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April 22, 2008
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Shvarts epilogue
Yale art student Aliza Shvarts could be showing her abortionesque senior project today--if only she had followed the Yale administration's stipulation that she issue a statement saying that she never inseminated herself, never induced menstruation (and possible miscarriage), and will not incorporate human blood into her installation. I thought Yale was playing with fire there, that the requirement was an open invitation to Shvarts to lie. After all, there was no basis for thinking the truth could be elicited from Shvarts at this point, and every basis for thinking that Shvarts would see Yale's requirement as an opportunity to further the annoying fuckwittage that she is mistakenly calling art. But Shvarts has kept quiet. She has not issued the statement Yale demanded. And so she will not be displaying her work. I find it hard to believe that Shvarts suddenly decided that honesty should be her modus operandi, and I do wonder what's coming next. But for the moment, the show will not go on.
As the dust settles a bit, it's worth considering what happens to "shock art" when it nestles in the hallowed halls of an elite Ivy League university. Here is Laurie Fendrich, a Hofstra fine arts professor and working painter:
For those of us in the contemporary art business, the Yale squabble isn't all that interesting. Ms Shvarts' undergraduate project sounds so, well, so undergraduate. Contrary to what a lot of people may think, her project wouldn't make it into a serious contemporary gallery and, if it did, it wouldn't get much traction with the press or the public. Ms. Shvarts's project is getting attention mostly because it's at an elite university, where it has students, professors, administrators and college flacks running to the free-speech and culture-wars barricades. Almost everyone in the art world has been there and done that, a long time ago.The real stuff--e.g., performance works by such artists as Carolee Schneeman, Ana Mendieta, Karen Finley, Chris Burden or Annie Sprinkle in the '60s, '70s and '80s--was bitter, shocking, risky, and always on the line. It took place in funky, rented venues, and not the cushioned halls of ivy. Sometimes it was stupid, but sometimes it was powerful and moving.
The dispiriting part about Shvarts's tempestuous teapot isn't really the art--whether it's morally offensive, or not, or good or bad--but the fact that putatively edgy art projects are really guided to completion by faculty advisers who inexorably turn what was once upon a time a fierce counter-voice to culture into soft risk-free, pseudo-avant-garde exercises in calculated offensiveness.
There are some things academe simply cannot house. Set aside the liability issues and any reservations you have about whether what Shvarts did can be called art, and think strictly about the concept of transgression. Fendrich's point is that genuinely edgy art cannot, by definition, come from within institutionally sanctioning space. That's a contradiction in terms, and attempts to sidestep this fact only lead to absurdities.
We should not forget, for example, that Shvarts undertook her project for a grade, in order to graduate. As she herself has stressed, she had approval for it, and she took the approval of one or two individuals to be synonymous with the university's sanction. One wonders who will assign Shvarts' grade, now that the advisor has been disciplined for allowing it to go forward. And one also wonders what that grade will be, now that the dean has publicly said the project ought never to have been allowed, and now that she is failing to fulfill the expectation that she display her work in the show. Such mundane academic considerations--which are founded on conformity to a set of strict hierarchical norms of instruction, authority, and judgment-- ought never to be the defining parameters for art that seeks to provoke by violating the social contract.
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Comments:
Something else for us to wonder about:
Liberty requires responsibility. You see this very explicitly with children who are appropriately raised. The art department is now going to undergo scrutiny that it did not before, because it has demonstrated a lack of sufficient responsiblity in that it did not tell Shvarts that her project was unacceptable. Whether this was because her advisers wanted to appear hip, or because they were confused as to the extent of their authority over the students, or because they actually thought her project was just fine, makes no difference here. So I wonder if Shvarts thought about the fact that her shock art could very well result in censorship of her fellow students that they would not have had otherwise.
Shock art, IMO, shares this with civil disobedience: there will be consequences that the artist should anticipate and probably won't like, and that should be considered part of the whole picture. You can't do these things and then whine about the outcome. If the consequences aren't worth the statement you're making, then perhaps you reconsider your actions.
Also, I wonder how much her fellow art students signed on to what the publicity about Shvarts's project has done to their Yale art degree.
If someone starts out with the idea of being "transgressive," he is unlikely to create great art...or great anything else. Stravinsky did not create "Rites of Spring" with the intention of starting a near-riot. Galileo did not develop his theory of planetary motion with the intention of offending the Church hierarchy. They pursued their ideas of beauty and truth where these ideas took them, and if people were offended, so be it. Very different from setting up "transgression" as the primary objective of the work.
Related: See "Art, Discomfort, and Dehumanization" at my blog.
"fuckwittage"?! This is a new one for me. Maybe too long since I took a decent English course. Is this a creation of our esteemed hostess/commentator/moderator? Or a word in common circulation? Is it perhaps a misspelling of the common technical term "fuckwattage"?
Helen Fielding gets credit for fuckwittage. It's a good, handy, usable word.
OK, that dictionary, that is not the one I usually keep handy. Sounds like kind of a loaded definition. Applies to women only in rare cases huh? Hah! But maybe it's girl-talk for "mindfucking", which does seem like more of a male pastime.
By the way, I don't know who Bridget Jones is. Is this part of my mis-education? Anyhow I will have to look her up. I mean, look her up on the internet.
Hey is this getting too highbrow for this blog?
Used first in Bridget Jones' Diary, it has now become a synonym for the mindgames men play when dating. It can also be applied to women in rare cases.
It can be preceded by "emotional" to make it about manipulating emotions or just plain "fuckwittage"
Girl 1: Oh Dan said he loved me but he's not ready for a relationship
Girl 2: That's just emotional fuckwittage. Get out of the relationship!
OK, now I got it, I may be slow on the uptake, but I work at being slightly couth. Bridget Jones the character in the Helen Fielding novel or whatever it is she writes. (Doesn't she have a brother named Henry or something?) Not the real-life actress Bridget Jones.
Fendrich is wrong: edgy art can't be *sanctioned* by institutions, but it can originate there as much as anywhere. But then, edginess is just part of "the degrading slavery of being a child of one's age" anyway.
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