On his blog, Perez Hilton recently said that "sometimes people use the excuse of 'art' in order to get away with craziness!" A fan of 'art' myself, I'm a little hesitant to trust the so-called "Queen of All Media." However, if you witnessed the atrocity of Wenda Gu's hair curtains this past summer, or were a student at Yale this past week, you might feel like slapping your knee with an "Amen, Perez! Now pass me the crack."
The art that Perez puts in quotation marks is referring to a recent scandal at Yale surrounding senior Aliza Shvarts' culminating studio art project. According to the Yale Daily News ("For senior, abortion a medium for art, political discourse," Apr. 17), the Yalie's exhibition is "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." If that's not disturbing enough, the exhibition itself supposedly features blood Shvarts saved from her miscarriages, as well as video footage of herself undergoing the alleged miscarriages in a bathtub. However, it should be noted that since the story initially broke, several other news outlets have claimed the story is a hoax and the exhibit may not exist in its purported form.
Shvarts' project reminds me of Dartmouth's own waste of money that was on display in Baker-Berry last year. Though I can't speak for all my fellow '09s, my sophomore summer is a mixed memory of sunshine, no air conditioning, jumping off the River Ranch and ... a giant hairball on display in the Baker-Berry corridor. Artist Wenda Gu's exhibition, which was on display from June to October of 2007, featured human hair donated by Dartmouth students (including me, but only because they were giving away free pizza during midterms). These 'donations' were then reworked and dyed to look like something you could pick out from the drain of a public shower and throw onto a canvas, or something a two-year-old braided and draped over a Christmas tree -- except both occupied the entrance and corridors of First Floor Berry for a whopping six months.
These so-called artists' aim is to challenge our perception of the relationship between the human body and art. But it seems to me that Shvarts failed in creating debate over this relationship altogether. Rather, any debate surrounding Shvarts' 'art' is akin to rumor -- about whether she really did abuse her body in the way she claims, whether she may or may not be insane, etc. In trying to spark debate over something that is legitimately interesting in the world of art, Shvarts has only succeeded in being talked about in all kinds of forums -- from famous blogs like Perez Hilton's to the column.
New media and ways of expression sometimes benefit art, and unconventional materials can add to an artist's message. But a line has to be drawn between innovation and shameless use of shock value that becomes a distraction more than an artistic message.
While someone's appreciation of art is always subjective, the materials in both of these exhibitions seem to have been chosen only for the sake of giving artists that extra edge. Gu uses human hair, and he is paid a pretty penny to put it on display at Dartmouth. Shvarts allegedly used her own blood in her exhibition (reports from Yale claim she is lying, but she is sticking to her story), and her name is all over the news. Artist Santiago Sierra makes sculptures out of human feces, and he landed prime viewing real estate at London's Lisson Gallery from December 2007 to January 2008. Maybe I should vomit on a piece of paper -- that'll earn me space in The New Yorker magazine.
Thanks, but no thanks, Aliza and Wenda. If you all want me to question my body's relationship to art, believe me when I say I only need a mirror and any page of Vogue magazine to do so. And while the idea of taking something supposedly ugly and making it into art is intriguing, it is very rarely well executed -- neither of these artists has accomplished that.
But if anyone does want to see a great exhibition that deals with the relationship between art and the body, they won't have to go very far. This month's featured exhibit at the Hood Museum is "Black Womanhood: Images, Icons, and Ideologies of the African Body." It's a thought-provoking collection -- one based on challenging stereotypes about the body, not aiming to shock viewers and undermine this worthy challenge.
