Bloody transgressions

It could have been. Today, in Holcombe T. Green Jr. Hall at Yale, a large cube was going to hang from the ceiling, bound in plastic sheeting smeared with blood – tokens from several miscarriages. Images of the remains of abortions in a bathtub was going to be \nprojected on the sides of the cube and along the walls of the gallery.\nUniversity officials have assured the nation that this art project, being displayed from today until \nMay 1, is fake simply “creative fiction designed to draw attention to the ambiguity surrounding form \nand function of a woman’s body.” They told the Yale Daily News \nMonday that they would not let Aliza Shvarts show her project unless she released a written statement saying it’s fake. But Shvarts, a senior art major at Yale and creator of the project, still insists that it’s real. Really her blood. Really her miscarriages. Really her abortions. And, I say, really over the line.\nIn a guest column in Friday’s Yale Daily News, Shvarts claimed she had “performed repeated self-induced miscarriages” over the past year after a process of inseminating herself. She provides a detailed \ndescription of how she injected sperm in a way to “insure the possibility of fertilization” and later ingested abortifacients to induce miscarriages.\nHelaine S. Klasky, associate dean and vice president for public affairs at Yale, told FOXNews.com that \nbecause Shvarts is “an artist,” she “has the right to express herself through performance art.”\nSure, Shvarts has the right to express herself. Freedom of speech is one of the many perks of living in the United States, and it’s great that a college student is passionate enough about an issue to create such a loud art project to portray her views. She definitely had a clear (and respectable) goal – in her column, she said she desired to “call into question the relationship between form and function as they converge on the body.” In this case, we can safely infer the “form” was a woman’s uterus and ovaries. And the function was what was being so severely questioned. For example, she argued that “it is a myth that ovaries and a uterus are ‘meant’ to birth a child.” I couldn’t disagree more with this statement, but that’s a topic for another day. Whether the blood is real, the project offers nothing to the art community other than pure shock value. Quite simply, this is the biggest exploitation of freedom of speech we have seen in years.\nFor this reason, the university administration deserves kudos for nixing the project.\nWe are privileged in America to have freedom of expression, and it is sickening to see individuals take advantage of it so they can do nothing more than make waves. No one is going to take this art project seriously; they’ll only praise her for \nbeing so outlandishly offensive or attack her for being ... so outlandishly offensive. Shvarts claimed her project is “an independent concept ... a myth and ... a public discourse.” But the only discourse this will spark is how Shvarts has tactlessly trivialized abortion. \nI appreciate your opinions, Aliza. But artists should honor freedom of speech, not exploit it.