Can We Talk?

Karen Finley often performs naked, and because she’s gorgeous--long legs, round breasts, cascades of auburn hair, cheekbones out to here--nudity is a power position for her. She knows the audience approves of what she looks like. She can do whatever she wants with them. And for nearly 20 years, in such performance pieces as “A Certain Level of Denial,” “We Keep Our Victims Ready,” “The American Chestnut” and “The Return of the Chocolate-Smeared Woman,” she has seduced people into looking at double standards: at how women, the poor and people with AIDS get creamed. Her work--collages of monologues, stand up comedy spiels, prop plays (sometimes performed with other actors) and video projections--is didactic, eye-catching and dissonant.

There are always some screws and bolts that don’t quite get incorporated into the do-it-yourself kit of her shows. Wholeness isn’t her goal. No two evenings are the same. On stage, she tinkers, kibitzes and free-associates, and these improvisations counterpoint scripted parts. At their best, her pieces rip big, unspoken and difficult-to-articulate desires out of closets. She’s disturbing, because she strips down to feelings that circulate in everyone but are usually kept bottled. She revels in her aggression, enjoys smushing around in real and pretend body fluids and thrusting them in people’s faces, such as her notorious capers of shoving canned yams up her behind (playing the part of a sociopath molesting his granny) and slathering chocolate over her body (commenting on the case of Tawana Brawley, a teen-age girl, possibly complicit in a hoax, whose torso was inscribed with excrement).

Finley’s is an art of retrieval: of turning found experience into subjects, defeat into mastery, marginality into an edgy focal point. She would probably press fewer buttons if she leaked shame and turned her exhibitionism into an act of abasement, but her pieces are encounters with unapologetic female flesh. It’s a peculiar thing, though: She doesn’t always understand her strength. By using seduction to sell an anatomy of sexism, she subverts seduction but she remains an erotic lure. It’s not an either/or situation. And because of that ambivalence, her body on stage is dramatic and erotic. The erotic moment is ineluctably dramatic because it triggers contradictory responses (arousal and discomfort, let’s say); the dramatic moment is ineluctably erotic because it excites.

Instead of celebrating this tension, Finley’s been known to gripe when her work is called sexual. Though she’s right to note that female artists are often trivialized by that description, the problem is with prigs who think that sex and seriousness occupy separate spheres. Sometimes Finley, too, thinks that using sex to sell an idea is a bad thing, a stand that’s more than a little disingenuous given her vamping. When she’s in control of her material and means, she jump-starts consciousness, driving for whatever snakes up in an individual rather than prescribing particular responses. At her most stolid--complaining, beating her chest and righteously sermonizing--she demands a single response: Feel my pain; hate my enemies; curtsy to my moral superiority.

Not surprisingly, similar unsteadiness tips “A Different Kind of Intimacy.” The book contains much that’s valuable but a lot, too, that’s dreadful, especially detached from her performances, which, in their outrageousness, lend even wound-licking texts some wit. Finley is most compelling in this book when she unreels, in an unamplified candid voice, the story of her career. It tells something of the tale of performance art as, during the ‘70s and ‘80s, visual artists increasingly looked at art-making as a performance and the finished object (if there was one) as a document of the process. When artists such as Chris Burden, who shot himself in one event, used their bodies as art-making sites and staged gothic horror shows as art works, the artists were free to slink out of galleries and penetrate clubs and theaters.

Finley, who grew up in Chicago and moved to New York in 1983, evokes that time of whirling experiment and thrilling wildness. With a sublet in the East Village and a job as a cocktail waitress at a club called Area, she began performing at Danceteria in the monthly showcase No Entiendes (“You don’t understand”), along with John Sex and Ann Magnuson. Some of her work from this period--the monologue “I’m an Ass Man,” for example--shows Finley being tough-minded and funny, at once goofing on and inhabiting a vicious kind of aggression, viscerally invoking how much people want to get inside each other’s pants, revealing the lie in every kind of decorum.

In 1986, after C. Carr penned a profile praising Finley in The Village Voice and was followed, the next week, by a savage denunciation by Pete Hamill, Finley became a symbol of the culture wars that were roiling not only between right-wing conservatives and avant-gardists but also between left-wing straight males and women and gay activists. Guys like Hamill were offended by sex as a subject in social debate and thought it vitiated the politics of economics, race and class, while feminists and gays considered gender in equality as important as any other sort of injustice and insisted, too, in inserting discussions of sexual practices into the public conversation--especially when, as in the cases of abortion rights and the criminalization of homosexual sex acts, government policed the bodies of individuals.

