The XX Factor: What women really think.

Hope, With a Catch

Today, the Smithsonian announced it has acquired "street artist" Shepard Fairey's now iconic HOPE portrait of Obama. A similar image of Obama by Fairey appeared on TIME's Person of the Year cover, as well. Unsurprisingly, Fairey isn't a big fan of Obama's selection of Rick Warren to deliver the inaugural invocation. "I understand that Obama is trying to appeal to conservatives and evangelicals," Fairey wrote on his Obey Giant Web site, "but this move is symbolically a slap in the face to many people." He continues, "I still think Obama is the best choice for president, but I can’t condone Warren’s involvement in Obama’s inauguration, no matter how insignificant it is." Therefore, Fairey is donating a "chunk of the proceeds from an inauguration poster of Obama I was asked to create to the movement to overturn Prop 8." Of course, Fairey isn't the only Obama-obsessed artist. In Chicago, graphic artist Ray Noland is painting up a storm of Obamas, including a piece featuring Obama attack dogs chasing down the disgraced Rod Blagojevich.

Do I Have to Be an Astrophysicist?

While I can't answer Melinda's question of whether the bar for mothers-who-do-it-all was always set so high, as a young twentysomething just starting out in my career, I can see that bar vaulting upward among the women of my own generation. With few glass ceilings remaining, the limits to our professional ambitions seem next to nonexistent. But along with our heightened career expectations comes the decision to try to balance both work and family life. For all the inspirational value of Hillary Clinton's historic campaign, even she got choked up trying to explain how she did it all.

About a year and a half ago, I heard Linda Hirshman speak about her book, Get to Work ... And Get a Life, Before It's Too Late, at the women's college I attended. I remember vividly her assertion that women in college should not waste their time studying subjects such as art history. Now, I was an art history major at a liberal arts college, and among the audience were a number of art majors who had emerged from the print-making and painting studios down the hall to hear Hirshman speak. Needless to say, none of us were thrilled with her advice. We were all passionate about the subjects and challenged and fulfilled by our work. Why should we have felt guilty for pursuing our interests?

With the opportunity in recent years to disprove the stereotypes about women's aptitude (or lack thereof) in math and the hard sciences, I often felt in college that I was letting down women everywhere by taking art and literature courses instead of math and physics. Studying at a women's college, I didn't have to contend with gendered expectations about the classes I should take; test tubes and equations just didn't excite me. Still, Hirshman and others like her made me feel that there were fields into which I should venture simply because they remained unconquered by women. It's taken me some time to realize that this can't be right. Can it? Just because a woman can be an astrophysicist, doesn't mean she ought to be one, and just because female art historians are not venturing into male-only territory doesn't mean they should feel guilty about studying Picasso's cubist paintings or Bernini's sublime sculptures.

Still Not Buying It

Well, I probably should have known that something was fishy when the Yale Daily News reported that “[f]ew people outside of Yale's undergraduate art department have heard about Shvarts' exhibition.” Yale’s not a big campus: When I was there, we all knew that some girl was keeping live crabs from a Chinatown grocery store in her bathtub; I’m sure that, if someone was regularly “making art” in hers, people would be talking about it.

Dana, you asked if the artwork was successful or not, given what we know now. I think that, based on the criteria I mentioned in my last post, the answer is no. I still don’t get the sense that Shvarts had a compelling—or coherent—message to impart. What does it mean to “draw attention to the ambiguity surrounding form and function of a woman’s body”? That’s like a horrible parody of art school speak. What does it even mean? OK, “function” I sort of get: She’s giving a big middle finger to the patriarchal-hegemonic-essentialist-traditionalist view of women as vessels for childbearing. Very Handmaid’s Tale. But where does “form” come in? What—or whose—“ambiguity” is she referring to? Maybe we’ll get a clearer thesis when Shvarts formally presents the work next week.

NB: According to the official Yale statement, the project includes “visual representations, a press release and other narrative materials.” (Emphasis added.)

Called It!

Just after my post below speculating that the abortion-as-performance-art story was a hoax, a fellow Slatester sent around this press release from the Yale public relations office, stating that Aliza Shvarts never really impregnated herself or induced any home abortions, and that the entire thing was "a creative fiction designed to draw attention to the ambiguity surrounding form and function of a woman's body." The only ambiguity it brought up for me was the question of whether Shvarts was a liar or a lunatic. But it's not clear who at the university knew about this "creative fiction," and for how long—from the wording of the release, it appears that just today Shvarts was called upon to confirm to university officials that her project was a stunt. I'm interested to know what other XXers think: Was Shvarts' point simply to trick people into being horrified that a young woman might really have done this to herself (and, depending on your point of view about abortion, ended the lives of several incipient human beings in the process). And if so, was her piece a success?

