who support creativity in any form, as they pondered what drives a young mind to take part in such a drastic experiment. We have a sort of multiple choice test question here. Is hers an

A) Artistic neurosis?

B) A new form of radical feminismtHer defiance in telling society that moral and social values have no importance to her?

C) Pure manipulation in the name of freedom of expression through art?

D) A woman doing with her own body, as she notes, whatever she deems fit?

My answer is both B and D. I strongly suspect that the idea behind this is likely a feminist theory gone askew: A female body does not have a utilitarian 'use' as defined by society. In the earliest forms of radical feminist thought, we find the basic idea that womens' bodies have been unjustly controlled by patriarchy, society and governments, religion, and economic systems, and defined to have a function, or a purpose rooted in production, whether of children or family-making. Womens' "roles" have been defined for centuries, and, as we all know, are still assumed to be locked in place in many societies.

The response of some strains of radical feminism is to encourage women to redefine their roles, and 'take power' or control the use and function of their own bodies, and moreover, to destroy the very notion that a woman, because she has reproductive organs, is expected to use them, to fulfill her 'duties' or take part in the endless march of creation.

Now, Shvarts explicitly drew on this seductive but difficult concept, but needed the masquerade of being an "artist" to introduce it to what she knew would be an unwilling audience. She tried to show that ultimately a woman decides what she wants to do with her body, and no one has a right to say whether one is right or wrong when making such a choice. I will call her, first, an extremist who disregarded her own physical health and took immense risk in order to prove her political agenda, which she claims is an artistic agenda.

Shvarts' project was declined entry in the senior art exhibition. Yale's college dean was outraged, and demanded a statement from Shvarts that her project was fiction, which she declined. Even though her project was given the green light by two art faculty members, it moreover failed to meet the hazy standards of what is considered appropriate in a university setting. As the moral debate over the project continues, the university came down with a decision that they thought no one could debate: the potential health risk of the project.

Yale's vice president noted the university would not "countenance any kind of public art that involves physical blood- as a health issue."

Though many famed performance artists are well-known for using their bodily fluids as the subject of their art, Shvarts, at end, was in an academic setting, where she potentially put other students at risk. Ultimately, I think Yale was looking for an objective out, to avoid either supporting or condemning the content of Shvarts' actual project, objectionable because of the process of making the final display ("ambiguous" or not), not the actual result.

As for the content of the project, as a mother of a child near Shvarts' age, it is foremost unfathomable to me that a young woman would willingly subject herself to such grave measures without any medical supervision. (I frankly suspect the sound mental state of such an individual.) Moreover, having bore a child, when I was just a bit older than Shvarts, that someone would have the audacity to trivialize a personal and sacred process, infuriates me.

I can intellectually understand her "point", her political agenda, but I also loathe the way she went about it. Perhaps it is impossible, not only as a woman and a mother, but as a human being, to be objective and impassive about Shvarts' action.

Perhaps Shvarts may have done incalculable damage to her own body (which is her own choice), and may possibly never be able to bear children. As for the fetuses that she may or may not have begun to bear, I will refrain from offering my thoughts on that entirely separate debate here. Most upsetting to me is that she had no regard for her own well-being, as she could have died through her reckless acts.

Shvarts wanted to create this spectacle, and we have watched and read about it in disbelief. One ideally should not have to take such extreme measures, and put one's health at risk to make waves. I think, at end, most were not impacted or impressed by her work, but instead quickly dismissed it as yet another shocking stunt in the name of art.