That same year Finley was threatened with arrest in London if she performed nude, a piece of hypocrisy, given the commonness of strip clubs there, that illustrated the rhetoric of her shows. Finley astutely concludes that it was OK for a woman to use nudity to show her vulnerability or to flatter males by trying to seduce them, because that reassured the order of males having power over females, but that if a woman used nudity to defy these arrangements, she was asking to be jailed.

She writes cogently, too, about the famous embroilment that she and fellow-performers John Fleck, Holly Hughes and Tim Miller found themselves in when, in 1990--as a sop to Jesse Helms and other conservatives in Congress--the National Endowment for the Arts revoked grants that had been awarded the four. Their work involved the body, and all but Finley were gay. The NEA Four, as they came to be termed, protested this censorship as well as the “decency clause” enacted by Congress that grantees were required to sign, pledging that their work would not contain, among other things, “homoerotic” content, which was labeled “obscene.” Lawyer David Cole from the Center for Constitutional Rights argued the case of the four, who sued the NEA and challenged the constitutionality of the decency clause. They won in 1993 though, Finley reminds readers, the putatively liberal Clinton administration appealed the decision, wishing to let the decency clause stand, and moved the case to the Supreme Court where, in 1998, the NEA Four lost to the government.

Among other principled stands, Finley stepped down from hosting the Bessie Awards in 1990, after learning they were financed by Phillip Morris, a company that with one hand supports avant-garde art and with the other is one of the largest funders of Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.). Ever the magnet for muzzling, she reports, too, that when Crown was about to publish “Living It Up,” her spoof of lifestyle guides that featured such recyclables as “pine needle underwear sachet,” the publisher’s more reliable money machine, Martha Stewart, shook her blond head no and Crown canceled Finley’s book. Doubleday bought her contract but, looking for support from PEN, the organization that supports censored writers, Finley was told, “We usually handle authors who are about to be executed or who are imprisoned in a third world country.”

On the minus side, “A Different Kind of Intimacy” is swamped with maudlin laments and screeching harangues, among the most sodden “An Act of Conscience,” in which the speaker proclaims, without irony, “my crime is that I have courage” and “the clown never cries / The man is the woman / The actor denies his own script.” Who can argue? A pivotal event in Finley’s life is the death of her father, who shot himself in the head when he was 48. She was 21. Ill-advisedly, she includes not only the words of his suicide note but a facsimile in his handwriting, a document that shows him only in a sentimental, self-pitying light.

Fortunately, more plangent offerings pipe up over what’s sketchy and simplistic, among them a description and photographs of her evocative installation “Momento Mori,” which featured an antique chest filled with sand on which viewers were invited to write the name of someone who had died of AIDS and then erase the name back into the sand. Finley sniffs out the sadism in the valorization of female pain--the cult of the silent childbirth these days that, as Finley teases in “Moral History,” fluffs women who swallow the agonies of labor. Some of Finley’s most delightfully wicked work is recent. In “The American Chestnut,” she clamors for the eroticization of men’s clothes: “I want to see men photographed so we can see the tips of their nipples, hard and erect, on the cover of Time. . . . I want testicles dressed in nice, woolly caps. I want the hot, hairy ball look. I want high-heeled oxfords and Nikes so the butt goes up in the air, so I can grab booty. I want to smell booty.” In “The Return of the Chocolate-Smeared Woman,” she confides her complicity in her “victimization,” declaring: “I’ve come to realize that I’ve been in an eight-year, sexually abusive relationship with Jesse Helms.”

Will the work of performance artists survive those who’ve embodied it? As solo performance has moved past the dens of downtown New York to Broadway, regional stages and the airwaves of HBO and Showtime, it’s among our most engaging theater, remaining dissonant and self-exploratory and beckoning audiences who wouldn’t ordinarily see plays. Can another actor drawl the life crises of Spalding Gray, another chameleon morph through the monologues of Danny Hoch and Eric Bogosian, another mercurial actor-dancer inject the stories of John Leguizamo with the sex and street sass he delivers? We’ll see. Shakespeare couldn’t have foreseen later interpretations of the parts he tailored for his ensemble of actors.

Some performance artists craft scripts as meticulous as those of any playwright, among them the artists named above as well as Deb Margolin, Lisa Kron and Peggy Shaw, all of whom have published texts. Other performers enact something closer to ritual and probably require the body of the inspirer on stage. Ron Athey and Bob Flanagan come to mind. Athey cuts and pierces his body and those of other participants; the late Flanagan, who had cystic fibrosis, created a hilarious and moving theater of pain as he plucked erotic goodies from his suffering. You probably have to be Chris Burden to make shooting yourself into something more than a rip-off of Chris Burden, just as you have to be Jackson Pollock to do his particular spatter paintings. Where does Finley fit in? Unclear. Me, I’d rather see the woman in the flesh.