FINLEY HITS BELOW THE BELT, SCORES CLEAN KO’S

“A lot of people who haven’t seen my show think that I hate men, or that I’m putrid and obscene,” confided performance artist Karen Finley.

And many people who have seen her act feel the same way. She assaults her audience with the kind of foul-mouthed, confrontational monologues that make Lenny Bruce’s old routines seem almost as quaint as “The Canterbury Tales.”

No one can say she doesn’t get a reaction. At a recent New York show, several men in the audience pulled down their pants and threw lit cigarettes at the stage. In Dallas, people threw pennies. In Holland, her show was stopped after an enraged woman leaped on stage and knocked over a table.

“In San Francisco, where I was doing a show with (fellow artist) Lydia Lunch, they got so worried about what might happen that they offered to pay us double not to perform at all,” explained Finley, who’s in town for a pair of performances tonight and Saturday at LACE. “I really don’t know what it is that gets people so nuts. I’m as surprised as anyone. This is 1986, but somehow what I’m saying on stage gets people very up tight.”

Of course, if you’ve witnessed one of her tumultuous, shock-theater events, it’s pretty easy to understand why the headline of a recent Village Voice cover story on Finley read “Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts.”

Finley is as much an artist provocateur as a performer. She discusses sex and violence in graphic detail, offers slashing rejoinders to hecklers and uses a large yam as a stage prop. And that’s just the part of her act that we can mention in a family newspaper. But the 30-year-old artist insists she’s aiming for more than just a gross-out exhibition.

“I never thought of being the first woman that talked dirty any more than I wanted to be the first woman to play for the Green Bay Packers,” she said, relaxing at a friend’s house here. “All I’m doing is talking about taboos, things that we prefer to ignore in our society. I think it’s the artist’s duty to respond to horrific events in our society, whether it’s incest, abortion, sexual violence, AIDS or pandas becoming extinct.

“A lot of people who interview me ask if I’d been sexually abused, as if all of this came from personal experience. Yet I never heard anyone ask Truman Capote if he was a murderer because he wrote ‘In Cold Blood.’ ”

Oddly enough, one of Finley’s pop-culture icons is the Barbara Eden character in “I Dream of Jeannie,” whom she views as a woman armed with special powers that men try, unsuccessfully, to control. “A big problem some people have with my show is that I’m a woman,” she said, noting that suggestive sexuality never seems to provoke an uproar when it’s used to sell jeans and cosmetics.

“What happens, I think, is that people are very fearful of women showing their body or using sexual language when they’re in power--and when I’m on stage, I’m in a position of power. It doesn’t bother anyone nearly as much if a woman shows her body when she’s in a position of sexual passivity, like you see in erotic movies and magazines.”

Finley shrugged. “But what I do definitely makes people very uncomfortable.”

Seeing Finley away from the stage, it’s hard to imagine you’re in the company of a bona-fide cultural menace. Wearing a black sweater, jeans and a pair of gray socks bunched around her ankles, she looked more like an art critic than an agitator (though her current reading material wasn’t exactly professorial--she’s splitting her time between Kitty Kelley’s biography of Frank Sinatra and a volume called “An Amateur’s Guide to Taxidermy.”)

A soft-spoken woman with a sly wit (she described her upbringing as something “like growing up in a John Irving novel”), Finley joked with her boyfriend, played a tape of a new song she’d written and reminisced about her childhood in Evanston, Ill., where she was the oldest of six children.

“My dad was very involved in jazz, so I grew up with a lot of musicians around,” she explained. “My mother was an ardent member of the Jungian Institute. To her, dreams were more important than even having food on the table. The important thing was that my mother’s creative talents were considered to be just as important as my father’s, so I grew up with the idea that, as a woman, I could use my talents in equal standing with men.”

Finley was already staging “Happening”-style performances when she was in high school. “We’d take aluminum foil and block all the entrances to school, so people had to bust through the foil to get in,” she recalled. “And when I’d give school reports and show slides about Reconstruction in the South, I’d always slip in a picture of a naked woman or a man.”

After attending art school and working with one of the members of a performance-art team called the Kipper Kids, Finley began performing solo, playing both raucous New York clubs and more high-brow art forums. “When I see someone in a Danskin or a leotard I get very nervous,” she explained, pulling her hair back into a pony tail. “The art crowds are usually too cool to show their feelings.

“To be a performance artist, you need the public to complete the work. So I like the clubs. When I’m on stage, I’m like a banshee or a poltergeist. I feel like I step out of my body sometimes. I’ve seen videos of my performances and I always say, ‘Who is that person?’

“So it doesn’t really bother me when people shout all the time or call me a whore. I just take the emotion and use it in the show.” She laughed. “Anyway, in New York, their bark is worse than their bite.”

Nonetheless, Finley’s first burst of media acclaim--a cover story this summer in the Village Voice--caused a huge ruckus. Judging from the explosive reaction, you’d think the Voice had endorsed Lyndon LaRouche for President. Angry letters poured into the paper for weeks on end, while Voice columnist Pete Hamill wrote a scathing attack, blasting Finley, the author of the piece and the paper’s editorial judgment. (In true Voice fashion, several of the paper’s critics also joined the fray, with spirited Finley defenses appearing in a subsequent film review and, of all places, the paper’s restaurant column.)

Finley holds no grudges. “I’m kind of used to that stuff by now. I was ready for Hamill’s ideas about me, but I thought it was pretty unfair, considering he’s never seen me perform. I’d like to think that if he saw my work that he’d see that I’m very serious about a lot of the same issues that he is.”

She laughed. “Anyway, I can’t hold anything against a guy who’s gone out with Jackie Kennedy.”

Finley certainly harbors no illusions about crossing over into the cultural mainstream. She was approached about doing a segment on MTV, but refused, saying that they asked her to clean up her act. “Listen, I wish I didn’t have to go through this. I’d love to be like a lot of people who are numb to some of the things that go on in the world. But I can’t do that.

“Once you see what happens to people around you, you just can’t close your eyes anymore. If I felt that way, I’d feel like I might as well be dead.”