Shock of the Real: An Interview with Karen Finley

Some people see Karen Finley as one of a long line of "transgressive" performance artists, artists such as Paul McCarthy and the Kipper Kids. Others see her as the prototype for a generation of "talk-dirty, nihilist, punk" entertainers like Lydia Lunch and Joe Coleman. Some think she's a feminist, and others accuse her of hurting the feminist movement. In this 1988 interview, New York journalist Margot Mifflin talked to Finley about some of the issues that drive her work. —Eds.

Margot Mifflin: What's capable of shocking you?

Karen Finley: Rape and homelessness are the most shocking things to me. Seeing a wealthy city like New York with all this property and abandoned buildings—not taking care of the homeless is shocking. All the sadness that we see in real life is shocking. That's one of my reasons for mirroring this society in my art.

MM: Do you consider your own work to be shocking?

KF: No. I see it as a reality, and the only reason it's shocking to people is that they haven't accepted it as a reality. Part of my work is the fact that incest, rape and hostility happen in the best of families, in the best of countries. As for the people who haven't had those experiences, hopefully my work will make them more sensitive to people who have.

MM: Don't you think people who most need that message would be the least likely to come to your performances?

KF: I just want to settle something: The audience is really important to me, but the most important thing in my work is a gestalt, catharsis or trance. It isn't my responsibility—not to be a copout—to figure out how people are going to respond to me. That's more your job.

MM: So you're more concerned with expressing your feelings than giving someone something you think they need?

KF: Yes. But I think I have all types of people coming to my performances—do you think otherwise?

MM: I guess anyone who's interested in performance art knows who you are, but that's a limited group of people. A lot of feminist art, for example, preaches to the converted. The uneducated women have no access to it. Likewise your performances: You're talking about helping people with universal traumas like rape and child abuse, but you're presenting yourself in such a way that only club-goers and artists will come see you.

KF: This is really ironic! The artist is always blamed for not marketing the art, which is a really yuppie notion. It isn't my problem that my work won't get on television, or that if it did it would be censored. It's enough for the artist to be doing the art. Throughout history one can see that the work of the radical artist has somehow come into the mainstream. My work may not be accepted for 20, 30, 40 years. I've been doing this for ten years; no one came and saw me five years ago, people are coming to see me now.

MM: Have you ever been tempted to compromise in any way?

KF: I don't know what I would need in order to do that—more money? I'm really rather content. I get pleasure out of what I do. I'd rather sling hash and be doing the work I do than get more money for something else. I've had offers to do movie parts—they were too racy for me—and sit-coms.

MM: And you didn't want them?

KF: No, 'cause I think it's important for me to do my work. I still want to show that art is scary, and that large corporations can't buy us, but we still have an effect on culture. Music does that, and I have a great advantage in that I perform live. Women are still keeping up their traditional image in hairstyles, in mannerisms, especially the passivity; I feel it's really important for me to go out and destroy that.

MM: Do you think the subjects you cover will always be shocking?

KF: I hope not. Ten years ago if a woman talked about her menstrual cycle it was considered shocking. Now it's not so bad. There are tampon and condom ads on television. I've really had to keep changing with different issues. One issue that always seems to have shock value is gender. Right now I'm interested in when God became a male, and that we don't question that at all, even in the '80s. That's a gender issue, not a sexual one like showing my pussy on stage, but it's shocking in terms of challenging the values of a system. I've always been interested in challenging systems.

MM: Tell me a little about what you're saying by showing abuse of women in your work.

KF: Something that I think is different in my work from other women who deal with abuse is that a lot of my characters don't remain the victim. There's always some way out. For example, a woman gets raped in the subway and she uses her menstruation as a weapon, something she's been told to consider disgusting, and it saves her. She was abused, but because of her femininity she was saved.

MM: Are most of your concerns gender-related?

KF: Yes. Looking at the art world right now you can see that it's still a small world for women. I feel it's my responsibility to bring up these issues instead of playing some kind of game. Naked bodies aren't shocking to me at all—I used to work in a strip club. In performance I try to present my asshole in an unsexual way. It's many men's fantasies to have a woman bend over and be fucked that way; it's a very sexual position. But when I take over it loses the sexual tension because the sexual tension comes from someone being degraded by that. I don't make it degrading. When I showed my rear end on stage and smushed these canned yams against it—an act that had a lot of repercussions in the media—I was using the body in an unsexual way. What I proved is that we're supposed to be so goddamn liberated and we aren't. We can't refer to other parts of the body the same way we refer to an ear or an index finger; our orifices are still for penetration or sexual pleasure. We really haven't gone very far beyond the bra-burning of the '60s in terms of sexual liberation.

MM: How did you first get into performance?

