Karen Finley Projects Outrage Without Props : Activist: Performance artist is scathing and scatological at Cal State Fullerton.

Performance artist Karen Finley, whose work helped spark the National Endowment for the Arts funding controversy, was scathing and scatological Wednesday night as she brought her aptly named “Shock Treatment” tour to Southern California.

But there was no chocolate, little skin and no produce--elements of previous Finley performances that outraged certain columnists and such members of Congress as Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) and Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Long Beach)--as Finley read for a standing-room-only crowd of 280 at Cal State Fullerton.

Last year, Finley was denied an NEA grant after criticism of her piece “We Keep Our Victims Ready,” in which she smears her breasts with chocolate as part of a monologue symbolizing the oppression and degradation of women. She is one of four artists suing the federal agency to force reconsideration of such decisions which, they charge, were based on politics rather than aesthetics. Finley is further suing for $50,000 in damages, asserting that the NEA violated her privacy. Several NEA-funded New York art spaces were investigated for staging Finley’s performances.

In an interview after her performance, Finley said she was not impressed with the NEA’a recent decision to drop the anti-obscenity oath it had required of grant recipients. The battle over censorship, she said, is not confined to the arts, and is not over because of the NEA action.

“I think that what they’re trying to do is to make people think that it’s over,” she said.

Stripped of her props, the subversion and the outrage for which Finley is known was evident in the content of her 70-minute performance rather than the form. Wearing a long, black dress, seated on a stool and reading from a music stand, Finley presented 10 of her works, most of which appear in her new book, also entitled “Shock Treatment.”

Buyer beware: Finley does dwell on the sexual and excretory in her diatribes against AIDS, sexism and racism. Other than tossing her long hair, however, the most physical activity of the evening came during one piece as Finley pounded her chest for emphasis. But even rooted on the stool, she was equal parts poet, preacher and blues singer, delivering her pieces as if they were incantations, sermons and songs without music.

Little in her previous publicity prepared the audience for how funny the 34-year-old Finley is. More than any other performer, she stirs memories of Lenny Bruce in the manic later stages of his career when, like Finley, he was beset by negative publicity and legal entanglement.

Never mistaken for a protofeminist, Bruce nevertheless challenged society’s fundamental assumptions about sex in ways that local enforcement, media and religious authorities found extremely threatening. And some of Finley’s pieces, like Bruce’s bits, have the feel of a jazz riff about them.

By way of warning Finley explained to the Cal State audience that, in addition to a glass of water, she had a large plastic “spit cup” handy, because sometimes “I kind of froth at the mouth.” Introducing one piece, she said her current preference is frankly for “blaming rather than forgiveness. . . . Blame, hate and then get it over with.” But in another piece, “Mothers at the Graves,” she said: “The only way to survive is to make fun of yourself.”

The funniest piece was “Happy Birthday,” in which Finley mused over the custom of a woman jumping out of a cake at all-male parties. Few of her explanations can be reproduced in a family newspaper--she does a lot of prostate material--but she did suggest a few variations on the practice for women’s parties. One is called the “Take Out the Garbage Game,” in which a guy “cute in a soap opera kind of way . . . takes out the garbage until he’s real sweaty and exhausted and naked.”

Each “game” ends with a crowd of women party-goers surrounding the man and humiliating him in a sexual fashion.

Many of the pieces and observations were pay-backs and potshots aimed at those she say are her tormentors.

Rohrabacher, whose district includes part of Orange County, was a frequent target because, she said, “he’s tried to destroy me and some of my friends.” Referring to him variously as “my enemy,” “a wimp,” “not really an intelligent person” and “a pathetic fool,” she told the students: “You can have a lot of fun with Rohrabacher in your back yard.”

In “It’s Only Art,” she talked about what she characterized as Helms’ obsession with anything remotely phallic, even food.

Other targets included Disneyland, Charlton Heston, Nancy Reagan, Donald E. Wildmon, Cardinal John J. O’Connor and Mary Elizabeth (Tipper) Gore. Sports Illustrated was hit for giving more space to women in swim suits than women athletes, and “classic rock” radio stations for never playing more than one female artist in a row.

In “Drought,” she said “sometimes you have to do extreme things to feel loved.” It might serve as a signature quote for all her work. Elsewhere in the same piece, she referred to herself as “a caged bird in heat.”

Finley got the greatest response of the evening from the largely student-age audience for her last piece, “The War at Home,” in which she took on the Gulf War.

“The yellow ribbons are really making me sick,” she said. The real symbol people should be hanging up are body bags, she said, adding that she is afraid for her brother, who is in the reserves.

“America is a mean, mean, mean, mean Daddy,” she said. “Invasion is only OK when it’s done by white man.”