Continuing Coverage: Abortion as Art

The debate around Aliza Shvarts' abortion as art project/social commentary continues as Yale officials now say that without a disclaimer clearly stating the entire project is a work of fiction/hoax and contains no human blood, and is merely performance art.

"In this case, we will not permit her to install the project unless she submits a clear and unambiguous written statement that her installation is a work of fiction: that she did not try to inseminate herself and induce miscarriages, and that no human blood will be physically displayed in her installation," Peter Salovey, dean of Yale College, said in the statement.

Additionally, Yale officials have said that Shvartz' advisers made serious errors in judgment in approving the project once they were aware of the controversial nature of the piece; the faculty involved have apparently been spoken to with "appropriate action" taken.

Now, this raises even further questions for me. First - if Shvarts presented the project to her faculty advisers as a performance piece/hoax project designed to get the rise that is has been out of us chatty media commentators, why would the faculty raise questions, or seek additional approval? On the face of it, if you want to believe that this is a performance piece and not actually what Shvartz says it is - the result of repeated attempts to inseminate and then herbaly abort resulting pregnancies - then what's the problem? Gelatin, food colouring, plastic, a controversial artist statement, and the precise results any performance artist is hoping to achieve. And if she lied to the advisers, why does this then become something that they should be punished for?

Secondly, the automatic ban on art that contains human body fluids/cast-offs strikes me as stepping very close to censoring art because it is controversial. Many modern, performance, and even "traditional" artists work in human fluids - is this really the appropriate response for officials to have to controversial art?

At this point, unless someone goes in with Luminol or DNA swabs and then runs PCRs, etc, we're never going to know if she actually did what she said - in a way, it's a wonderful example of just how flexible truth and knowledge actually is.
-Kelly Hills

Abortion as Art Debate Continues

Aliza Shvarts abortion as art Yale senior art project is continuing to create controversy. Originally billed as a student deliberately impregnating and aborting over the span of many months, and saving the fluids for an art project, was labeled fictitious performance art by Yale - a statement Shvarts immediately called inaccurate:

Shvarts reiterated Thursday that she repeatedly use a needleless syringe to insert semen into herself. At the end of her menstrual cycle, she took abortifacient herbs to induce bleeding, she said. She said she does not know whether or not she was ever pregnant. No one can say with 100-percent certainty that anything in the piece did or did not happen, Shvarts said, because the nature of the piece is that it did not consist of certainties.

Well, at least we are now starting to see bits and pieces of an artist's statement - something I'm still trying to track down.

But Yale isn't happy with this latest development, with the dean of the art school, as well as Yale proper, speaking out against this, and discussing how future senior projects will be reviewed, supervised, and approved.

Shvarts is right - we'll never know what "the truth" of this situation is. But that's not necessarily the point; truth isn't always needed to have discussion, to consider possibilities and what if's. And my problem with this entire situation is both narrow and broad in scope. Narrowly speaking, as a student myself, I'm irritated with the very idea of someone so blatantly causing trouble that will then turn around and impact other students - future art students are going to have a lot more grief and oversight and hoops to jump through because of Shvarts, and that seems almost intuitively unfair, and selfish. There's an element of "about-me at the expense of others" to the piece that I simply find distasteful.

But the broader concern is over art in general, and who supervises it - especially bioart.

It's no secret that I'm a fan of DIY biotech and the art that comes out of the movemet. The Critical Art Ensemble is one of my favourite performance art groups, and I love how thought provoking their biotech projects are. And as it becomes easier and easier to grow your own biotech, we're going to see more artists using biological materials in their work. The difficulty of Kac's Alba the GFP Bunny is going to give way to homebrewed experiments and art - sort of literally. As is, the walls of my office are decorated with art from students using osteoblasts to make things as diverse as religious symbols and art highlighting the life cycle of Pacific Northwest trees; freshmen and sophomores with no biology background spending 5 weeks in a basically equipped lab, making fascinating and interesting art. (I still wish I had a picture of the spiral nebula one student made out of her DNA. Figuring out how to photograph that one was a challenge!)

As DIY biotech becomes easier, as more artists begin to question what it means to use our bodies as art, interactive with the world, or any number of other justified reasons, we're going to hit these boundaries. These points that might generate a yuck or a wince or a deep-seated intuitive response; and what do we do then? Where do we draw the line? Art has often pushed boundaries, and in general we allow for the freedom of the artist to engage in whatever work they want, so long as it breaks no laws. That's part of art, to push and make us think, re-evaluate.

