‘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.

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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 . . . .”

Under pressure from a public aghast at Shvarts’s plan, Yale eventually acted. University administrators acknowledged that the student’s proposal should never have been allowed and ruled that her exhibit would be cancelled unless she stated in writing that she had fabricated the miscarriages and pledged not to display human blood. Shvarts’s work was, in the end, barred from the exhibit. Thereafter, campus officials, in a show of backbone, declared they had taken “appropriate” — although undefined — punitive action against Lindman and another faculty member who had approved the project.

The only appropriate action for Yale would have been to fire Lindman for her deplorable judgment in approving a project that so trivialized abortion — and even constituted a potential biohazard. Lindman should have been fired, too, for her appalling lack of artistic judgment in not questioning, as feminist critic Charlotte Allen wryly observed, “whether plastic sheeting and videotapes of a naked undergraduate flaunting her presumed miscarriages add up to a work of art.”

Instead, a prestigious Ivy League university has once again endorsed a professor who conflates destructive — even potentially murderous — pornography with art, and who encourages her students to do the same.

The “aesthetic” and “scholarly” lessons Shvarts imbibed at Yale from Lindman and her ilk are far from aberrational. Art and literature departments across the country are infested by them. Charles Lane of the Washington Post recognized the kinship of Shvarts’s project with this broader academic fashion, calling her plan

. . . the reductio ad absurdum — or ad nauseam — of ideology and pedagogy that have been standard fare in the humanities at Yale and on many other campuses for years. Her supervisors . . . probably didn’t tell her no for the same reason that, in 2003, a New York University professor initially approved a student’s proposal to record two students having sex in front of the class. (The NYU administration later nixed it.)

The politicized obsession with race, gender and sexuality; the denigration of canonical works by “dead white males”; the callow mocking of convention; the notion that truth itself is merely a construct of power and self-interest — all characterize the study of art and literature in America’s colleges and universities. All were reflected in Shvarts’s rationale for her “installation.”

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