Vol. 3, No. 2, Fall 2004

[page 190]

Heather A. Beasley

Blasphemy, Parody, and Running Commentary:
Roman Catholicism and the Work of Karen Finley

Karen Finley's intensely political, deeply personal art has scandalized the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and won her awards ranging from two Bessie Awards to a MacArthur Fellowship, while attracting the attention of politicians, scholars, and critics. Finley's career has survived a national furor over censorship, obscenity, community standards, and taxpayer funding for the arts. Yet, for all the writing that has addressed the vitality of her art and the raw, challenging subjects she takes on, relatively little has been written about her experiences with Roman Catholicism and its presence in her work. While Finley herself has written short autobiographical pieces touching on her Catholic upbringing, and mentioned it briefly in a few interviews, the analysis and scholarship surrounding her work is missing this crucial element of her identity in its interpretative strategies. This article rectifies that omission by discussing several of her works in light of her Roman Catholic experiences, her rebellion against the church's concepts of sexuality and womanhood, and her creation of new performative rituals.

Born in Chicago in 1956, Finley was raised by her mother, a political activist, and father, a jazz musician; she was the oldest of six children. Her father's family was Scottish and Irish Catholic, while her mother was raised Catholic by family members who had converted from German Judaism. Her recollections of her early experiences with Catholicism included two years spent in Catholic school, in second and third grade: "I went to Catholic school for a couple years and it was fairly liberal and progressive."(1) As previously discussed, there was Catholic history on both sides of her family, although she mentioned that her family was also part Gypsy and had incorporated some of their ritual practices and superstitions as well. She described [page 191] being exposed to a variety of religions, stating, "There wasn't really a Catholic constancy in my life."(2)

Does this lack of Catholic constancy, or of active religious practice, mean that it is inappropriate to examine Finley's work against the backdrop of Roman Catholicism? Art critic Eleanor Heartney thinks not; she suggests,

As Finley herself reflected in our 2002 interview, "It [Catholicism] obviously shaped me. [. . .] Everyone seems to know that language, and that's where it's useful for me for people to be able to relate to it. It's shared information so I appropriate, I exploit it."(4) Clearly, Finley would never define herself as a "Catholic artist;" however, she considers herself fluent enough in the language of Catholicism to use it to achieve her various goals. Thus, an analysis of how, when, and why she chooses to use Catholic language, symbols, and rituals in her work is appropriate.

Finley became part of the Chicago Art Institute's Young Artist Studio program in 1968 at the age of 12, where she became fascinated with the idea of privileging process instead of product. Her subsequent education emphasized studio arts; she received her MFA, with a focus in painting, from San Francisco Arts Institute in 1981.

[page 192] She left San Francisco for Chicago, where she created visual artworks and performed in various clubs until 1983. Finley then moved to New York City and began performing in East Village performance art venues like PS 122, Franklin Furnace, WOW, and the Cat Club. These venues became legendary in performance circles for the showcases they provided for women performers like Finley, Deb Margolin, Holly Hughes, and the Split Britches troupe. Finley also worked in nightclubs such as the Danceteria and the Limbo Lounge, performing brief monologues which she later evolved into a longer collection of character sketches titled I'm an Ass Man. These non-traditional spaces for performance attracted audiences whose reactions toward cabaret performers ranged from partial interest to complete indifference to open hostility, which led Finley to develop confrontational tactics for holding their attention that became trademarks of her later work.

In December 1986, Finley's first major solo performance, The Constant State of Desire, premiered at the Kitchen. This work won her a Bessie Award; it later toured across the U.S. and Europe, and excerpts from the performance text were published in The Drama Review (Spring 1988) and anthologized in Out From Under: texts by women performance artists (1990). Other major performance works include We Keep Our Victims Ready (1990), A Certain Level of Denial (1992), The American Chestnut (1996), and Shut Up and Love Me (2001). Finley is also a prolific writer, with several collections of her performances and visual artworks in print. These books include Shock Treatment (1990), Living It Up (1996), Pooh Unplugged: A Parody (1999), and A Different Kind of Intimacy: the Collected Writings of Karen Finley (2001).

