Section 5
Finley's performances powerfully produce a sort of catharsis in her audiences. Discussing a 1992 performance of A Certain Level of Denial, Jeremy Gerard notes that "Many in the audience were frequently moved to tears during the 75 minute piece. And a few were moved to leave before it was over." Likewise, describing Finley's performances in general, Kay Larson remarks that, "The terrible 'Why' that hangs over the human race begins to penetrate your hardened hide. She can raise your childhood traumas and remind you why they were vital. Excavating her own pain, she can resurrect some of the moral fervor you lost when you grew up" (49). Similarly, Carr describes Finley's monologues as a "deluge" in which "The words were heartstopping in their sexual explicitness, but hearbreaking as well. . . . She would expose the victimizer's monstrous impulses; she would validate feelings the victim could barely talk about" ("Telling the Awfullest" 153). Likewise, Kathy Acker, viewing We Keep Our Victims Ready, highlights a moment near the third section of the performance: "At that moment, I, and I think most of the audience, felt that we were watching an extraordinary transformation, from agony to cleansing, with which we identified if not understood" (43). Describing the final vignette of the same piece as "a move toward redemption," Charles Wilmoth observes, "The text, paralelling [sic] what Finley had done with her own body, created a hopeful place where we can surmount the machinations of a world that would turn people into and maintain them as ever-ready victims."
The power of Finley's performances is unquestionable; even so, the negative--often hostile--responses she has evoked from her audiences and critics reveal some problematic underpinnings. During the Hitler/Braun piece, "a Spanish woman, a Nazi sympathizer, ran to the stage and attacked Finley with a mop," C. Carr reports; "Kipper threw her off, but then a couple hundred others got up and rushed the stage" ("Unspeakable" 126). Also, during another performance, audience members threw lit cigarettes at her. Further, in addition to the moral assault instigated by Evans and Novak's characterization of Finley as a "nude chocolate smeared woman," Carr's article "Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts," which praised Finley's early performances, "produced a deluge of letters to the Village Voice" regarding Finley's use of canned yams in Yams Up My Granny's Ass. As Lynda Hart points out, "Two themes predominate [in these letters]--filth and madness":
One 'greatly disgusted' reader suggested that he send 'a lump of shit in the envelope' to make Voice editors feel 'more at home.' The same writer referred to the editors as 'a pack of crazies.' Another reader equated Carr's 'rationalization' of Finley's work with 'those who justified receiving their entertainment at Bedlam and Charenton'; one drew an analogy between Finley's art and a man on the street relieving himself under a billboard advertising tequilla. A debate continued for several weeks concerning whether or not Finley had inserted the yams into her anus, if the yams were cooked or uncooked, and if the latter were the case, was it possible to insert them. (94)A number of critics have also found offense in Finley's work. Kevin Kelly, writing for the Boston Globe, sneers, "In 'Victims,' she's nearly nude and does the chocolate bit, which is meant to show the victimization of women but really calls up images of June Allyson and Depend diapers" (62). Gerald Nachman, who finds it "shocking to see a militant feminist in a dress," observes the way in which, "After slathering herself with chocolate from a heart-shaped box, it starts cooking on her overheated body and the aroma wafts into the audience"; he says, "I believe I'll pass on desert." Further, Nachman is annoyed by Finley's habit of taking "swigs from an Evian bottle and [spitting] on the floor, which is either a comment on men, a parody of Roseanne Barr or just more boorish behavior on Karen's part"(E1). Finally, Richard Grenier apologizes wholeheartedly to the NEA for having defended Finley prior to viewing her performance. "I was . . . expecting there'd be something ladylike in her performance, something genteel, even when she slathered her nude body with chocolate sauce seasoned with alfalfa sprouts ('sperm')," he says, but, "Actually it was disgusting. I discovered she's the foulest-mouthed woman I've ever seen on stage, screen or in Greenwich Village." He is dismayed by Finley's "tirade," but even more so at the fact that, for Finley, "Nothing is too intimate. I now know that Karen Finley's periods last five days and that she started menstruating at 12." Grenier concludes, "I'm still working on the chocolate. If her alfalfa sprouts stand for sperm, as Miss Finley says, and everything is symbolic, what does the chocolate sauce stand for that gets dumped all over a poor woman by life?" During her performance, Finley had said, "Now that I'm defunded, I might as well use the real stuff!" But Grenier asks, "what 'real stuff'?" What Finley's detractors see when they watch her performances or hear about them is a hysterical, abject, leaky, excessive, uncontrollable woman.
