...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.
My moral qualms with this are many, but I think Michael J. Lewis, in the Wall Street Journal, has pointed out some of the artistic problems with the piece:
Immaturity, self-importance and a certain confused earnestness will always loom large in student art work. But they will usually grow out of it. What of the schools that teach them? Undergraduate programs in art aspire to the status of professional programs that award MFA degrees, and there is often a sense that they too should encourage the making of sophisticated and challenging art, and as soon as possible. Yale, like most good programs, requires its students to achieve a certain facility in drawing, although nowhere near what it demanded in the 1930s, when aspiring artists spent roughly six hours a day in the studio painting and life drawing, and an additional three on Saturday.
Given the choice of this arduous training or the chance to proceed immediately to the making of art free of all traditional constraints, one can understand why all but a few students would take the latter. But it is not a choice that an undergraduate should be given. In this respect — and perhaps only in this respect — Ms. Shvarts is the victim in this story.
I think that Lewis is right—the option to stray into "making art free of all traditional constraints" should not be granted to undergraduates. On some level, it's a matter of mastering the fundamentals before moving on. (I would say this should be the case for not only the visual arts, but for the performing arts and writing, as well.) On another level, it's a matter of maturity—Ms. Shvarts, I think, suffers from pretension. This is true of most undergraduates...but it becomes problematic when it leads to inducing several miscarriages.
7 comments:
That's the most interesting take I've read on this matter (yours and the WSJ's), and I've read a few. What you did not mention is that Yale did recently decide it would no longer be exhibiting her piece, which must be quite the blow to the girl, although she will undoubtedly justify the effort and (pain?) she must have undergone in order to make the project a reality.
Whether or not this girl is defensible, that is a good question. Avant-garde art, according to Matei Calinescu, must, over anything, create a aesthetic of crisis where there is none.
In a socio-anthropological context, it is a rebellion against legitimate, authorized culture. That's why you have people like the recently deceased composer Karlheinz Stockhausen who said that the 9/11 attacks were "the greatest work of art one can imagine." He later apologized but had already been blacklisted.
Let's consider this girl's situation from another angle: must avant-garde art be ethical (in essence, "good")? I'm not answering this question; I'm only posing it. It seems that we've set art on a pedestal, as something to be hung in the context of museums, socially safe places. Embassies within enemy territory. We praise art because it forces us to "experience"-- a phenomenon less and less evident in a culture of unchecked, rampant amusement.
Can Ms. Shvarts have done something both wrong and artistic?
Jason,
Two comments:
The only sympathy that I can extend to Ms. Shvarts is that she has fallen victim to the shortcomings of the age (see WSJ quote). She's received much more attention than most artists can dream of, which, on some level seems to be the point of avant-garde art or at least contemporary "shock art" to put it crudely. She claims that she wanted to deconstruct ideas on miscarriage, or at least to force people to think about it. Well, I think she's forced people to think about it. They just haven't reached the same conclusion as her. And yes, Yale declined to show the piece. But as for the effort she went through...I suppose it depends on whether you view it as a piece of art or a monstrosity (is that too harsh?). If the latter is true, it's almost like saying, "It's too bad we didn't get to carry out the terrorist attack—we went through so much effort planning it." (In *The Big Lebowski* are we to feel sympathy for the German girl who cuts off her toe in order to defraud Lebowski of money?)
Which, in a round about way, brings me to my next point. According to the "social-anthropological context" perhaps we should grant a terrorist sympathy for not exploding his bomb, for that could be art, "organized rebellion against legitimate, authorized culture." Which you grant with the reference to Stockhausen.
I think it comes down to ideas of what art should be. I tend to think that art should bring to light the true, the good, and the beautiful. That's not to say that all art need be neo-classical or romantic...that would be awful. It is to say, though, that all art should bring us closer to truth, which I think is beautiful. Perhaps I think that Ms. Shvartz wanted to bring us closer to truth...but that is all I can grant her.
Art should bring us closer to truth; I agree. The fact that it does may be beautiful, but as far as the truth itself being beautiful...
