ART REVIEW : ‘Memento’: Undiluted Karen Finley

Two venerable artistic traditions--one Modernist, one not--coincide in “Memento Mori,” Karen Finley’s ambitious installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Each is registered with an undeniable degree of commitment, and both contain elements of considerable power. Still, the dual traditions coexist uneasily. They don’t exactly cancel each other out, but they do seem peculiarly flat.

“Memento Mori” includes several wall paintings and two tableaux vivants. Their subjects aren’t just politically charged, they’re about the most volatile that could be imagined. One is a woman’s right to choose in the matter of abortion, the other the nightmare of the AIDS epidemic. Both are bound up with complex questions of how certain people are marginalized in terms of social power, and of how that marginalized status can prove deadly.

Finley is one of the so-called “NEA 4,”a group of artists currently suing the National Endowment for the Arts in the wake of alleged violations of their First Amendment freedoms. She has been the target of phenomenal verbal abuse, and her art has been the subject of demeaning misrepresentation.

“Memento Mori” marks her solo debut in Los Angeles (the New York-based artist had two works in a 1985 group show here, at Zero One Gallery). MOCA has given us our first chance to consider Finley’s work in some depth, free from the distorting demagoguery of congressmen and political pundits.

The first tradition Finley valorizes is that of modern agitprop, or agitational propaganda, which transforms art into a noisy theatrical spectacle in order to function as a socially exhortatory tool. Agitprop means to rally the collective crowd.

The second, much older tradition is that of the memorial, in which the quiet potency of individual human memory is harnessed and given form. Memorials address the crowd as a congregation of individual consciences.

Finley’s art is blunt and didactic. “The Virgin Mary is Pro-choice,” declares the legend scrawled beneath a crudely painted wall image of the Madonna. “God is a Woman,” announces another mural, itself faced by the declaration on an opposite wall that “My God Is Homosexual (Love Your Neighbor as Yourself).” The gallery of murals is an antechamber to the rooms with Finley’s tableaux, and it creates a stark confrontation between her vocal assertion of the free play of ideas and the contradictory specter of blasphemy.

For an artist better known for performance work than for painting or installations, it’s not surprising that the theatrical dimension of agitprop is most plain in the two tableaux. “The Women’s Room” and “The Memorial Room” are stage sets constructed in the galleries, and they incorporate “actors” drawn from among community volunteers. (So far, more than 400 have signed up to participate during the show’s run.) They also invite museum spectators to become participants in the drama--that is, to become active rather than passive viewers.

“The Memorial Room” is the more elaborate of the two. At its dual entrances, attendants offer visitors flowers to weave into a lace curtain or ribbons to tie on a wrought-iron gate, both in memory of one who has died from AIDS. Nearby, another attendant stands next to an open hope chest filled with sand; you can trace a name with your finger.

A row of four beds lines one side of the room. Two hold patients, while caring friends are seated by their sides. Two are empty, with votive offerings in place of absent people. Opposite, two texts are inscribed in gold paint on a black wall. The texts are part political tract--wagging fingers and assigning blame--part anguished wail of heartfelt grief.

“The Women’s Room” uses a similar lineup of domestic furniture--this time dressing tables whose mirrors are scrawled with familiar statements of women’s unequal status in our culture. On the floor nearby, a woman in a nightgown lies in rumpled bedclothes on a mattress. Above her head a bird is trapped inside a cage, from which cascade hundreds of interlocking coat hangers. Texts painted on adjacent walls and on a hanging silk sheet tell brutal, no doubt authentic tales of self-afflicted abortion.

Finley’s texts in these tableaux aren’t just angry. They are furious .

By contrast, the installations are decidedly sentimental, sometimes even mawkish. Emotional recognition is their first aim, but the fury of the texts insists it is not enough for art. Sympathetic attention to the deadly crisis of AIDS or to the equally deadly yoking of women does not do the trick. Once aroused, Finley wants you to choose sides.

Moral demands are not often encountered in museum exhibitions, and it is frankly bracing to see MOCA provide a platform for their presentation. The strongest aspect of “Memento Mori” is that the artist plainly is not going to shut up, no matter what her opponents might choose to hurl her way.

In fact, it might be productive to think of Finley less as an installation or performance artist than as a kind of martial artist. Every ounce of force brought to bear against her seems to get absorbed and turned back against the perpetrator, in a deft and quick-witted act of self-defense. That’s the real-life tableau vivant now playing at MOCA.

Finley is astute in recognizing the modern museum as a public arena in which meaningful social rituals are enacted, and thus as an appropriate venue for the consideration of pressing public issues. She tries to harness that ritual site to her own specific ends. Her tableaux give public visibility to scenes that are more typically private.

Where her work falls apart, however, is in its inability to collide its dual traditions of agitprop and memorial in any vital way. They are, after all, rather contradictory terms. Agitprop is a radical call for reform, commemoration a deeply conservative impulse. When brought together here, they seem unwitting bedfellows.

Finley doesn’t set them against each other in an interesting or illuminating way. Their cohabitation creates no friction or ambiguity, which might have opened up thought and feeling to unanticipated dimensions. For all its in-your-face insistence on moral rectitude, “Memento Mori” feels scattered and diffuse, finally generating little heat or light.

* Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave., (213) 626-6222, through Aug. 23. Closed Mondays.