REVIEW : Finley Attacks Her ‘Victims’ With Zeal of a Prophet

Karen Finley meets her downtown Sushi Performance Gallery audience with the assumed intimacy of a television talk-show host and the fervor of an old-time evangelist.

She chats amiably with the gathered folk, bringing them into her confidence by commenting on the progress of her own work. At one point, she generously tosses out handfuls of candy and distributes improvised Karen Finley T-shirts; then, in the next moment, she hectors her audience and lashes out with the righteous zeal of a Hebrew prophet.

Just as there is only one Billy Graham, there is but one Karen Finley, and the first lady of graphic performance art opened Sushi’s 10th anniversary season Wednesday night with predictable panache.

“We Keep Our Victims Ready” is the title of her new one-woman routine, which she has coyly marketed as both a world premiere and a work-in-progress. (No doubt Finley would dismiss the notion that a work should be completed before its world premiere as the typically oppressive complaint of a doddering white male critic.)

The targets of Finley’s wrath are males, museums that don’t show art made by women, child and wife abusers, males, Jesse Helms, the Roman Catholic Church, males, religious zealots, Nazis and males.

With this cast of villains, it comes as no surprise that women, mothers, children, AIDS patients, as well as gay men and lesbians are the subjects of Finley’s sympathetic portrayals and impersonations.

It is her ability to capture such an individual--the alcoholic mother, the grieving partner of a dying AIDS patient--in a concise pose and unfailing verbal cadence that puts Finley above the routine performance artist. She refines this anguish into poignant litanies that are paradoxically indebted to both High Church liturgy and fundamentalist preachers. Such intense moments are rare in a genre that thrives on cheap shock and cartoon-sized philosophies.

If Finley’s dramatic abilities soar, her ideas remain earthbound. Nor does she uncover new ground: each topic she touches has been editorialized and celebrated in television documentaries. Some of her assertions are half-baked, e.g. her claim that contemporary American social and political repression can be equated with Nazi Germany in the late 1930s. “Only our ovens work at a lower speed,” she observed.

As usual, a Finley opus requires an intimate interaction of the Finley torso with unexpected foodstuffs. In “We Keep Our Victims Ready,” Finley first smears her body with melted chocolate (from a gaudy, heart-shaped candy box), then sprinkles it with more candy, alfalfa sprouts, and finally adorns it with gobs of Christmas tree tinsel. At least she allows the audience to conjure its own interpretation, although a sardonic comment on the children’s verse, “Sugar and spice and everything nice--that’s what little girls are made of,” seems one likely possibility.

Finley works on a stage with few props: a rocking chair, a kitchen table, and a simple cot. Each one serves as the appropriate altar for each segment of her three-act devotion. The simple lighting was uncredited, but Ken Branson was listed as guest producer. Not all of Finley’s text was committed to memory Wednesday night, which interfered with her usual unerring sense of timing and delivery.

Still, this is vintage Finley. She will repeat the show at Sushi through Sunday.