KAREN FINLEY
You had to laugh. I mean, it was so absurd. Here was this incredibly earnest woman, clumping around in red galoshes and ranting against the patriarchy as she slapped shit-brown icing on her scrawny flesh. Hardly sexy. And yet Jesse Helms and the Idiot Right are busy attacking Finley as the height of subversive lasciviousness, making her a focus for their campaign against obscenity in the arts. This–nothing more than this dripping mess of sugar-glazed half-naked artist–was all they were scared of.
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But she’s not sexy. In fact, I’ve never seen a naked woman–other than the one sliced wafer thin and exhibited in glass panels at the Museum of Science and Industry–who evoked less of the erotic than a naked Finley. There’s an article in the current issue of American Theatre magazine, “The Actor as Object of Desire,” that discusses the phenomenon of the carnal charge that runs between performer and audience. Finley’s art, her whole literal and figurative stance, is a conscious negation of that charge. And by extension, a negation of all the voltage that runs through all the frayed, sexist wiring strung across our society. The offhanded way she displays her shock of pubic hair, the very lay of her breasts on her rib cage–so stubbornly unremarkable, so defiantly matter-of-fact–are part of that negation. Maybe that’s why Finley wears the red galoshes: to ground herself and break the circuit.
The angry Kali shows up again in Finley’s new solo, We Keep Our Victims Ready. She’s in the testimony of a working mother who literally slaves her guts out, trying to keep her pregnancy a secret from the boss. And in the declarations of an alcoholic mother who thinks there should be a new holiday called Dependence Day. And in the confessions of a fear-paralyzed and desolated woman whose comment that her “life is worth nothing but shit” incites the celebrated chocolate-smearing episode.
The full mystic vision of Kali includes birth as well as death, the cornucopian vagina as well as the hungry mouth. Finley definitely resists any suggestion that the life force can function in our murderous culture–resists it hard: there’s a point in the piece where the veal calf-rape victim actually discusses cutting out her vagina so as to make a hole no one can fuck. Even so, the Mother appears.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Dona Ann AcAdams.
