Dinner from yesterday didn’t sit well so I’ve been making performance art all day. I’m calling it “ode to Yale”. So far it’s a 6-part movement but I’m working on a follow-up piece. Once I get the bugs worked out it should flow together nicely.
By my definition of talent I’m sticking with “hoax” until someone pays me for my crappy art. Sorry, make that crape’ art.
Fortunately, your definition of talent isn’t what makes it art. What your post does demonstrate is that you’re thinking about what she’s doing and reacting to it, which in effect means she’s accomplished what she intended and produced a highly effective piece.
Again, I’m not saying it’s good, in fact I think she could have gone about it in other ways for more profound effect, but the fact is, it is effective. Maybe you’re just mad because you fell for it . 
It was clearly a successful piece. In the end I’m a fan. She accomplished her objective and now has created one of the most famous performance art pieces in history, and is now a famous artist. Congrats to her. She can now put her work up in Chelsea with the rest of the hacks.
I have to say, though, it sure beats starving a dog (warning, this is a link to a PETA site that asks you to sign an online petition).
She hopes it inspires “discourse”, like people can’t talk about such a thing without viewing images of her red cottage cheese. Nice. Art…it escapes definition anymore!
Don’t fuck with Big Pomegranate.
So, wait. It was menstrual blood, or it wasn’t?
Oho, the student is claiming that Yale is lying, and that the display is exactly what she says it is.
Maybe so, but the constant stress on one’s body doesn’t sound healthy.
And before anyone asks, yes, I AM pro-choice. I still think this “activity” would be insanely stupid.
Is it effective? We’ve had, what, maybe 20% of the posts talking about the issues of abortion or how this piece makes us outraged/not? Most of what I see us “thinking about” is the mechanics and merits of the actual red stuff (whatever it is) and video tapes and the probability of deception, not any message about Life, the Universe and Everything.
Or was her intent to spark discourse on the creation of art using the artist’s bodily fluids and the safety/ethics of that? If so, then perhaps it’s “effective”.
Or does it matter what she wanted us to react to - any reaction at all counts as “effective”, even if it’s not what she expected us to be talking about?
I guess this is a bigger question than this thread is here for, and probably covered in Art 101, along with some bastardized lesson on “the medium is/isn’t the message”…
I suspected this was a hoax but my thoughts about her “performance art” weren’t about the morality of abortion or the use of her bodily tissue or even the process she would have followed to do this if it was real. All I could think about was her parents talking with their friends and sharing what their kids are up to.
“Well, Johnny is finishing his bachelor’s and has been accepted to Yale Law School. And what’s your daughter, Aliza, doing?”
“Oh, she just finished a performance art piece where she purposely impregnated herself, aborted the fetuses using herbal medications, videotaped the miscarriages then smeared the blood and tissue between sheets of plastic wrapped around a large cube and she projected the videos of the miscarriages on the cube.”
:eek:
“Don’t worry! She didn’t really do any of that! The whole project was a hoax concocted as part of her performance piece to draw attention to the ambiguity surrounding form and function of a woman’s body. And it seems like only yesterday I was putting her fingerpaintings up on the fridge.”
“Uh, yeah. Gee, look at the time. I gotta get going.”
Another vote for Poe’s Law here.
Or, yeah, just some arsewit who has mistaken shock for artistic significance.
Any discourse is discourse. My bet is that she expected people to react to the issue of abortion, I don’t imagine anyone would would say otherwise. If her intent really was to make a piece about the body and art she could have used hair or skin or toenail clippings or photographs. Obviously the concept of pregnancy and abortion was used specifically to elicit this kind of reaction.
My own thoughts on the matter, thinking as art students do, is that she expected her peers and classmates to discuss the issue of body and art along with the abortion piece of it. I bet she never expected to get national coverage on it, but would have known that the art-ignorant (for lack of a better word, just those normal folks that don’t think like artists, and particularly performance artists) would only see abortion as the topic for discussion.
It was clearly a disaster. A good portion of the people that read about her mental breakdown… err… performance art didn’t even believe it was real.
I predict the words “Would you like fries with that?” will be the only meaningful expression she’ll make the rest of her life.
That’s weird that Yale is disavowing it while she is claiming to have really done it. Maybe she really did all stuff, but they don’t want to be responsible?
But honestly, it seems a little out there. I wasn’t TOO surprised to see it was a hoax, especially when other posters were poking holes in the whole thing yesterday.
I suppose the most likely explanation is that she didn’t really do it, but perhaps wishes she had? Or is a bit unhinged?
Uh huh. For discussion purposes, anything could be called art. You can dance on that semantic pin all you want. As I stated before, it is as much art as taking a dump. I make performance art every day. A cry for attention doesn’t make it any more artistic nor does the discussion of it make it a performance piece.
As a fellow performing artist I feel her blending of organic medium, technology and space renders an olfactory sense of what art has transcended to.
Would you order food from her?
It’s nice to think that people like this will sink into anonymity, but likely she won’t. She’ll rabble rouse for years, this success will only inspire her to reach further.
As far as what she did, what she claims is that she squirted some jizz up her cootchie and drank aborifacent herbs around the time of her period. Sounds more like a ritual than anything really. Not terribly scientific, the jizz may well have been inert by the time she inserted it.
As long as it didn’t involve tomatoes in any form.
Dammit! Three minutes too slow. Although my joke would have involved tomato soup…
And I think it’s really reaching to call this a success. Everyone hates her and the majority of the world now believes she’s mentally ill. I know “mentally ill” sells in the art world, but when was the last time we heard anything from “The Virgin Mary Is The Shit” guy?