Performance Art : Karen Finley: Naked Truths About Women in America

Jesse Helms’ worst nightmare: Karen Finley, be-hatted but otherwise stark naked, moaning out a list of injustices to women (“I make 63 cents to your dollar. . . . I got my perfume on ‘cause a woman needs to keep her smells to herself . . . “); describing the death of a 12-year-old who drank Draino because she couldn’t tell her parents she was pregnant; and telling about the night her father hit a baby deer and shot its mother and then ran over them both.

You’ve got to love her. Or at least you’ve got to be glad she exists, even if seeing her once will probably be enough for most people (except, of course, for the people who want her banned, and they usually don’t get around to seeing her at all).

To recap, Finley came to national prominence in 1990 when the National Endowment for the Arts denied her funding after syndicated columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak (who had never seen her perform) attacked her. Apparently her most unforgivable crime was to smear her naked upper torso with chocolate to symbolize society’s degradation of women.

Finley stopped into a temporary performance space in Santa Monica on Thursday night to display her distinctive brand of protest art. And while her show, “A Certain Level of Denial” (presented by the Santa Monica Museum of Art in conjunction with “Power in America,” a series of events in observance of Worlds AIDS Day and Day Without Art), at times veers dangerously close to parodies of this kind of performance, there is little doubt that Karen Finley feels her pain. In fact feeling her pain is her art, with all of the egocentrism and masochism that implies.

Standing or lying nude, or sitting at a lectern in pants and a turban, Finley rails against prevailing evils, using scenes from her own life to illustrate that things are rotten in the state of, well, everywhere. Like a TV schizophrenic, she employs two voices: One is low and laced with melodramatic vibrato, sounding very much like a Southern evangelist summoning the deepest demons in her congregation; the other is a high-pitched, pain-filled tremolo, like the ones actresses use when playing grown women forced to relive some childhood trauma under hypnosis.

Is Karen Finley an extraordinarily sensitive instrument, a woman who has no emotional defense against all of the pain in the world? Or is she an exploiter and whiny abuser of that pain for her own fame? She claims that karma was invented to keep the miserable in a state of acceptance, yet her endless litany of complaints seems to indicate, if not a love of, at least an attraction, to suffering. (“I’ve been a mother, a whore and a slave, but never valued by anyone,” she says at one point. One wants to step in for her imaginary shrink in this scene and offer some pertinent advice, such as, “Get over it.”)

After her show had started, a man in a black wig, leather miniskirt and stiletto heels entered the theater and stood in the back. While she performed a monologue about a friend with AIDS who committed suicide, the man began to sob, deeply and loudly. He continued sobbing into her next story, in which she hung her head like a catatonic and rocked a toy rocking horse by gently lifting its head off its body while recounting a rape by two Chicago policemen. She stopped rocking for a moment and said, gently and in a normal, soothing voice, “I hear you. I just want to tell you that.”

The cynical New Yorker in me wondered if the man was a plant. I don’t believe he was, and it doesn’t matter anyway. At that moment I believed in her pain because it wasn’t centered on her own anguish. For me, it was Karen Finley’s finest moment. “I am this country! I am this sickness!” she shrieked at another point in the evening, and there is no question that, like her or not, Karen Finley serves a purpose in this culture.

* For more information on the series “Power in America,” 1646 18th St., continuing through next Saturday and including various performances and videos by other artists, call (213) 660-TKTS.