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[This essay appeared in High Performance (Issue 36). 1986. pp 66-67]

KAREN FINLEY

"UNSPEAKABLE PRACTICE & UNNATURAL ACTS"
Media Gallery
San Francisco
September 6, 1986

Photo by Marion Gray, 1986

A few months ago I had never heard of Karen Finley. Now, she appears to be a buzzword in contemporary avant‑garde performance.

I first encountered her during one of my weekly perusals of the magazine stands. A photograph of an attractive woman, presumably naked, reclining on a satin covered bed, embracing a large hound, intimately, and boldly staring out at the anonymous viewer‑the presumably male voyeur‑with slightly amused and unflinching candor. This photograph caught my eye. The caption read, in bold headline print, "Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts: The Taboo Art of Karen Finley." This combination of image and text inspired sufficient curiosity to sell at least one newspaper. The article itself proved compelling, and critic C. Carr convinced me that Karen Finley was someone I wanted to experience.

Little more than a month later I found myself in an overcrowded art-space, anxiously waiting for Finley to take the stage. Carr had apparently catalyzed quite a few curiosity-viewers. The crowd was buzzing with regurgitations of Finley's already near‑mythic exploits. It was clear that something shocking would transpire that night and it was likewise clear that the audience members were there to prove they were unshockable. I was a little nervous myself.

A surge of anticipation (and knowing laughter) arose as they brought out a plastic sheeting for the stage floor, followed by a table upon which there were assorted articles of canned food. More waiting ensued. Finally, Karen Finley walked onstage. It was not the entrance of a star, but of a rather self-conscious individual faced with the enormous task of attempting to feed these starving hordes with but some bread, some words, some canned yams.

* * * * *

The stage magic of Karen Finley is apparently made from momentum. It provides the illusion of coherence. Diving headlong into some disturbing characterization, the rhythm of Finley's scatological stream-of-consciousness ranting sustains credibility, even in the face of irrationality. With the authoritarian assurance of some evangelical "holy roller," she intones her psalms of debauchery, powerful, histrionic, manipulating the energy into a frenzy of dark excess. Her words take on the weight of poetry, her modulated voice, like Giorno, spitting out one acrid one-liner after another. She is entranced, her characters now molding her, shaping her, transforming her along a continuum of unspeakable ideation. As with Diamanda Galas or Johanna Went, we are witness to the taboo sacrament of metamorphosis... at least, when the momentum is rolling.

On the evening I saw her she never did manage to gain control of her momentum and her stylistic characterizations fell flat. I was reminded of the last years of Lenny Bruce when he no longer did his "bits" but, rather, talked about them. I had the impression of Karen Finley trying to perform Karen Finley.

Many of the themes in her work have to do with questions of power, definition, "normalcy." Karen Finley is a transgressor, she plumbs the extremes of emotional experience and whimsically pummels the parameters of limitation. She plunges us into pathos, the turmoil I we try so hard to avoid. In "The Pornographic Imagination," Susan Sontag pointed out that "the poetry of transgression is also knowledge. He who transgresses not only breaks a rule. He goes somewhere that others are not, and he knows something the others don't know." Karen Finley pushes beyond the borders of normal practices and natural acts into an ambiguous area where we must face these boundaries, these limitations, and re-evaluate them. Faced with our prejudices, we must ask "Why do I feel this? What does it mean? Where does it come from? Is it arbitrary?" These are unsettling questions. Finley, then, becomes a measure to fathom our own reactions.

Is she pornographic? If we use the common understanding of pornography as a medium intending to arouse prurient interest, then I think we can safely say that Karen Finley is not pornographic. If, however, it is understood as the excessive, the transgression of social limitations, then perhaps she is pornographic. Then, we must ask "So what?" Returning to Sontag,

"Everyone, at least in dreams, has inhabited the world of the pornographic imagination for some hours or days or even longer periods of his life; but only the full-time residents make the fetishes, the trophies, the art.”

This brings us to the perennial questions: "But is it art?" Alfred Jan has remarked that "avant-garde performance extends boundaries Of familiar content and action using shock tactics if necessary in hopes of increasing consciousness about being human." Karen Finley provokes; she does not entertain. We cannot not respond. She makes us face our own rigidity, our own biases. She raises questions for which she provides no answers. If one then chooses to maintain sharply-defined boundaries as a result of this questioning, then it truly becomes a choice, an awareness, and not an imposition. This inner "stirring," this raising of questions, is this not one of the major functions of art?

Barry Kapke