UD thanks Rita for linking her to Aliza Shvarts’s explanation of her art in the Yale Daily News. The piece is here.

She echoes, as UD knew she would, the Foucauldian thing I wrote a couple of posts down.

Shvarts writes with the obscurantist condescension of the expensively ill-educated. This is the prose that appears on the walls of our museum exhibits: rancid with jargon, evasive with meaning, bursting with self-confidence.

For the past year, I performed repeated self-induced miscarriages. I created a group of fabricators from volunteers who submitted to periodic STD screenings and agreed to their complete and permanent anonymity. From the 9th to the 15th day of my menstrual cycle, the fabricators would provide me with sperm samples, which I used to privately self-inseminate. Using a needleless syringe, I would inject the sperm near my cervix within 30 minutes of its collection, so as to insure the possibility of fertilization. On the 28th day of my cycle, I would ingest an abortifacient, after which I would experience cramps and heavy bleeding.

To protect myself and others, only I know the number of fabricators who participated, the frequency and accuracy with which I inseminated and the specific abortifacient I used. Because of these measures of privacy, the piece exists only in its telling. This telling can take textual, visual, spatial, temporal and performative forms — copies of copies of which there is no original. [The piece does not exist only in its telling. She has thoroughly and clinically described real acts of gratuitous self-wounding.]

This piece — in its textual and sculptural forms — is meant to call into question the relationship between form and function as they converge on the body. [In what way does form "converge" on anything? What is form? The body is already a form. Does another form - or it'd have to be a group of forms - converge on it? What does she mean?] The artwork exists as the verbal narrative you see above [The writer believes that the paragraphs she just wrote are a work of art.], as an installation that will take place in Green Hall, as a time-based performance, as a independent concept, as a myth and as a public discourse. [Everything, in other words, is art. Your responses to this woman and what she does are art. Every gesture you make is art. Everything.]

It creates an ambiguity that isolates the locus of ontology to an act of readership. [Since "it" in this essay refers to everything -- everything is art -- we shouldn't be surprised that it creates ambiguity. Fog would be more like it. This ambiguity is however at the same time a focus - it 'isolates' something of value. That something of value is the place where being is. Ontology is isolated to -- the language here is impossible to translate -- something is located to... Let's try again: The it that is universal art is an ambiguity. It is an ambiguity which is a focus. The focus allows us to look in isolation at our being as readers of art. Our being as readers of art, UD assures you, is not interesting under the regime described here, since here everything is art. It's not interesting to think about my relation to anything or everything or nothing, which is what art, according to this writer, is.] An intentional ambiguity pervades both the act and the objects I produced in relation to it. [What is 'it' in this sentence? The installation itself? If she intended the act -- what she did to herself -- to be ambiguous, why is it that no one's taking it that way? Why is everyone unambiguously disgusted?] The performance exists only as I chose to represent it. [This is what I mean by the bristling self-confidence of the ill-educated. There's no audience interpreting her work. There's only the artist controlling her intention and making the piece exist as an expression of her representational choices. This assertion has the ineffable wispy effect of Blanche Dubois talking about her grand aristocratic family background. It is pure psycho wish fulfillment. You can get there if you are, like this woman, a stupendous narcissist.] For me, the most poignant aspect of this representation — the part most meaningful in terms of its political agenda (and, incidentally, the aspect that has not been discussed thus far) — is the impossibility of accurately identifying the resulting blood. Because the miscarriages coincide with the expected date of menstruation (the 28th day of my cycle), it remains ambiguous whether the there was ever a fertilized ovum or not. The reality of the pregnancy, both for myself and for the audience, is a matter of reading. [You'd like to think so. You might consult... let's call the rest of the world for a reality check on this one. Except that you don't think there's reality. You think there's your representational needs and their satisfaction.]

This ambivalence makes obvious how the act of identification or naming — the act of ascribing a word to something physical — is at its heart an ideological act, an act that literally has the power to construct bodies. In a sense, the act of conception occurs when the viewer assigns the term “miscarriage” or “period” to that blood. [Here we go round the Foucault bush. Nothing exists but the naming of things. So if we can get people to play around with names we can liberate people into the solipsistic splendor this woman has attained.]

In some sense, neither term is exactly accurate or inaccurate; the ambiguity is not merely a matter of context, but is embodied in the physicality of the object. This central ambiguity defies a clear definition of the act. 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. [You'd like to think so.]

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. [There's a naive faith in language here that's at odds with her ambiguity thing. If I TELL you what the work means, you'll SEE that, and you'll stop BOTHERING me.]

As an intervention into our normative understanding of “the real” and its accompanying politics of convention, this performance piece has numerous conceptual goals. [She writes like that Georgetown student SOS recently savaged. Hideous empty pretentious words and phrases -- numerous conceptual goals -- vague tossed off stuff that doesn't mean anything -- politics of convention -- and of course our friend the quotation mark, meant to sneer at the possibility that anything could be real.] The first is to assert that often, normative understandings of biological function are a mythology imposed on form. [A mythology. Notice that she'll happily use this weighted word, with its own significant history of meaning, to mean oppressive lie.] It is this mythology that creates the sexist, racist, ableist, nationalist and homophobic perspective, distinguishing what body parts are “meant” to do from their physical capability. [This is the self-flattering, holier than thou, part of things. Locate yourself on my evil list, reader. I will instruct you in how not to be those things if you watch film of me scraping blood out of myself.] The myth that a certain set of functions are “natural” (while all the other potential functions are “unnatural”) undermines that sense of capability, confining lifestyle choices to the bounds of normatively defined narratives. [confining lifestyle choices. If ever language were a vehicle of soullessness, it would be in these paragraphs.]

Just as it is a myth that women are “meant” to be feminine and men masculine, that penises and vaginas are “meant” for penetrative heterosexual sex (or that mouths, anuses, breasts, feet or leather, silicone, vinyl, rubber, or metal implements are not “meant” for sex at all), it is a myth that ovaries and a uterus are “meant” to birth a child.

When considering my own bodily form, I recognize its potential as extending beyond its ability to participate in a normative function. [This distinguishes the writer from all other women, who regard themselves as animated wombs.] While my organs are capable of engaging with the narrative of reproduction — the time-based linkage of discrete events from conception to birth — the realm of capability extends beyond the bounds of that specific narrative chain. [Again note the insufferable pomposity with which she makes primitive observations. I could have a baby... or I could not have a baby.] These organs can do other things, can have other purposes, and it is the prerogative of every individual to acknowledge and explore this wide realm of capability.

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UD Has Decided She Can Only Continue to Follow this Story While on LSD. Do You Have Any LSD?

[A Yale spokeswoman] told the News that Shvarts had vowed that if the University revealed her admission, “she would deny it.”

“Her denial is part of her performance,” Klasky wrote in an e-mail message. “We are disappointed that she would deliberately lie to the press in the name of art.”