Karen Finley Manages to Keep Body and Soul Together : Art: Her blend of rage, compassion and down-home detail surfaces as she tells a UCI audience about her controversial performance pieces.

“It’s so lovely to be in a place where I’m welcome,” Karen Finley told an audience at UC Irvine’s Little Theatre Tuesday night.

Coming from another artist, the phrase might just have been a pleasantry. But Finley has become accustomed to tense encounters.

She gained a curious kind of infamy after being vilified by conservative columnists and Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) on the basis of reports of her performance piece “We Keep Our Victims Ready” (1989) in which she covered her body with various foods. The following year, she was denied a National Endowment for the Arts grant.

Even some of the liberal venues around the country that have booked her current tour “are so afraid to be associated with me, they won’t announce me to the press,” she said.

Her new piece, “A Certain Level of Denial”--which will be performed at the Santa Monica Museum of Art tonight as part of the Day Without Art AIDS observance--lost one of its AIDS group sponsors, she said, because they feared alienating corporate supporters.

Finley doesn’t look the slightest bit like an artist-provocateur, with her friendly, open face, well-groomed shoulder-length hair and sporty clothes. But a slide from one of her early pieces, of her naked rear end dripping yam juice, served to remind the UCI audience of the extraordinary fearlessness and visceral feminist anger in her work.

In a rambling account--hindered by a stuck slide projector and her admitted tiredness after six weeks of touring the country--Finley talked about her background and her work.

Coming from the liberal university community of Evanston, Ill., she discovered the world of “happenings”--spontaneous art events--as a young teen-ager. Performance simply was another medium for her, she said, “similar to jewelry, ceramics or acrylic painting.”

But she had grown up watching the politics of the late ‘60s on TV: the riots in the streets during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the Vietnam War. And she already was questioning women’s traditional roles: “I couldn’t become an altar boy; I had to wear dresses to school.”

Her training at the San Francisco Art Institute in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s coincided with the punk rock movement. She and her friends opened for bands and performed in nightclubs “instead of sending in slides and waiting to be accepted in the traditional nonprofit galleries.”

Living in New York in the mid-’80s, Finley began using her body as a medium in work that, she said, deliberately stressed the emotional qualities traditionally decried in women. Male artists like Vito Acconci and Chris Burden already were mortifying their flesh in the name of art. But Finley said she was unprepared for the uproar that occurred when she worked in the nude.

“When a man takes off his shirt, he’s going to work,” she said. “When a woman takes off her shirt, she becomes easy prey.”

The piece illustrated by the slide of Finley’s buttocks deals, in a series of monologues involving various types of food, with sexual abuse and misogynist attitudes experienced throughout a woman’s life. In the scene shown, with the yams (“I smeared them on my backside”), a grandmother is abused on Thanksgiving by her drug addict grandson.

“It really was kind of horrific,” Finley recalled. Her tone changed to annoyance as she described the way she felt the press already had begun to misconstrue her work. “A man considered liberal--he wrote liner notes for (Bob) Dylan--(wrote in the Village Voice) that I took uncooked yam and was sticking it up my butt. That’s an example of my work being taken out of context.”

In addition to her performance work, Finley’s output includes painting, poetry, recordings (including “A Certain Level of Denial,” on Rykodisc), a black comedy (“The Theory of Total Blame”) and public sculpture (a bronze casting of “The Black Sheep,” her poem about the outcasts of society, installed in an area of downtown New York with a large homeless population).

Her installations include “Memento Mori,” a piece--seen at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 1992--involving tableaux of “dying” patients and various rituals for viewers.

“I felt very frustrated when my friends were dying,” she said. “I didn’t feel there was a proper grieving ceremony.”

As a result of the NEA’s “anti-obscenity” provision of 1990, Finley and three other artists were denied grants and sued the agency, arguing that the stricture--which questioned the “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value” of depictions of sex acts and other activities--was too vague and broad. The lawsuit was settled in the artists’ favor last year; the government is appealing the ruling.

“The Clinton Administration is continuing the appeal of the Bush Administration,” Finley said with a sigh.

“We Keep Our Victims Ready,” the piece that provoked the fracas, was inspired by a news report of a 16-year-old girl found in a trash bin, covered with feces.

“If we are marginalized--as women, gays, lesbians, immigrants and so forth--we are victims no matter what,” Finley said. “(In the piece) I give stories of people where this (oppression) happens to them.”

*

In the notorious portion of “We Keep Our Victims Ready,” Finley covers her body with chocolate to represent the callous treatment of women. She adds various other items, including tinsel “because no matter how bad you’re treated, a woman always knows how to get dressed for dinner.”

Frequent laughter at Finley’s satirical comments on the treatment of women were proof that her universe does have its lighter side. In a similar vein of dark humor, her “self-help” book (“Enough Is Enough: Weekly Meditations for Living Dysfunctionally,” Poseidon Press) contains illustrated mottoes for anyone fed up with feel-good platitudes (“Why let go when you can control?”).

The artist’s unique blend of rage, compassion and down-home detail surfaced once again at the end of her talk when she stepped in front of the screen where slides had been projected, closed her eyes and laced her fingers at her waist.

Turning her voice into a deep, incantatory vessel, she became an anguished survivor, waking up in the middle of the night to read through old phone books containing numbers of friends who died of AIDS.

“I pick up the phone. I ask for your name. . . . Sometimes I pretend I’m talking to my dead friends in heaven. The phone just rings and rings. . . . Ah ain’t got nothing to hold onto, but crying helps when you can’t watch any more TV and the streets are silent except for the paper trucks with tomorrow’s news. . . . “