Given the body of scholarship that already exists surrounding Finley's work, I will focus not only on her well-known performances, but also visual aspects of various gallery installations and lesser-known performances, in relation to the following questions: What are the specific performative tactics Finley chooses to convey her messages? How does Finley attempt to redefine and explore old rituals, or create new ones, through her performances and installations? How have these tactics worked in relation to her audiences and the public? Answering these questions will add a new dimension to the scholarship considering her career. Finley's relationship to Roman Catholic visual and emotional culture will emerge through [page 193] juxtaposition of her writings with those of theorists, critics, and theologians, and examination of Catholic cultural touchstones that are evoked by (and sometimes central to) her work.

Early Performance Tactics: I'm an Ass Man

Much critical analysis(5) debates the sexual content and graphic imagery in Finley's works, specifically in her two best-known pieces The Constant State of Desire and We Keep Our Victims Ready (the performance at the center of the 1990's NEA debates). The performative strategies and subject matter of her earliest pieces make it clear that certain specific themes and strategies at the center of later controversy were present in her work from its beginning.

I'm an Ass Man (1984) contained a collection of characters in scenarios that challenged even the most jaded New Yorker. The title piece was performed in the voice of a man about to rape a woman on the subway, when he stops because he discovers she is menstruating. Other sections included "Mr. Hirsch," in the voice of a small girl who is forced to perform oral sex on her friend's father, and "Yams Up My Granny's Ass," in the voice of a drug addict who celebrates Thanksgiving by abusing his senile grandmother. Even without quoting passages at length, the sexual taboos Finley was putting onstage—menstruation, rape, pedophilia, elder abuse—shocked, confused, and angered audience members. Her subjects were off-limits in polite conversation, their activities the kind "nice" people did not ever speak of. She chose her subject materials not solely for their shock value, but as a way to take the subject of violence against women and discuss it publicly.

The controversial nature of Finley's work sometimes led audiences and critics to overlook her message, and to focus instead on her performance techniques. These included performing naked and smearing her body with various types of food to represent blood, semen, and other bodily fluids. The shock tactics she used to enthrall the crowds and her work on taboo sexual subjects led to a new level of fame. In June 1986, Village Voice critic C. Carr chose Finley as the [page 194] subject of a cover story, titled "Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts: The Taboo Art of Karen Finley." This article and others brought Finley to the attention of the international art community, and she began getting offers to perform abroad and bring her work to new audiences. Carr's review made it clear that Finley's relationship with her audiences was already an uneasy one, describing her performance of I'm an Ass Man as "both fascinating and horrifying to behold, because audiences can't help but recognize their own most mortifying obsessions in the fast-flowing bile. Finley rivets, but she doesn't entertain."(6) The aesthetic tensions of Finley's performer-audience relationship were already established, as were several performance techniques that would soon make her both famous and infamous.

First, portraying both victims and aggressors is a technique that challenges Finley's audiences to face their own preconceptions about the issues she addresses. This strategy gives Finley the opportunity to emotionally involve her audience while raising difficult questions about the nature of blame, the center of the issues she is concerned with, and the deeply internalized nature of violence in American society. Her victims often blame themselves, while her perpetrators rarely challenge their own actions, leaving her audiences asking deeply important questions about societal reactions to crimes against women, children, and homosexuals. Finley raises these questions without spoon-feeding easily palatable answers, leaving her audiences to struggle with possible disjunctures between their beliefs and the realities of violence.

Second, direct address to her audience enables Finley to immediately engage and sometimes enrage her spectators. Audience members are often placed in the position of the attacker while Finley screams, "How could you do this to me?" or accuses, "I'm never enough for you." She embodies a variety of characters, and places the audience in various relationships to those characters throughout the course of any full-length performance. However, the performances for which she has been most lionized by her supporters, and villified by her critics, involve this dangerous relationship established through direct address. By holding the [page 195] audience accountable for the suffering she describes, Finley pushes her way into their consciousness and asks them to confront their own complicity.

