Inspiration
Performance artist Karen Finley has smeared herself with chocolate, painted with her own breast milk, put Winnie the Pooh in S&M gear, and locked horns with conservative Sen. Jesse Helms.
A New York-based performer, author, playwright, and director, Finley probes themes of the body, sexual abuse and violence, AIDS, suicide, female sexuality, and American politics. While she has received significant critical and popular acclaim within the art world, it was her 1993 free speech battle with Jesse Helms, the National Endowment for the Arts, and ultimately the Supreme Court that brought Finley to a wider audience.
Her work onstage smashes stereotypes of Performance Art as Gong-Show castoff fare. They are mesmerizing experiential masterpieces. Finley takes her audiences through contemporary terrain at an accelerated pace, unheard of even in this age of instant access and continual gratificiation. Instead of the "shock" so many would have you believe they center on, her performances tend towards religious frenzy, complete with potent, quasi-spiritual transformation.
In an art world still confused about experiencing the moment versus purchasing the object, Karen Finley’s artworks balance wicked humor with humanistic morality. That entire ‘90s Brit Pack’s system of manufacturing shock could be contained in one of Karen’s pieces. Take your pick: She raked Jackson Pollock over the coals in documenting the "action" of her Breast Milk Paintings.
The word of the decade was TABLOID and Karen spread the word. In ten short years sex is less of a threat to your life but more of a threat to your career. Fear of sex is a fear of our bodies, their potency and their mortality. For all the faith in God that America preaches, its obsession over the physical is a belial eloquently pointed out by the Art World & America’s profound problem child, Artist Karen Finley.