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In an interview with Richard Schechner in 1988 Karen Finley commented on her performance style by stating, ‘I'm really interested in being a medium.’ It is with this simple remark that she illuminates the most compelling aspect of her work as a performance artist. Finley's work is both frustrating and enlightening, and it is the conflicting tensions her performance style evokes within me as male spectator that I find so engaging. I am drawn into the performance via the bodily exhibitionism that permeates so much of her work, only to be pushed away by the tone and subject matter of her narration. At the end of her performance I am left with no easy answers, only disturbingly caustic questions.
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2. Scheduler, Richard, ‘Karen Finley: A Constant State of Becoming’, The Drama Review. (Volume 32, Number 1, Spring 1988), p. 154.Google Scholar
3. While I realize that the subjective term ‘I’ may seem out of place in a scholarly article, I find it impossible to discuss Finley's work from a feigned objective position. To this end my analysis will be tinged with my own observations and experiences as a male spectator.
4. A point that Barry Kapke illuminates by pointing out that, ‘She provokes, she does not entertain. We cannot respond. She makes us face our own rigidity, our own biases.’ See: ‘Karen Finley: Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts’, High Performance. (Issue 36, 1986), pp. 66–7.
5. Evans, Rowland and Novak, Robert, ‘The NBA Suicide Charge’, The Washington Post. (11 05 1990), A27Google Scholar. This description of Finley's performance not only set off the fire storm that resulted in the National Endowment of the Arts defunding of Finley, Holly Hughes, Tim Miller, and John Fleck, but caused president George Bush to write a note to the chair man of the NBA, John Frohnmayer, stating: ‘I do not want to see censorship, yet I don't believe a dime of taxpayer's money should go into ‘art’ that is clearly and visibly filth.’ For more information see Carr, C., ‘Artful Dodging: The NEA Funds the Defunded Four’, The Village Voice. (15 06 1993), pp. 30–1.Google Scholar
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7. For an excellent semiotic analysis of this process see Fischer-Lichte, Erika, The Semiotics of Theatre (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992)Google Scholar in which she describes the idea of a ‘body-text’ as a convergence of actor, craft and text that evoke a wealth of meanings that would take much longer to establish with an isolated text.
8. Easily misunderstood on a surface level, Finley's use of her body prompted Playboy to approach her in 1986 to film one of her performances for their video magazine. Basing their offer merely on a description of her work, the magazine changed its mind upon realizing that ‘this was not mainstream sexuality’. Indeed, what Finley does in performance, though condemned by some as pornographic, is a highly charged political critique of the traditional object-status of the female body. For more information on the early part of Finley's career see Carr, C., ‘Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts: The taboo Art of Karen Finley’, The Village Voice. (24 06 1986), pp. 17–20.Google Scholar
9. Hence the ‘nude chocolate-smeared young woman’ tag.
10. Like the representatives of Playboy, as well as Evans and Novak and Senator Jesse Helms.
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13. This juxtaposition of body and voice, while used in The Constant State of Desire to question assumptions about the traditional roles of male spectator and female performer, is a performance strategy that Finley employed in her more recent work, A Certain Level of Denial. Framed by the subject of death, one of the most memorable moments in the performance was as Finley verbally disgorged a litany of conditions that prompted the suicide of one of her close friends afflicted with AIDS. Kneeling in front of the harsh white light of an empty slide projector that cast a distortedly elongated shadow, her hair draped over her face and a body that was nearly completely slack she intoned: ‘He couldn't control the anger. He couldn't control the hate. He couldn't control the suffering. He couldn't control the government. He couldn't control the humiliation. He couldn't control the pain. He couldn't control his life, but he could control his death’, while repeatedly striking the body of a small rocking horse with its severed head. As with the subject/object positions created in Mondo New York the power of Finley's performance of A Certain Level of Denial rests in the space created between her physical presence and the images she creates with her voice. For more information on this performance see Feingold, Michael, ‘Naked Ambition’, The Village Voice. (4 08 1992), pp. 97 and 100Google Scholar, and Drake, Nicholas, ‘Karen Finley: A Certain Level of Desire’, Art Papers. (01–02 1995), pp. 61–2.Google Scholar
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15. Ibid., pp. 62–3.
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20. Derrick, , La Dissémination, p. 237Google Scholar. Dissemination p. 209: ‘The hymen is first of all a sign of fusion, the consummation of a marriage, the identification of two beings, the confusion between two. Between the two, there is no longer difference but identity. Within this fusion, there is no longer any distance between desire and the fulfilment of presence, between distance and non-distance,- there is no longer any distance between desire and satisfaction.’
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