‘Performance artist” Pia Lindman is the Yale instructor who authorized and guided Aliza Shvarts’s proposed “abortion art” project for a senior art show in the 2007-2008 school year. Yale has once again engaged Lindman to teach during this academic year, to the university’s enduring shame.
Shvarts’s proposed project, as widely reported, consisted in repeatedly artificially inseminating herself, inducing possible miscarriages, and videotaping herself bleeding into a cup.
Her plan was then to display her bodily fluids and presumably aborted fetuses in a plastic-wrapped ceiling installation, upon which she would also have projected the videos of said miscarriages. As for the “scholarly” justification for this gruesome display, Shvarts explained in run-of-the-mill postmodern, victimological boilerplate that her intent was “to assert that often normative understandings of biological functions are a mythology … that creates the sexist, racist, ableist, nationalist, and homophobic perspective . . . .”
