The Naked Truth

If you are one of those people who doesn’t “get” modern art, you aren’t going to like it when Karen Finley pops out one of her breasts and starts squirting her milk all over a piece of crushed velvet. Performance artist Finley knows how to push your buttons.

This darling of the art world and scourge of conservatives exudes a raw, brute energy that emerges from the depth of her soul. She is a humanistic—rather than intellectual—artist. Almost childlike in her openness, she reveals her whole self while performing. Too intense to be hip, but too in-your-face to be condescended to, she conveys the anguish of existence with a furious energy. Like some kind primal being, Finley expresses the inexpressible and demonstrates the power of pure emotion.

Yet many cannot handle the honesty of Finley’s rage; conservatives have frequently tried to prevent her from receiving federal funding. Last Thursday, she gave Harvard students a chance to judge her for themselves when she came to the Carpenter Center and delivered a lecture entitled “The Body as Rorshach Test.” Clad all in black with silky auburn hair, and a svelte yet womanly figure, Finley looked more like a striking movie star than a queen of grotesquery.

But she is more than a pretty face. Finley combines humility and arrogance in a way that befits someone as prominent as she. Her intimate bantering with the audience was almost too much, and one found oneself fearing that she would fly off the handle at any moment. She seemed stifled, slightly ill at ease, almost hysterical. Then she broke into the schizophrenic voice of her irrational stage alter ego, which sounds like a combination of a southern preacher, an axe murderer and a juvenile delinquent. The tension evaporated, and she did what she does best: perform.

In many of her performances, Finley takes on the grandiose chauvinsim of a male-dominated art world. Her life-long commitment to feminism stems from her disgust at the way women have been shackled by their domestic role. As objects of desire, and thus objects of inspiration for male artists, women have only had a passive role in the history of western art.

Finely claims to use this disadvantage to her advantage. “I didn’t have the privilege as a woman to use abstraction,” she says. Finley decided to outsmart men at their own game by elaborating on their obsession with the female body. In her performances her body becomes a work of art. “I wanted to be the canvas. I am the experience. You can’t buy me.” Finley uses her body as a weapon against sexism, racism and other forms of oppression. Her work reflects the frustration of those who have been suffocated by a hypocritical moral order. She wants her work to provide a voice for those who have, in her own words, been “fucked over.”

She became derisively known as “the chocolate smeared woman” after rubbing chocolate all over her body in “We Keep Our Victims Ready.” Finley intends this act to be a symbolic gesture of solidarity towards a young black woman whose dead body was found covered in excrement. “I wanted to give her a voice,” she says. “All of us have that moment where putting shit on us is a better choice.” After covering herself in chocolate, Finley wrapped herself in tinsel, mimicking a mistreated woman dressing for dinner.

In “I’m an Ass Man,” Finley tells the story of a man who is about to rape a woman on the subway, but is enraged to find out that she is menstruating. Kidney beans represent the menstruation. In “Mr. Hirsch,” she used melted ice cream to symbolize the mess involved when a little girl is forced to perform oral sex on her neighbor. And in “Yams Up My Granny’s Ass,” a piece that many outraged critics fixated upon, she rubbed canned yams all over her backside in order to illustrate the act of a drug addict abusing his grandmother on Thanksgiving.

Such highly charged performances have resulted in several arduous legal battles. Much of Finley’s work in the 1980s did not meet the National Endowment for the Arts’ congressionally set standards for decency. Finley calls this kind of legislation a form of McCarthyism, and believes herself to be a defender of the First Amendment. In 1998, her case reached the Supreme Court, which decided against her. Although Finley’s work is highly respected in Europe, she refuses to seek funding abroad; leaving the country would be a form of resignation.

Much of Finley’s lecture was spent going over the art that she has produced in the last two decades. Many of Finley’s friends died of AIDS in the ’80s, and she believes that the taboo associated with homosexuality denied them proper funerals. And so she decided to initiate her own funerary pageants. “Written in Sand” is about the process of mourning. Viewers enter a candle-lit room and write the names of loved ones who have died of AIDS in sand on the ground. She has also continued to work with feminist themes. “Relaxation Room” is a commentary on the sanitization of childbirth and consists of three large photographs of a baby’s bloody head emerging from woman’s vagina during labor.

Finley’s early work depicted abuse. Now, a more mature woman, she attempts to convey the power of female sensuality and sexuality. “I felt that women were always laughed at or sexualized when somebody wanted to shut them up, and I didn’t want to risk that happening to me,” she says.