Yeah, it “got people talking.” Big deal. The fact that this little performance-art trick is going to be taken up into the meme of Reality ™ for the anti-choice wingnuts and get endlessly recycled and thrown back in our faces as “something that really happened!” doesn’t seem to have crossed her tiny little brain. Or maybe it did, and she’s an anti-choicer deliberately trying to produce so-called “evidence” that they can quote in fund-raising literature down the road.

In which case this is nothing more than the deliberate manufacturing of something equivalent to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and should be denounced.

Frankly, based on that art-diatribe pseudo-Foucaulting bilge in her so-called statement, I’m more likely to write her off as a clueless idiot.

Schroedinger’s embryo.

Me: No the whole point is that new ideas will be conceived in the viewer’s mind. It’s not the artist’s job to spell it out for you.

Mnem, jargon translated: The difference between miscarrying and menstruating is biologically minimal, and only is meaningful because society invests meaning in the act of impregnating a woman. In fact, you could argue that impregnating a woman is considered more meaningful than giving birth, which of course is because we live in a world where men are supposed to have control of everything important. Legalizing abortion was a social act that suggested that the act of going through with a pregnancy and birth was more important than ejaculating into a woman, and that women should get the credit for making babies more than men.

Legalizing abortion was a conceptual death blow to patriarchy, which is of course, why it’s the major point of struggle in the culture wars, though gay marriage, which drains “traditional” marriage of its patriarchal meaning (that men own women) is quickly catching on it.

People think the central question in the abortion debate is “when” life begins, but that’s a red herring. More important and direct is the question of who we assign the power to start life—the man? Or the woman? Pro-choicers say women create life through the process of pregnancy. Anti-choicers say men create life through the process of ejaculation.

Are you sure you want to put your words into her mouth? She’s about the worst advocate for any viewpoint imaginable, and a lot of pro-choice advocates are not pleased about this at all.

I fully agree that the “life begins at conception” argument is factually stupid, and the continuation of this myth is hampering medical research that could cure Alzheimer’s and other diseases, as well as dramatically and unnecessarily increasing the cost of fertility treatments because unused embryos have to be preserved indefinitely instead of discarded.

It is a biological fact that fertilized eggs routinely fail to attach to the uterus, and are discharged in what appears to be a normal menstruation at an early stage of embryonic development.

However, my understanding is that later in the pregnancy, miscarriage is physically and emotionally traumatic, and the suffering of women who lose pregnancies that they are trying to take to term shouldn’t be discounted.

Anyway, Shvartz makes none of these points, and that’s part of the reason her art is so bad. I don’t think projecting video of herself menstruating onto a surface smeared with blood makes any salient point whatsoever about abortion, gay marriage, feminism or anything else, and I think people who are trying to advance their positions on those issues gain rather minimal benefit from Shvartz’s assistance.

By the way, why is legalized abortion the liberating achievement rather than the invention of the birth control pill?

And dismissing artists as stupid is an old trick, and one that artists kind of play into, because they refuse to explain themselves straightforwardly, because they want you to engage with the art. I suspect that she’s actually quite aware of what she’s doing. The anti-choice nuts were swapping a video around of her talking about patriarchal heteronormativity, and the implication of course was, “Teach women to read and look what happens,” but it did demonstrate that she’s not a dumb fuck who got lucky, but someone who understands the unspoken conceptual disagreements in the debate and who decided to expose them.

Oh, I understood the jargon. I just think you’re giving her way, way too much credit for deep thought and political awareness.

But, then, I come from the artistic tradition that says, “If you want to send a message, use Western Union,” so I don’t have a lot of patience for performance art.

Legalizing abortion was a conceptual death blow to patriarchy, which is of course, why it’s the major point of struggle in the culture wars, though gay marriage, which drains “traditional” marriage of its patriarchal meaning (that men own women) is quickly catching on it.

People think the central question in the abortion debate is “when” life begins, but that’s a red herring. More important and direct is the question of who we assign the power to start life—the man? Or the woman? Pro-choicers say women create life through the process of pregnancy. Anti-choicers say men create life through the process of ejaculation.