A Certain Level of Denial
Naked except for a flower-festooned hat and black slip-on shoes, Karen Finley lies motionless onstage in a tightly framed box of light roughly the size of a grave. One moment she speaks as a dispassionate psychiatrist barely able to conceal his sexist biases, asserting that because she’s naked she must desire him, and the next she becomes his long-suffering patient, doing her best not to scream when she tells him, “Women are tired of having their bodies viewed as a loaded gun.” During this ten-minute scene Finley hardly moves a muscle and never once raises her voice, delivering a carefully crafted comedy routine we only wish we didn’t find so funny.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
If A Certain Level of Denial, commissioned by New York’s Lincoln Center in 1992, marks a distinct transition in Finley’s work, it should come as no surprise that the piece feels somewhat disjointed and uneven. She’s always assembled her solo performances out of disparate parts–personal anecdotes, historical atrocities, lyric digressions–and A Certain Level of Denial is part of this lineage. But in The Constant State of Desire and We Keep Our Victims Ready, her most recent pieces in Chicago, Finley seemed a sort of medium, possessed by the spirits of society’s dispossessed, most prominently abused women and battered gay men. Their voices ripped out of her with a stunning intensity. This consistent (if terrifying) persona helped unify those pieces. Here Finley experiments with several much more subdued voices–the seductive but impersonal authority figure, the tremulous religious testifier, the sobby melodramatic damsel–but she hasn’t quite found a way to integrate them, to give the piece a unified sensibility.
Finley’s true genius lies in her ability to burrow deep into the recesses of catastrophe. We may think things are bad, but she shows us just how bad they are. Even artists–those we turn to for help in understanding–are complicit in America’s moral bankruptcy. After lamenting the suicide of friend and fellow performance artist Ethyl Eichenberger, for example, Finley imagines someone pressing Ethyl’s slit wrists against a canvas to create a painting, an appalling metaphor for artists’ tendency to distance themselves from real tragedy, objectifying it rather than experiencing it. “Let me tell you about performance art!” she howls, in that horrifying possessed voice so familiar from her past work.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Photo/Michael Overn.
