When it isn't enough to be controversial

Abortion as Art form at Yale Quote: Art major Aliza Shvarts '08 wants to make a statement. Beginning next Tuesday, Shvarts will be displaying her senior art 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. [...] The "fabricators," or donors, of the sperm were not paid for their services, but Shvarts required them to periodically take tests for sexually transmitted diseases. She said she was not concerned about any medical effects the forced miscarriages may have had on her body. The abortifacient drugs she took were legal and herbal, she said, and she did not feel the need to consult a doctor about her repeated miscarriages. Shvarts declined to specify the number of sperm donors she used, as well as the number of times she inseminated herself. Art major Juan Castillo '08 said that although he was intrigued by the creativity and beauty of her senior project, not everyone was as thrilled as he was by the concept and the means by which she attained the result. "I really loved the idea of this project, but a lot other people didn't," Castillo said. [...] The display of Schvarts' project will feature a large cube suspended from the ceiling of a room in the gallery of Green Hall. Schvarts will wrap hundreds of feet of plastic sheeting around this cube; lined between layers of the sheeting will be the blood from Schvarts' self-induced miscarriages mixed with Vaseline in order to prevent the blood from drying and to extend the blood throughout the plastic sheeting. Since the function of (static-Visual) Art has now been divorced more or less completely from its product, and both from its craft, what is left for Art to do? Political art is a joke - antisystemic actors and the world-system elite share a complete disregard for it. Of course, artists can still *piss people off*, and that seems to be about all that (at least most of them) do. Ms. Schvarts probably thinks she is making some sort of political statement here, something about choice, or a Woman's Body, (pick a liberal feminist hobby horse and run). What she is actually doing is using the resources of a kind of superexploitation that is only beginning to be adumbrated (the US relative to its economic hosts) in order to re-present her own blood (in a double sense - actual blood and her aborted progeny) in its commodity form. I wonder if, as a man, I am entitled to, uh, risk daring hypothesis*: despite its feminist pretensions, Schvarts' work is actually the latest word in misogyny. What we are treated to is a glimpse at the brutal inner kernel of the liberal feminist ego ideal - a bloody, masochistic 'death Mother' whose function is to convert anonymous sperm into defective, non-functional children. This is why, pace the claims of what passes for a left in this country liberal feminism cannot be safely quarantined from the rest of Enlightenment poisons. Just as populist democracy takes the malformed images of the peasantry developed by the old feudal elites and says "wow, I want to BE that", so does liberal feminism identify wholly with fundamentally misogynist libidinal structures. The thesis is that all women ARE mothers or whores, with the proviso that whores are awesome. *Zizek said this, in these words, in the Pervert's Guide to Cinema. I aped him because I think its funny.