Yet even glowing reviews of Finley's work reinforce such a construction of her. Most revealingly, Anthony Adler, in an article entitled "Kali Incarnate," describes the goddess Kali as "a sort of bone-crushing, milk-giving Unified Field Theorem, encompasing within herself the entire process, power, and paradox of life-and-death existence," then asserts that Finley's performances provide "at least . . . the scent of" the goddess (111). It is "A distinctly foul scent where Karen Finley is concerned," he says; "a stink of blood and death, of oozy shit and human rot, poisoned semen and endless rage." Commenting upon her channeling of voices, he remarks, "One is reminded of Linda Blair, breathing sulfur and spewing obscenities in The Exorcist" (112). Let me emphasize that these observations are commendations of Finley's work, and let me also stress the similarity between such comments and those made by Finley's detractors. What, after all, is the difference between Carr's praise of Finley as "an unsocialized woman" ("Unspeakable" 121) and Nachman's "foulest mouthed woman I've ever seen" who "spits on the floor"? What is the difference between June Allyson in Depend diapers and Linda Blair spewing pea-soup vomit?
In the simplest terms, Finley does what a woman is not supposed to do--but which age-old stereotypes insist that she is biologically determined to do. Thus, the difference is that her fans wholeheartedly support her transgressions of the boundaries of domesticated femininity, whereas the same transgressions horrify and terrify her detractors--those who, like Grenier, demand "something ladylike in her performance, something genteel." In this sense, then, Finley is extremely successful in her role as an avant-garde artist in the Shamanic tradition, "publicly breach[ing] the taboo of the times" and deliberately inverting social custom so that "acts repressed in the public morality may surface there, . . .set loose for their power to balance and complete the sense of life" (McEvilley 93). Of course this brings up an interesting problem, because it suggests that the abject, angry images of Woman Finley embodies for the sake of communal catharsis are repressed realities smoothed over and concealed by "public morality." In other words, if domesticated, passive, squeaky-clean femininity is the standard according to public morality, then Finley's abject, angry woman is an alternate reality public morality exerts its efforts to erase. Thus, I believe what we see in Finley's performances is "Woman, red in tooth and claw," the flip side of the Nurturing Mother and an image which is more deeply entrenched in history and across cultures than even Finley herself is aware.
Finley, Paglia, Juno and Vale, Patti Smith, and Hughes all represent the Angry Woman through "obscenity" and abject imagery of defilement, violence, blood, guts, excrement, and aggressive sexuality; all embrace the image of "Woman, red in tooth and claw" as an empowering force for women. Given that these images are central, the matter seems to go far beyond the issues addressed by ritual-making and activist feminist performances of the 1970s, and Angry Essentialism seems not to recognize the dangers of the Devouring Mother construction of Female Nature. An important question to ask, then, is what these performers hope to accomplish by combining anger and abjection.
In Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva defines abjection as that which "disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite" (4). Given this description, one reason Angry Essentialism might laminate anger to abjection is because, as Hart suggests, "to violate borders is to reveal how a system is constructed" (98). But Kristeva gives as examples of abjection Nazi crime, rape, and murder; abjection, she says, "is immoral, sinister, scheming, and shady: a terror that dissembles, a hatred that smiles . . ." (4). Translated into Paglia's Angry Essentialist framework, these characteristics of the abject are the facts of Female Nature against which man is in a continual battle to maintain order. Female Nature is the amoral, chthonian, daemonic force repressed by Western culture (5); she is a "writhing octopus" (241), primitive urges (3), "primeval muck, oozing into infant forms" (56); she is "the blind grinding of subterranean force, the long slow suck, the murk and ooze" (5-6). Abjection and Female Nature are inextricably melded together in the press of ideological assumptions about women and nature; thus it seems that additional factors must be involved when feminist artists and critics consciously choose to represent female nature as aggressive, angry, and abject.
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