First in Show: Karen Finley
A Certain Level of Denial

    Karen Finley has always clothed herself in controversy. The first that mainstream America heard of her was when the NEA — the National Endowment of the Arts — investigated how their grant money was being spent by individual artists, and found her work obscene.
    They cut her funding, making her shows cost twice as much as they used to, and at the same time throwing the Chicagoan in the Robert Mapplethorpe category of “perverted artist.”
    This is what the average American knew of Finley. I knew more, but only a bit. Years ago, I heard a song from a dorm-mate called “Tales of Taboo.” The lyrics were explicit and obnoxious... The lyrics involved every orifice on the body, as well as food parts, explicit acts with her grandmother, mulatto children, bums on the subway, and urine. I borrowed her compact disc from a friend, but I didn’t take her seriously.
    Then I heard stories of her stage performances. Usually they would entail Finley half-naked, smeared in either chocolate or oatmeal, screaming obscenities at the top of her lungs. She never made the college circuit, so I never got the chance to see this performance-of-a-lifetime.
    Then early this year I found out that she was playing at the Metro in Chicago, so I called Ticketmaster and credit carded me over a pair of general admission tickets. Two weeks later, Ticketmaster calls me and tells me all of her shows are cancelled, with no explanation. I was crushed. I was looking forward to a funny evening with the woman I had heard so much about, but had to read in the newspaper that the Metro wouldn’t let her go on stage undressed since they served alcohol (you know, it’s a little law in Chicago that a bar can’t do that). Metro didn’t want to lose their liquor license; Finley wouldn’t change her show.
    Then I heard that the Steppenwolf Theatre was giving up two weeks in their Studio Theatre for her, and I was thrilled. This was finally my chance.
    We went to the theatre, got there just a few minutes early, but managed to find seats in the front row. There were three large projection screens, one slide projector on the floor in the center of the stage, a director’s chair and music stand between the first and second screens. A bench full of clothes was off to the right.
    I looked at the program. “A Certain Level of Denial.”
    The lights dropped, and Finley made her way to center stage, naked except for boots and a hat, microphone in hand. The room was quiet. She started her first rant, and she was as entertaining as her albums and her books were. She enacted a scene where she was in a psychiatrist’s office; she did both voices. The conversation went something like:

    “Doc, you know how sometimes you can get a dog, and that dog had another owner, and he’s a perfectly happy dog, but every time you get a broom out of the pantry the dog just whimpers and goes to the corner and hides? And it wasn’t anything the owner did, really, and they don’t know what to do? I feel like that dog.”
    “So what you’re saying is, the broom is a symbol for a man’s penis...”

    The crowd roared. This might even be better than what I expected.
    Then she starts other sketches, and while she is performing, slides of original paintings of hers are being displayed on the screens behind her. Powerful, emotional work. Her subtle jokes mask a powerful sense of unrest concerning the treatment of women, gays and minorities in this country.
    She tells a story of a lesbian couple whose dog was just run over by a car. Cars drove by, drivers yelling, “serves you right,” “you freaks shouldn’t have a dog,” and the like. No one would stop; the women couldn’t get their dog out of the street. And the one woman cried while the other woman held her.
    Finley talked of her father once running over a doe in the road while the family was out for a drive. Her father was mad that it wasn’t a male — he could have at least had some horns. Then she said that this was the first lesson she learned in economics — that even a dead male is worth something.
    At one point, she put on a nightgown and brought a rocking horse without a head to a platform right in front of the slide projector, which served as a spotlight, and the rocking horse provided a massive silhouette when the chair was empty. She held the rocking horse head in her hand, and rocked the hourse by gently knocking the head to the neck. The silhouette on the back screen, while Finley’s hair hung down, was of a sad little girl and her broken toy. Then she started to speak, and she said she believed her friend killed himself last night, he had AIDS, and he said he wanted to be remembered as alive and not dying. And she wanted to call him, to hear his voice, her friend, but she was too afraid, because she didn’t want to know that he was really gone. And she was crying, saying over and over, she believed her friend killed himself last night, he had AIDS, and he wanted to be remembered as alive and not dying.
    And I was sitting in the audience, with tears streaming down my face.
    Finley managed to make her stories so human that you felt all of her pain, that you began to understand her struggle. It was by far one of the most powerful performances I have ever seen in my life.
    Anyone in the audience who supported the rights of animals, women, gays or minorities was moved by her performance. Anyone who was human was amazed by her performance. Yes, she can be shocking, but she can also simultaneously wake you up and tear you apart. When I left, I walked out of the theatre with a new respect for Karen Finley.

Copyright © 2007 Janet Kuypers.

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