Are we going to need to change this idea in the face of DIY biotech and bioart? Are some sort of reviews of bioart proposals necessary? Does it need to be vetted by an ethicist, some sort of specialist? Or at least supported? Is it even a valid area for an ethicist to get into, or does it become antithesis to the entire idea of art, having someone approve or deny the process itself?

Shvarts is certainly getting debate and dialogue over her art project - I'm just not certain it's the dialogue she was hoping to create.
-Kelly Hills

Abortion As Art A Hoax

Never fear Kelly, from Yale University:

New Haven, Conn. — April 17, 2008

Ms. Shvarts is engaged in performance art. Her art project includes visual representations, a press release and other narrative materials. She stated to three senior Yale University officials today, including two deans, that she did not impregnate herself and that she did not induce any miscarriages. The entire project is an art piece, a creative fiction designed to draw attention to the ambiguity surrounding form and function of a woman’s body.

She is an artist and has the right to express herself through performance art.

Had these acts been real, they would have violated basic ethical standards and raised serious mental and physical health concerns.

Even with the explanation, I'm still not sure I get it. Anyone?

Abortion as Art

I'm coming off a two week conference rush and rounding the bend right into final exams and papers, a condition that generally dramatically decreases the amount of news I ingest or general attention I pay to the world. That said, I got home from school this afternoon to find at least half a dozen messages, via email, LiveJournal and Facebook, all wanting to know if I had seen this:

Art major Aliza Shvarts '08 wants to make a statement. Beginning next Tuesday, 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.

The goal in creating the art exhibition, Shvarts said, was to spark conversation and debate on the relationship between art and the human body. But her project has already provoked more than just debate, inciting, for instance, outcry at a forum for fellow senior art majors held last week. And when told about Shvarts' project, students on both ends of the abortion debate have expressed shock . saying the project does everything from violate moral code to trivialize abortion.

So yes, internet, I have seen this, and the reason I didn't place it up here sooner is... I really, honestly don't know what to say.

The display of Schvarts' project will feature a large cube suspended from the ceiling of a room in the gallery of Green Hall. Schvarts will wrap hundreds of feet of plastic sheeting around this cube; lined between layers of the sheeting will be the blood from Schvarts' self-induced miscarriages mixed with Vaseline in order to prevent the blood from drying and to extend the blood throughout the plastic sheeting.

Schvarts will then project recorded videos onto the four sides of the cube. These videos, captured on a VHS camcorder, will show her experiencing miscarriages in her bathrooom tub, she said. Similar videos will be projected onto the walls of the room.

In my office, I have artwork made by students - and some of that artwork contains human osteoblasts. Although I don't own any of it, some students used their own blood or sperm in their projects; I have an art project done for a research course that is bound with my hair. And then, of course, there is Critical Art Ensemble's BioTech projects, including Cult of the New Eve, GenTerra and Marching Plague.

The idea of using the body and its cast-offs in art is nothing new. There are even well known artists, male and female, who use menstrual blood in their work, and of course, Turner Prize winners have used just about every secretion and bodily cast-off possile in their art. So I can approach it from that view and theory and it's interesting, potentially provocative. I'd like to see her artist statement and what the point she was driving at with is.

And then I pause and go "waitaminute, she intentionally got pregnant and aborted multiple times for art?!" and it's hard not to have an intuitive moral outrage - perhaps regardless of your position on abortion. Abortion is not something to be done lightly, it's not a lark. It's often a difficult and wrenching position for women to be in, especially those in areas where the local community is not so supportive of a woman's right to choice. And even if a woman feels nothing but lightness and joy at no longer being pregnant, it's still hard to ignore the fact that the choice made was a serious decision. I think Yale student Sara Rahman ('09) had it right when she said that the art project "turns what is a serious decision for women into an absurdism, [and it] discounts the gravity of the situation that is abortion."

Personhood, moral agency - these are things that are difficult to define, and defend. It's a core discussion in bioethics, and probably always will be; I have a hard time seeing us suddenly wake up one morning and all agree. But this seems to go beyond, and I fear that why it's going beyond might get lost in the shuffle, or accusations that I've already seen (if you support abortion this should be fine it's the same thing etc).

I'm still thinking about it, but I think the line it crosses it not that it's an abortion, but that it's an abortion for entertainment. While it is certainly her body and her own right to do with it as she will, it's coming dangerously close to the almost apocryphal stories of women who use abortion as birth control, only instead of finding herself unintentionally pregnant and aborting, she is intentionally impregnating herself, aborting while filming, rinse and repeat. There seems to be an intentional callousness to this that separates it out from the often legitimate moral questioning that revolves around the abortion debate, and knocks it into an entirely separate sphere best defined by three letters: W T F.

