You heard it here first (well, unless you subscribe to email updates from the Yale Daily News): Aliza Shvarts’ work will be presented at the Tate Modern.
Not the piece that got her in so much trouble in April, mind you, and not on display; she just created “two seconds” (according to a curator) of a two-hour presentation at the Tate about the media. A Yale faculty member invited her to include her work under the rationale that “she seemed to be more affected by the media than most of us are in our whole lifetimes…I thought she would have some reaction to how the media manipulates stories and truths.”
Well, sure. But will two seconds of an event called “Grammaphones, Films, Typewriters” during a two-day celebration of the work of “German media theorist Friedrich Kittler” (who?) really get to the depth of that? More likely, it seems that one of two rationales were used: either the Tate just wants to gain access to Aliza Shvarts, the controversy, without having to open itself up to criticism of Aliza Shvarts, the artist; or the Tate, unlike almost everyone who passed judgment on the controversy this spring, recognizes that — regardless of whether this is what Shvarts is trying to do with her art — she’s at her most compelling as a performance artist who forces the public sphere to recognize its own tendencies toward the farcical. The hysteria, the gullibility, the breathless search for the New Big Controversy — the Tate seems to have brought Shvarts on less as a documenter or analyst of these things, but as a lightning-rod artifact of them.
Good for the Tate. There is no easy way to collect a performance artist, especially one whose medium is news cycles. Using her only for a few seconds — name-checking her, really — seems like the right way to recognize what she does best.
(While we’re on the topic of gullibility, Yale College Dean Peter Salovey finally admitted to the YDN that “we could never determine unambiguously what she did.” So much for the readily-believed explanation that it was a “fabrication” all along, eh?)
Glad Tate did not become one of bowing to “politcal correctness” which made art and science subordinate to lawless dictators thoughout history.Aliza Shvarts work demosntarted we did not advance in that sence even one step since. Bravo to fearless conseptual artists who make us see surounding in a different way otherwise the earth be still flat.