Finally, nudity as a performative strategy has also been ever-present in Finley's work. Finley's use of nudity has exposed her vulnerability, her humanity, and her womanhood. I argue that Finley's calculated use of nudity was a conscious artistic technique, meant for more than initial attention-grabbing. In order for her work to transcend commonplace exhibitionism, Finley had to connect the use of nudity to her overall performative purposes. Her usual technique was to combine her own nudity with a symbolic covering of some sort, generally a type of food (yams, chocolate, raw eggs) as a visual symbol for the degradation her characters were suffering. In "Mr. Hirsch," for example, she used ice-cream sandwiches, squeezing them tightly at the end of the monologue to represent the neighbor's ejaculation onto the nine-year-old speaker. This tactic recurred in several of her later works.

Individuals' Rights and National Controversy: We Keep Our Victims Ready

Finley's work directly concerns oppression of individual rights and the activism necessary to end such oppression. At the core of her work is a crusade against homophobia and sexism; these two issues surface repeatedly in all of her major works, including the performance at the heart of the NEA controversy, We Keep Our Victims Ready (1990).(7)

We Keep Our Victims Ready is a stark, openly political work. Like Finley's other performances, it is a collection of monologues, this time loosely connected around the central theme of popular culture's ideas of victimization. While We Keep Our Victims Ready is perhaps her most famous work, and definitely her most controversial, its openly political nature involves religious symbolism only peripherally in the performance text itself. When examining [page 196] an artist's career in the light of religious experience, it is crucial to remember that religion is only one factor in a complex web of materials that artists draw on to create their work. However, religion became inextricably entwined with the controversy surrounding the performance, as the national argument over whether her works violated standards of decency was rooted largely in a conservative Christian value set. Religion and art analysis intersect at the point of audience reception of a performance, as well as within the process of artistic creation; audience members bring their own cultural baggage to interpretation of a work, and that baggage may include religious beliefs and practices. The consequences of the NEA trials also colored Finley's later work. In a 1990 interview for Paper, she described how the religious and political pressures expressed in the media were changing the way she created art:

We Keep Our Victims Ready is a necessary inclusion in any critique of Finley's body of work, and already has a considerable amount of surrounding critical literature; this project adds a consideration of the conservative religious right's interactions with Finley as a result of the NEA court cases.

A brief look at one section of the performance will illustrate how it became the center of national controversy. In 1987, the Tawana Brawley case focused national media attention on a young black woman who had been discovered in a garbage bag, naked, and covered in human feces. She accused three white police officers of raping her; the case was later thrown out of court when her evidence was found to be fabricated. Finley was obsessed with the images of this court case, which she eventually used as material for "Can this veal calf walk?" a short [page 197] monologue which later became the centerpiece of We Keep Our Victims Ready. Finley recalls the symbolism underlying her choices for the materials in which she covered her naked body:

This particular performative use of nudity in combination with foodstuffs would lead to the rescinding of Finley's NEA grant in the summer of 1990. This piece became the source of her nickname, "the chocolate-smeared woman," in the conservative press; certain members of the public(10) clearly interpreted her performance choices differently than with the symbolic meanings she described.

Critic Stephen Holden, after seeing We Keep Our Victims Ready at Lincoln Center, added to the debate by giving a specific reading of the symbolism of "Can this veal calf walk?" in his review:

Marcelle Clements interviewed her the same day that the NEA made the grant rejection announcements. It was too soon to know how the label of "obscenity" would affect Finley's work and audience reactions to it, but Clements raised the questions on many people's minds in her story on We Keep Our Victims Ready:

In the end, the answers to Clements' questions were "No" and "Yes." The rescinding of Finley's grant marked the beginning of eight nightmarish years of First-Amendment-related court cases. A brief review of the legal, political, and artistic history surrounding the trials is essential to understanding the central issues at hand, as well as their ramifications in Finley's later work.