I admit, I find myself really hoping that the actual art project is analyzing social reaction to a "fake" project (of abortion as art).

So tell me, internet, as I mull this over and see if I can come up with a more coherent argument: what do you think?
-Kelly Hills

Pew: State of the Media released

Pew's 2008 State of the Media has been released, and while I haven't had time to read much of the report yet, Framing Science has a fascinating and sad breakdown of cable news topic coverage that adds a new element to the discussion Sue and I have been having about illustrating and popularizing science.

Collectively, the broad range of domestic issues including the environment, education, transportation, development, religion, domestic terrorism, health care, race -- everything but immigration -- made up 13% of the time on cable (compared with 26% on network evening news). The three topics of celebrity, crime and disasters, in contrast, accounted for 24% of cable's time.

To put that into perspective, if one were to have watched five hours of cable news, one would have seen about:

* 35 minutes about campaigns and elections
* 36 minutes about the debate over U.S. foreign policy
* 26 minutes or more of crime
* 12 minutes of accidents and disasters
* 10 minutes of celebrity and entertainment

On the other hand, one would have seen:

* 1 minute and 25 seconds about the environment
* 1 minute and 22 seconds about education
* 1 minute about science and technology
* 3 minutes and 34 seconds about the economy
* 3 minutes and 46 seconds about health and health care

While my initial reaction is "well, who cares about illustrating the story when the signal is getting lost in the noise", my second reaction is to wonder if again, we're seeing a lack of content because the media types don't know how to report it. Is it a matter of lack of education, lack of visuals, lack of knowledge, or (what I fear) lack of interest?
-Kelly

illustrating science

io9 explains how the top scientific discovery of 2007 was nearly overlooked by the mass media (and thus general public) because no one could figure out how to simplify it:

For a long time, It seemed as a medical discovery that Science called "one of the greatest of 2007" might never get covered by the mainstream media because it was just too complicated. But then an enterprising journalist and artist with the Philadelphia Inquirer boldly went where no reporters dared go. Writer Tom Avril and artist Cynthia Greer figured out how to simplify this complicated discovery into a completely-accurate cartoon (above).

A researcher named Steven Reiner at University of Pennsylvania proved that the human body fights disease with two kinds of immune cells (called T-cells): some that fight the invading microbes, and some that exist just to keep a record of how to fight those microbes in the future. Those "memory" cells are what this researcher revealed, and their mysteries are still being unlocked.

Very interesting. But I have to wonder - what do we miss because people can't figure out a snazzy graphic to go with the report or story? I know when I write blog posts, I scrounge for appropriate art, sometimes creating my own and always grateful when a site like io9 takes care of it for me. Why? We're visual creatures, and I think that the art makes a story more interesting, and in the case of science, can make a complicated concept easier to understand. (I would have never passed geometry without the coloured 3D shapes we had to play with.)

Combined with wondering what we miss, I wonder at how much things have to be dumbed down in general for American mass market media consumption, and if anyone has compared science reporting in different countries to see how they vary. Do countries which have a higher level of general scientific literacy in their population have the same media reporting habits, or is their media more rigorous? Or more importantly, should we be worried that the mainstream media feels it can't even try to cover science without cutesy art?

Art in bioethics is, itself, a somewhat tricky subject. How, precisely, do you illustrate neuroethics? Informed consent? Agency? If you're talking about fMRIs, I can certainly point you to some interesting graphics - likewise for IVF, fertility, abortion. It's the abstracts where we run into potential problems, the concepts that cannot be so easily summed up in a photograph of a pregnant belly.

Are important, but less visually easy (or stunning, a la the photo of the mouse with an ear on its back) stories in bioethics being passed over because of their lack of easy illustration? And is there anything that can really be done about it?
-Kelly

Bestill My Beating Heart

Perhaps not the best centerpiece for the next family gathering (unless your family is like mine, in which case it'll be a competition to see who can get the display open first to see how the heart actually works...), but a cool piece nonetheless, created by artist Billy Chasen for the American Heart Association's 2008 Heart of New York Gala.

Billy has some other cool work worth browsing, too, including an exploded iPod set in resin that still works, and a marvelous and rather mindboggling piece called Weight of Words. He also has an interesting blog that covers ground from social commentary to art (which you might argue are one and the same).
-Kelly