What's beautiful about a woman's arm being hewn from her body in Rawanda? Yet it is the truth. It certainly is done in rebellion (that is, the attempt of a minority culture to subvert or change the official). Is this also avant garde? My answer would be no. I'm not saying that this girl deserves sympathy. If she gets anything, it'll be pity. I do feel pity for the toeless German girl. Sorrow mixed with compassion.
Be careful; I never granted Stockhausen anything. I did not defend his comment. I only explained how one might misconstrue the avant-garde by invoking a single one of its characteristics as its sole prerequisite. If you've ever read Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, you will probably detest the event of 9/11 just as much as someone who lost a family member there.
I agree that it should bring us closer to truth. I do not believe that that truth must be beautiful. I do think that truth will be catalytic in a positive direction--in the direction of autonomy. Provocation or "shock" is not the point. I quote Calinescu again:
"The avant-gardist, far from being interested in novelty [shock] as such, or in novelty in general, actually tries to discover or invent new forms, aspects, or possibilities of crisis. Aesthetically, the avant-garde attitude implies the bluntest rejection of such traditional ideas as those of order, intelligibility, and even success […] art is supposed to become an experience—deliberately conducted—of failure and crisis. If crisis is not there, it must be created."
If we can accept this as a definition, the question still stands. What are the boundaries? What separates art from, as you put it, monstrosity. What is the major difference if they both induce thought and experience?
JMH
I have no hip books of cultural criticism to refer to...but I would like to re-quote part of the WSJ article:
Even Ms. Shvarts's central proposition -- that the discomfort we feel at the word miscarriage is itself a species of linguistic oppression -- is a relic of the highly politicized literary theory of the late 1980s. As she wrote in an op-ed published in last Friday's Yale Daily News:
"The reality of miscarriage is very much a linguistic and political reality, an act of reading constructed by an act of naming -- an authorial act. It is the intention of this piece to destabilize the locus of that authorial act, and in doing so, reclaim it from the heteronormative structures that seek to naturalize it."
In other words, one must act to shatter the rigid lattice of categories that words impose upon us. Although the accompanying jargon is fashionable (or was a few years ago), it is essentially a portentous recycling of the idea behind Marcel Duchamp's 1917 urinal, which became a "Fountain" when he declared it so.
*****
I don't want to be an avant-garde killjoy here, but I do think that part of the problem with contemporary art is that it is not the molding of the intractable as art traditionally is....(I think Updike said that.)
Also, as for art illuminating the beautiful...I agree that is too rigid, though I think I'm looking at beauty as more of a form than perhaps you are.
(It's amusing that this is a public-private conversation between the two of us.)
Just to clarify, I think there are two questions here:
What is the role of art?
and
What qualifies as art
( a possible third: what is the role of contemporary art?)
David, two things.
Firstly, I disagree with Updike. Modern art is, indeed, the molding of the intractable; the difference between it and the traditional is that modern art realizes that the intractable experience does not necessarily come from the meticulous blending of paint or the number of hours spent with a chisel; on he contrary, the intractable element of art is the mind - he human part of the equation that can, indeed, see anything as art; that is, as something which works at one and causes one to work to truly see the great rug that is the world and, perhaps, what lies beneath it.
I don't think Shvarts was trying to do what Duchamp did. That is, she was attempting to de-value instead of "valuize" something that was traditionally (rightfully or wrongfully) perceived as the opposite.
As to your question as what qualifies as art -- art migrates. Everything carries the possibility, but only certain things, from time to time, can be POSSESSED by it. The role of art? That takes more than a comment-space, but at least partially, it inspires one to autonomy. That is, to life.
Avant-garde work is avant-garde in part for the shock value it displays. Which works well for stereotypical male artists who gut cows and bottle sharks in phermaldahyde?! And it's often better for society to see a man killing animals than a woman killing her own children but Schvartz said of her work that "it’s not the intention of the piece to scandalize anyone.” Not to scandalize anyone. Not even her. She has left the 'hands on' apects of her art work rather off in left fields. No one knows if she really did this or whether or not she is just making a statement. I am right? Or did I read something wrong?
I think truly avant garde work is out there and has been out there for a while!
Is (Mark Tansey's) work avant-garde?
What qualifies art as avant-garde?
Is this work avant garde?
Is the ( New Yorker Dollar ) Avant Garde Artwork?
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