On Edge: Performance at the End of the Twentieth Century

Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts

• • • Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts The Taboo Art of Karen Finley A raw quaking id takes the stage, but at first you don't notice since she's wearing an over-the-hill Sunday school dress or a Sandra Dee cocktail party outfit and she's stepping shyly to the mike looking nervous. But then her pupils contract as if she's disappeared inside herself. She's slipped into that personalized primeval ooze now and the floodgates fly open in a loud declamation: "No, Herr Schmidt, I will not shit in your mouth, even if I do get to know you. ..." Or, "Igo down on that ass with my mouth, my penis still kinda high and hard and I suck suck suck my own cum outta your butt juice with a little bit ofyum yum yum yum yum baby liquid shit mixed up with that cum, baby. You can jerk off on my pancakes anytime." She might be stealing the male voice like that. Might be spitting on the stage. Tearing at her taffetas. Smearing food on herself. She might say or do anything up there. Onstage, Karen Finley represents a frightening and rare presence-an unsocialized woman. Finley performs on the club circuit, wafting on to the stage in her polyester good-girl getup at one or two in the morning to wail like some degenerate apparition about incest, priests' assholes, the cum on the bedpost, bulimics up-chucking in their stilettos. The fuck-and-shit vocabulary draws shrieks, back-talk, occasional hysteria from the rowdy drunk crowds. But Finley says, "I'm really never interested in the sexual point in my work. I'm really interested in the pathos." In fact, her monologues are obscenity in its purest form-never just a litany of four-letter expletives but an attempt to express emotions for which there are perhaps no words. An attempt to approach the unspeakable. Finley began performing in 1979 after her father's suicide. She'd been exclusively a visual artist before that, but "I had difficulty being alone and doing static work when I was feeling such active emotion." To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book The Taboo Art of Karen Finley 12} in the fast-flowing bile. Finley rivets, but she doesn't entertain. There's no nonsense here about taking an audience out of itself and into the performer's world. Even an artist like Spalding .Gray-whose work tells the ongoing story of his own life-uses an I'm-not-acting persona, removed at some level from a "real" self. Finley doesn't offer such wholeness; she presents a persona that has shattered, a self unable to put a face on things. Finley told me once that she thought some women performance artists were getting more hard-edged, less subtle, while men were learning to be quiet, more contained and passive. Certainly women have no tradition of foul-mouthed visionaries, as men do-Celine, Genet, Lenny Bruce, et al. But at least women now have a sort of rude girl network that provides a context for outrageous work. Think of Lydia Lunch and that baby-faced dominatrix image so startling in the late seventies, or the obscene and sexually demanding narrator in any Kathy Acker story, or the oddball menace of Dancenoise (Lucy Sexton, Anne Iobst) onstage at SBC swigging "blood" from coffee cans, tearing dolls limb from limb, shouting, "Give me liberty or give me head!" Finley, thirty, grew up in the Chicago suburb of Evanston, the oldest of six children in a somewhat bohemian family dominated by strong and troubled personalities. Her father was a jazz drummer who would quit music periodically to sell vacuum cleaners. Her mother ran a sewing business out of their house and would involve the whole family in her obsession of the moment, which might be Wagner or Jungian psychology or health food. There was never much income. There were lots of people passing through-musicians, customers, and people with problems whom her mother would "adopt." For a number of years, a deranged aunt would call them "sixty times a day. . . . So whatever was going on, the phone would be ringing, and she would come over to the house with bird crosses and she once tried to kill me with chairs. . . . We would have the police over at our house all the time." One of Finley's...