Comparing Yale Student Aliza Shvarts' Abortion Art Project to Other Controversial Art

What it Is, and How it Stacks Up to Other Controversial Works

According to The Yale Daily News, senior and Art major Aliza Shvarts goal in creating her senior art project was to "spark conversation and debate." In that, Ms. Shvarts has certainly succeeded, but many Yale students and members of the art community have doubts about her motivation. For the project, which is set to go on exhibit next Tuesday, she claims she artificially inseminated herself "as often as possible" and then induced abortions so she could videotape them in her bathtub. She saved the blood from her miscarriages and will use that, along with her videotaped abortions, as part of her exhibit.

Her art display will feature a large cube suspended from the ceiling and wrapped in plastic sheeting. Between those plastic sheets will be the blood from her forced abortions, mixed with petroleum jelly. The video recordings of her miscarriages will be projected onto all four sides of the cube, as well as the walls of the room.

Yale authorities say that the project is a hoax. However, Shvarts claims that although she's not sure she was successful in having miscarriages, it wasn't a hoax.

There have been several controversial art project in recent years. The Cremaster Cycle 4 by Matthew Barney is one of these, which I was fortunate enough to see on display at the Guggenheim in New York City a few years ago. The Cremaster Cycle is unsettling, at times downright disturbing, and always shocking. The Cremaster Cycle is about "the process of creation", according to the Guggenheim's website. It featured large reproductions of sperm and ova, an amputee with prosthetic legs made of glass, and a video of creatures from the display scaling the cylindrical inner walls of the Guggenheim. In spite of the exhibits ability to shock and disturb, it was a display whose meaning and merit could be discussed long after you left the building. And I realized that, in the end, there was a reason for the seemingly chaotic madness.