Miguel A. Guanipa  Bio

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Life, Death, and Art

The Birds, the Bees, and Aliza Shvarts

One day, perhaps not unlike today, Aliza Shvarts woke up and had an epiphany; she had finally settled on a theme for her Senior Year art project.

Aliza resolved that she would impregnate herself with sperm samples collected from donors sworn to permanent anonymity, by injecting these samples into her cervix with a plastic syringe, at a precise time window during her menstrual cycle.  She would then wait until the day her period was due, at which point she would ingest an abortifacient.  The resulting evacuation would then be splattered onto a plastic surface and incorporated into a multimedia visual exhibit at the Yale University Green Hall gallery.

Only Aliza knows – or is supposed to know with absolute certainty – that this is a truthful account of the process she went through to assemble this piece.

Aliza reckoned that by deliberately keeping her audience in a state of ambiguity (some would call it virtual obscurity) she could achieve one of the primary “conceptual goals” of her project, which was to prove her thesis that the “normative understandings of biological function[s] are a mythology imposed on form”.

In other words, those looking at the exhibit would fail to ascertain whether the blood represents the remains of a typical menstrual cycle, or the termination of a fertilized human ovum, hence they would not be able to positively identify the presentation with any degree of accuracy.

Since they are exposed only to a strictly visual experience - coupled with the artist’s testimony of her own uncertainty about the pregnancies - the moment they choose to define it as the remains of either, they will have arbitrarily imposed their own narrative on what we have all been – wrongly - taught to believe represents the exclusive (or normative) function of the human reproductive system. 

At first blush, it is virtually impossible to plough through the quasi-deconstructionist fog in which Aliza shrouds her arguments. If all is permitted (extra-normative functions?), then nothing should be forbidden – thus she explicitly dismisses any ontological arguments that appeal to a moral standard as unduly restrictive, sexist, homophobic, - or whatever jaundiced adjective one chooses to ascribe to it. The traditional understanding of these arguments is the only one that is forbidden in this presumably open forum.

But by stigmatizing those principles that fundamentally contradict her relativistic underpinnings, and using euphemisms like “fabricators” to describe the sperm donors or misnomers like “miscarriages” for her alleged self induced abortions, Aliza herself assumes an exclusivist stance that vouches for more than one faction of the “linguistic, political reality” she so wishes to disassociate herself from.

There’s no mistaking what Aliza is driving at. She is a prime example of what a young disciple of relativism - who has swallowed its tenets hook, line and sinker - sounds like. But the validity of her thesis extends only as far as her intentional ambiguity persists and stops short at the juncture where reality enters into play. It is only Aliza’s constant semantic trickery that evidently allowed her to bamboozle the deans at Yale University - who went on to publicly question the truthfulness of her account and recast her presentation as an expression of “creative fiction”.

For example, at one point Aliza exclaims that it is a “myth” that “ovaries and a uterus are “meant” to birth a child”. Through her carefully chosen words, Aliza insulates herself from protestations to the obvious. It is obvious that the function of the latter is to facilitate conception; but is that what they are “meant” to do?

In Aliza’s world, none can argue against someone who decides that her ovaries can be removed, frozen, and used in a game of ping pong. After all, isn’t it – as she maintains - “the prerogative of every individual to acknowledge and explore this wide realm of capability”?

But Aliza does not operate in a vacuum. Her choice of subject matter is only a reflection of the methodical, progressive values re-education that she has been subjected to, which reigns supreme in most of our country’s higher learning institutions. The proud stewards of this pedagogy are themselves the product of decades of similar indoctrination.

And what Aliza has achieved is no grand accomplishment. She has deliberately kept her audience in the dark (an old liberal trick) in order to advance a rather dubious proposition, and has mistaken widespread public outrage as evidence of her thesis’ timeless significance.

From redefining nascent life in the womb to justify its extermination, to the obfuscation of what they view as pliable moral ethos like consciousness and dignified existence in order to justify the euthanizing of some of society’s most vulnerable members, her artistic output (no pun intended) is merely a repetition of what her equally enlightened liberal predecessors have been peddling for eons, only using a different medium.

But modern science does not always afford us the luxury of entertaining such ambiguities. Though there are many things that science can not ascertain with absolute certainty, pregnancy is not one of them. To clear what appears to be a glaring misconception in this area, Aliza would have done well to add an elective Biology class to what no doubt was probably a very demanding Fine Arts curriculum.

Yet technically and in a very limited sense, Alisa is correct. Whatever we decide to do with our bodies is our own prerogative. But that does not mean that it is right and that there are no consequences to making such choices.

In fact, there are certain parts of our bodies that can perform a variety of consonant functions, but our organs are designed to fulfill very specific purposes. Whenever we overtax any organ or employ any part of our bodies in a way dissonant with its intended purpose - or in essence rebel against it - we usually introduce the seeds of degeneracy into a meticulously, and wonderfully crafted design. In that sense, ovaries, intestines, livers, lungs, and the rest of the organs that make a normal functioning body are meant to perform only specific functions, regardless of our choices.

And though it may sound somewhat archaic to the modern ear, this premise is nonetheless true, and supported by volumes of rather dismaying empirical evidence provided by an ever decaying society that is constantly being instructed to believe otherwise.