Roe v. ...Yuck!

OK, I’m both resolutely pro-choice and a known oversharer on this topic, but that abortion-as-Yale-art-project item strikes me as genuinely repellent. It also strikes me as a scam. Though auto-insemination doesn’t always have to be high-tech and expensive (just ask any lesbian with a turkey-baster baby), it seems highly unlikely that nine months' worth of the most assiduous basting would result in four separate pregnancies and miscarriages. (Though the artist declines to specify how many times she knocked herself up, the description of the installation implies that that four separate filmed miscarriages will be projected onto that plastic-wrapped bloody cube suspended from the ceiling. Up for a jaunt to New Haven, anyone?)

And as long as we're getting technical, what's this wonderfully effective "herbal" abortifacient, apparently available without a doctor's prescription, with which the budding Duchamp supposedly induced her multiple miscarriages? And since an early-stage induced abortion can be indistinguishable from a menstrual period, who's to say the filmed miscarriages weren’t fake? The whole story rings false, particularly the notion that Aliza Shvarts’ adviser would sign off on a project that could endanger her student’s health and would almost certainly endanger her own job. Hoax or not, I guess Shvarts’ installation is an accomplishment by some negative measure: In a single attention-getting move, she’s managed to make the pro-choice movement, feminism, performance art, and Yale all look bad at the same time.

Adventures in the Yale Art Department

Bloggers are expressing shock, disgust, and outrage at this Yale Daily News article, which describes one Aliza Shvarts’ 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.” The exhibition itself consists of video recordings of her “experiencing miscarriages in her bathroom tub” and a large cube featuring samples of her uterine blood pressed between layers of plastic sheeting.

Weird and gross, granted. (Go walk it off if you need to.) But as a piece of agitprop shock art, it treads some familiar Karen Finley, Robert Mapplethorpe-esque ground, which as we all know is candy for the undergrad art crowd.

When I was at Yale, I heard about a student who had sex with her boyfriend while menstruating, then hung up the bloody sheet as part of an art-department exhibition. And one year, I participated in a friend’s performance art project about “the seven stages of women”—I was lucky (I got “sickness”), but the girl who got cast as “puberty” had to spend three hours in a huge box of tampons while fake blood made from baby shampoo dripped all over her. Now, this is why Yale is actually a great place for young artists, particularly young female artists: They’re encouraged to take themselves, and their work, very, very seriously. Of course, that means you get a lot of juvenile stunts (though that performance art piece, as a whole, was pretty moving), but if you’re not going to take your work seriously, why even bother doing it? I’m glad Yale inculcates that kind of earnestness, and I believe Shvarts when she says that she wanted to “inspire some kind of discourse.” But I don’t think she gave much thought to what, exactly, the “message” of her piece was supposed to be—though she claims that it does, in fact, have one. Is that cube a shrine? A cautionary tale? A memento mori? I don’t know, and I’d be surprised if Shvarts knew, either. Muddled thinking usually leads to boring art.

All that being said, plenty of people—including many of the women at Slate—think the whole thing might have been staged. First of all, artificial insemination isn’t that easy—or cheap. And what are these “herbal” drugs Shvarts claims to have taken? But even more damning: How could her adviser have possibly sanctioned this project, much less given Shvarts the green light to go ahead without a doctor’s supervision? Doesn’t that seem like grounds for an immediate dismissal, or at least a tenure reassessment? Call me naive, but I have a little more faith in that professor’s common sense—she must be in on the joke. Right? Right?

 Read the rest of the Aliza Shvarts conversation on XX Factor.

Moss Graffiti

This weekend, a friend showed me artist Edina Tokodi’s incredible moss graffiti, which features moss in the form of animals like rabbits and deer and abstract compositions mounted on walls in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Tokodi’s work is a whimsical surprise, green and playful. But I think moss will be creeping up on us more and more.

Last week, the New York Times announced it was installing an “open-air birch and moss garden” in the lobby of its new building. It was about to import seven ginormous birch trees and “several tons of moss” from New Jersey, according to incredulous accounts from NY Mag and Gawker. Moss has also shown up in designs for green rooftops. And a few years ago, a “moss laboratory” was created in a shed at a minimum-security prison (because working with plants is apparently good for inmates and moss cultivation does not require sharp objects.)

Where else will moss spread? I’m betting yoga studios, table arrangements, and fancy facial cleansers. Maybe moss is the new lemongrass. Still, tooling around the web, I realized its new uses couldn’t possibly be more creative than its traditional ones: some kinds of moss were included in wound dressings because of their antibacterial properties. Some were even used as diapers because they can absorb up to ten times their weight in liquid. Any takers?