✧ push picks #062 ✧

Aliza Shvarts is an artist theorist who takes a queer and feminist approach to reproductive labor and language. Her artwork has been exhibited internationally at venues including the Tate Modern, Athens Biennale, Art in General, and SculptureCenter. Her writing and interviews have appeared in October, Artforum, The Cut, e-flux, Art in America and The Brooklyn Rail, among other publications. Shvarts holds a PhD in Performance Studies (NYU), was a Helena Rubinstein Fellow in Critical Studies at the Whitney Independent Study Program (ISP), and currently Director of the Low-Residency MFA Program at School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC).

Disconsent: Faith is a new work I have been testing out, most recently at Human Resources (LA) and 601Artspace (NYC). It consists of live one-on-one performances and is part of my larger Disconsent series, which examine the relationships between consent, which often takes the form of a speech act, and its imperfect opposite—dissent—which often exceeds speech to take the form of silence, protest, or other forms of bodily acts.

Participants are invited to listen to a story about a time when someone consented or dissented in the context of religion or faith. Then, they tell this story back, “reversing” the terms of consent or dissent. This reversal can range from simply replacing the terms used in the original narrative (i.e. replacing "yes" with "no") to inventing new details entirely. Participants then tell a story of their own about a time they consented or dissented in the context of religion or faith. This becomes the story I tell to the next participant. My eyelids are taped shut for the duration of the work. Participants are asked to sign a card and agree to having their voice recorded. 

For the recent Dallas exhibition Is it Real? Contemporary Artists Address Reproductive Freedom, my collaborator Viva Ruiz and I were honored to do a Q&A with Texas Equal Action Fund (TEA Fund). They are doing amazing, vital work. Everyone should support them.

I just watched AKA Jane Roe, a documentary about Norma McCorvey who was the "Roe" of Roe v. Wade which was heartbreaking--not just because of the state of access to abortion care right now, but for the way McCorvey's own life highlights the intersections between failures of care and failures of justice.

This has been stuck in my head, maybe for obvious reasons.

I am writing an article for Art in America on reproductive justice in the art world, and was revisiting this amazing article by Meehan Crist called “Is it OK to have a child?” (video here)from March 2020 volume of the London Review of Books. It is an incredible read for a lot of reasons, connecting climate crisis and anxieties about reproduction to eugenics discourses (past and present) and the ethics of having a child. What sticks out for me for though is this provocation to think about reproduction outside of capitalism:

“Having a child isn’t merely one consumer choice among many. […] Today, our desires are conditioned by a baffling confluence of forces: the cultural fantasy of free consumer choice, a sense of personal responsibility for global phenomena, the pressures of precarious economic circumstances, and the terrors of ecological collapse. Some people say they don’t want to bring a child into a devastated world, or they don’t want to harm the planet, or don’t want their child to suffer in a degraded future. And then there is the moral imperative to erase that carbon footprint, which has as much to do with care for the environment and other people as with relieving the misplaced burden of moral responsibility. In wealthy, industrialised nations, we are told to be better, greener consumers. But do we have meaningful choices? What would it look like if we did?”

I have been watching a lot of the Great British Bake Off over the past year, which started when I had to put my beloved dog of fifteen years to sleep. It was a devastating time, and the show is very calming. I have been thinking about one of the technical challenges from a couple years ago where contestants were asked to make “plaited bread”—by which they meant challah (an incident which sparked an online commentary about how Bake Off “has no Jewish friends,” though this is by far not the worst incident of cultural insensitivity on the show). And of course no one really could. But then at the same time, I am a jew, whose mother is British, and I can’t make challah either.