Talented Toiletmouth

By Richard Lacayo

When Karen Finley takes the stage, you're not at My Fair Lady. A typical solo work by the New York-based performance artist involves a flood of ranting * profanity, unspeakable desires, feral behavior and sexual politics. Assuming the character of a rapist or an abusive husband, Finley acts out the darkest imaginings of men, the furies of mind and body that she sees as the source of degradations suffered by women. In the process, she fills the stage with shrieks and spit, sometimes stripping off her clothes and smearing food across her body. In a now legendary piece that she introduced several years ago, she slathered yams around her buttocks.

Conservative columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak predict that Finley, whose work has been supported in the past by three NEA grants ($22,000 in total awards), will be the next target of outrage -- and opportunity -- for enemies of the endowment's funding. Finley, the columnists warned, could become "the Mapplethorpe case of 1990" if her latest request for support is approved. Last week that suggestion of scandal was enough to shake the National Council on the Arts, the beleaguered body that oversees grants recommended by NEA panels. The council voted to postpone until August its decision on all grant applications for performance work.

"I use certain language that is a symptom of the violence of the culture," Finley insists. "If I talk about a woman being raped, I have to use the language of the perpetrators." While her wild orations about menstruation and excrement have been known to rattle even shockproof veterans of New York City's downtown art scene, they have also won her a raft of admiring reviews. When she performed at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in January, the Star Tribune used words like heartfelt and moving to describe We Keep Our Victims Ready, a verse piece about the consequences of male violence for women, gays and the homeless. The same piece was also singled out by Evans and Novak, who took exception to the fact that at one point Finley spreads chocolate across her naked body in what she describes as "a symbol of women being treated like dirt."

Next month she will repeat that performance at New York City's Lincoln Center, a redoubt of sober establishment culture. "My work is not about entertainment," she says. "People usually leave my shows crying." After leaving one of them, her grandmother sent her a note. It was a mixed review that could sum up the dilemma that any unbridled artist poses for the NEA. "She said that I was talented," Finley recalls, "but also a toiletmouth."