KF: My father committed suicide when I was 21, which was so frightening to me because I'd never considered that possibility; it came out of left field. That was really the trigger for a lot of what I do. I've always done things like faking epileptic seizures in public, or pretending to throw up in a restaurant; it's part of my personality. But because of that incident I have a punch, a motivation behind my work. I've hit bottom. That's really important, because even if you have talent and intellect, you need a motivation to kick it off. That rage can be very healing to people because I think everyone has had some kind of loss, and I connect with them because of mine. It has nothing to do with talent, or class structure. It has to do with life and fate, because even if you're living a good life and you're a good person, you can still fall. But I wouldn't say my father's suicide has been my most shocking experience. My most shocking experience is getting into a taxi on Park Avenue and riding to the Lower East Side and seeing the uneven distribution of wealth—seeing that our government doesn't take care of its poor. Those larger situations, like the AIDS crisis, are more shocking than personal problems.

Reality is always more shocking that art. I think that shock in art is followed by some kind of transformation that happens because of the artist. I mean, you could say that Second Street between Avenues A and B is an artwork, and that's not so. It's not enough just to have the shocking thing, disassociated from everything. The artist frames or mirrors it with brilliance or timeliness. I don't know that there's a clear line between what is an atrocity and what's art, I do know that when Chris Burden shot himself in the arm [1] it was art, but when my father shot himself it wasn't.

MM: What have you found shocking in other people's art?

KF: The most shocking thing I've seen is Richard Kern's and Lydia Lunch's movie Fingered. I'm emotional in my work, but I don't act out the abuse. Lydia Lunch does. I had to leave the movie—just thinking about it gets me upset. Also, hearing people laugh when someone is being abused or mutilated—I don't understand it. People laugh at my work and I don't understand it.

MM: What sort of response have you received in Europe?

KF: I was banned in England, and my record can't be sold there. I was to perform at the ICA with Howie Montaug's No Entiendes and the Westminster consul told me the funding would be removed from the institution if I did. They have some bizarre laws there about women being nude and talking. Americans are more open to looking at things, I think, and are more vocal and responsive. But the whole thing about the yams in my rear end was something I never expected to be shocking. I thought it was funny. Every city I did it in thought it was shocking, except Chicago, I guess because they have such a tradition of experimental theater there. I really thought the American public was much more sexually liberated than that. I mean, you'd think horrific subjects like real physical abuse would be much more shocking than yams in a woman's rear end.

MM: Let's talk about pornography. You've said that you're trying to strip pornography of its attraction for men, to invert it, as if to condemn it, yet you worked in a strip club and say you like pornography.

KF: Well, pornography should change with the times and I don't think it has enough. It's always been in the hands of men, and, in terms of us growing sexually, that has to grow too. I don't hate men, I just hate what they do! I have a very good relationship with a man. Anyway, as an economic resource every woman has the right to do whatever she wants with her body—prostitution, pornography. I am for pornography, I am against anything that depicts violence towards women. A lot of pornography isn't about sexual pleasure, it's about power.

MM: Would you ever consider presenting pornography in an appealing way from a feminist perspective? Meaning, introducing a positive alternative to what you're criticizing.

KF: I don't think I'd be a good person for that because I'm too cynical and have too much of a sense of humor—I would always be inverting it. But I'd be in favor of it. I turned down a writer who wanted to do a Penthouse forum on me because that magazine pretends to be an incredibly intelligent magazine. It's pornography, why don't they just say they're pornography? Then Annie Sprinkle wanted to do something on me. I like her a lot, her sense of pornography is fantastic, and I said yes immediately.

MM: When you use sexual slang are you mocking it?

KF: I'm repeating street language. I'm showing that language is very important. It's the only weapon you have for your anger once everything else has been taken away.

MM: It's powerful even though it's bankrupt and clichéd?

KF: Yes, that's part of the sadness of it.

MM: What's the most shocking image you've used in a performance?

KF: Talking about an old woman being fist-fucked in a nursing home, and that she enjoyed it because she hadn't been touched in 50 years.

MM: So your message in many of these raps is that people are so physically and emotionally starved that even violence becomes pleasurable.

KF: Yes, and that's where the perversion starts.

MM: People don't accuse you of condoning what you present?

KF: Not too much. People seem to understand.

MM: What are some taboos you have yet to bash?

KF: God being a man, which I think is really going to destroy a lot of premises. Also, women's biological sexual superiority of multiple orgasms. I'd also like to get into American imperialism, and the fact that Americans aren't first anymore; Japan has beaten us out of a lot, which I think will be good for us.

Notes

1. Artist Chris Burden had a friend shoot him the arm with a rifle, and called it an artwork (Shoot, 1971). —Ed. [return]

This interview originally appeared in High Performance magazine, Spring/Summer 1988.

Original CAN/API publication: September 2002