Pia Lindman has been rehired by Yale. Lindman gained notoriety earlier this year as the faculty advisor who authorized and presumably encouraged Aliza Shvarts to concoct a senior art project supposedly comprised of her own self-induced miscarriage. On that subject, see an earlier post: “Arts, Shvarts!”
Candace de Russy notes the prevalence of this aesthestic trend in academia (more accurately a rejection of aethestics) and provides some background on “body art” in which the artist uses his own body as the subject and object of art. She concludes:
This is the lineage of Shvarts’s sanguinary project — original only in that she, unlike most other female body artists, planned to use pregnancy and miscarriage as her principal medium. In her 1995 book, Lucy Lippard found this aspect of women’s performance art “curious,” opining that maybe “procreativity [would be] the next taboo to be tackled.”
Shvarts did not disappoint, tackling the procreativity taboo with a vengeance. To what extent did Lindman and other members of Yale’s art department tutor and encourage her in this repellent plan? Neither Shvarts nor Yale is telling. But one thing is certain: Yale’s failure to prevent Lindman and her kind from influencing impressionable undergraduates is testament to the university’s slavish cowardice in the face of a decadent and destructive ideological fashion.
But of course Lindman was rehired. Imagine the outraged faculty if Yale had turned instead to someone with more traditional views, someone who aspires to beauty, someone who rejects political banality as the artistic ideal. A professor holding such views would be a rarity. Would Yale dare to look outside the clubby confines of academia? Could such an outsider survive in the art department of a modern university, or even want to try?
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