in retrospect, i suppse that while the abortion art is definitely startling, regardless of who the artist is, its not exactly shocking coming from her. she was always kind of weird.

funny thing is, i dont remember her being particularly into art class. like, when i think of her, i dont think “artiste”.

i found out about this story after reading a blurb, a one-line quote in “Newsweek” yesterday. i recognized aliza’s name and, after googling her, found out about this.

personally, i think her “project” trivializes abortion, and gives pro-lifers even more ammunition with which to attack a woman’s right to choose. it makes a heartbreakingly tough decision for many women into a “performance piece”, subject to ridicule and criticism. i understand the points she is trying to make in her artist’s statement, but the manner in which she actualized these concepts is absolutely repulsive.

Hey, it is my art project

In her own words:

For the past year, I performed repeated self-induced
miscarriages. I created a group of fabricators from
volunteers who submitted to periodic STD screenings
and agreed to their complete and permanent anonymity.
From the 9th to the 15th day of my menstrual cycle,
the fabricators would provide me with sperm samples,
which I used to privately self-inseminate. Using a
needleless syringe, I would inject the sperm near my
cervix within 30 minutes of its collection, so as to
insure the possibility of fertilization. On the 28th
day of my cycle, I would ingest an abortifacient,
after which I would experience cramps and heavy
bleeding.

To protect myself and others, only I know the number
of fabricators who participated, the frequency and
accuracy with which I inseminated and the specific
abortifacient I used. Because of these measures of
privacy, the piece exists only in its telling. This
telling can take textual, visual, spatial, temporal
and performative forms — copies of copies of which
there is no original.

This piece — in its textual and sculptural forms — is
meant to call into question the relationship between
form and function as they converge on the body. The
artwork exists as the verbal narrative you see above,
as an installation that will take place in Green Hall,
as a time-based performance, as a independent concept,
as a myth and as a public discourse.

It creates an ambiguity that isolates the locus of
ontology to an act of readership. An intentional
ambiguity pervades both the act and the objects I
produced in relation to it. The performance exists
only as I chose to represent it. For me, the most
poignant aspect of this representation — the part most
meaningful in terms of its political agenda (and,
incidentally, the aspect that has not been discussed
thus far) — is the impossibility of accurately
identifying the resulting blood. Because the
miscarriages coincide with the expected date of
menstruation (the 28th day of my cycle), it remains
ambiguous whether the there was ever a fertilized ovum
or not. The reality of the pregnancy, both for myself
and for the audience, is a matter of reading.

This ambivalence makes obvious how the act of
identification or naming — the act of ascribing a word
to something physical — is at its heart an ideological
act, an act that literally has the power to construct
bodies. In a sense, the act of conception occurs when
the viewer assigns the term “miscarriage” or “period”
to that blood.

In some sense, neither term is exactly accurate or
inaccurate; the ambiguity is not merely a matter of
context, but is embodied in the physicality of the
object. This central ambiguity defies a clear
definition of the act. The reality of miscarriage is
very much a linguistic and political reality, an act
of reading constructed by an act of naming — an
authorial act.

It is the intention of this piece to destabilize the
locus of that authorial act, and in doing so, reclaim
it from the heteronormative structures that seek to
naturalize it.

As an intervention into our normative understanding of
“the real” and its accompanying politics of
convention, this performance piece has numerous
conceptual goals. The first is to assert that often,
normative understandings of biological function are a
mythology imposed on form. It is this mythology that
creates the sexist, racist, ableist, nationalist and
homophobic perspective, distinguishing what body parts
are “meant” to do from their physical capability. The
myth that a certain set of functions are “natural”
(while all the other potential functions are
“unnatural”) undermines that sense of capability,
confining lifestyle choices to the bounds of
normatively defined narratives.

Just as it is a myth that women are “meant” to be
feminine and men masculine, that penises and vaginas
are “meant” for penetrative heterosexual sex (or that
mouths, anuses, breasts, feet or leather, silicone,
vinyl, rubber, or metal implements are not “meant” for
sex at all), it is a myth that ovaries and a uterus
are “meant” to birth a child.

When considering my own bodily form, I recognize its
potential as extending beyond its ability to
participate in a normative function. While my organs
are capable of engaging with the narrative of
reproduction — the time-based linkage of discrete
events from conception to birth — the realm of
capability extends beyond the bounds of that specific
narrative chain. These organs can do other things, can
have other purposes, and it is the prerogative of
every individual to acknowledge and explore this wide
realm of capability