In 1989, Congress took the NEA to task for providing grant monies to photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and visual artist Andres Serrano, claiming that their works were obscene. Several bills appeared on the House floor seeking to put tighter controls on the types of art the NEA could fund, including the Rohrabacher Amendment, which would have introduced a prohibition on awarding any grant used to "promote, distribute, disseminate, or produce matter that has the purpose or effect of denigrating the beliefs, tenets, or objects of a particular religion."(13) This bill hinted at the religious roots of conservatives' opposition to the [page 199] controversial grants in question; it failed, but a compromise bill authored by Representative Paul Henry and Senator Jesse Helms (and sponsored by Representatives Pat Williams and Thomas Coleman) passed in 1990. The Williams/Coleman Amendment added a "decency clause" to the NEA charter, requiring all works receiving grants to meet "general standards of decency and respect for the diverse beliefs and values of the American public."(14) Meanwhile, Finley and three other artists (Tim Miller, John Fleck, and Holly Hughes) had received preliminary approval of their Performance Artist grant applications by an NEA panel, but this approval was reversed by the NEA Council four months before the decency clause was officially implemented in November 1990. The artists, believing their grants had been denied because of the decency standards and the prevailing political climate, sued the NEA in 1992 seeking reinstatement of their grants, and attempting to overturn the decency clause as unconstitutional because of vagueness and violation of the First Amendment. The California Ninth District Court reinstated their grants and found the clause to be unconstitutional. The artists' grants were reinstated, but the section of the case pertaining to the decency clause was appealed several times, and finally reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1998. In June of that year, the judges voted 8-1 against the artists, upholding the decency clause and thus instituting new possibilities of censorship over the works selected for future funding.

One of the cases the Supreme Court majority opinion cited was Rosenburger v. Rector (1995), which reinstated state university funding for a Christian student newspaper at the University of Virginia on the basis that its denial "would risk fostering a pervasive bias or hostility to religion."(15) The Court opinion then differentiates between unlawful discrimination based on religion, such as that in Rosenburger, and selection of winners of open competition, such as that for NEA grants. The majority opinion stated that the definition of "decency" is left up to NEA selection panel members, and that the NEA is thus not discriminatory against any particular kind of speech by mandate of the decency clause.(16)

[page 200] Some religious conservatives rejoiced at the Supreme Court decision. Michael W. McConnell, in his analysis of the case, suggested that "It is impossible to imagine a 'viewpoint' that would be excluded by the standards of 'decency' and 'respect for diverse opinions.' Even the viewpoint that one should be indecent or disrespectful can be expressed decently and with respect for the sensibilities of others."(17) He also accused Justice Souter, the sole dissenter, of falling "for the idea that the 'arts community' should tap public funds but have no public responsibility."(18) While the conservative press celebrated the decision as a victory, the mainstream media reinforced the stereotypical links between religion and political conservatism. For example, nationally syndicated columnist Alice Thorson decried the Court's decision:

Through use of phrases like "religion-based intolerance," Thorson implicates all religious practitioners without questioning precisely whose religions and which practitioners are actively intolerant. Such criticism, while masquerading as liberal, actually reinforces false and divisive overgeneralizations about religion and religious practitioners. Her reference to "great art of the past commissioned by the church," for example, is most likely to refer to the Roman Catholic Church's patronage of arts during the Italian Renaissance (since that was the last time the [page 201] phrase "the church" referred to a single religious entity). However, the original authors of the Congressional "decency clause" language were both Protestant: Jesse Helms is a Baptist, and Paul Henry was an evangelical Christian of the Christian Reformed sect.(20) Specificity thus becomes crucial to arts criticism in relation to religion, because critics otherwise run the risk of alienating arts advocates whose religious views do not result in intolerance.

Critics also noted that the debates over arts funding in the 1990's occurred primarily between the cultural elite and the conservative elite, and the larger battle was over who had the right to define the public and speak for them. Finley's performance style was catalogued and criticized for appropriating the voices of the disenfranchised without doing anything to empower them. Grant Kester argued that, unlike Finley, true public artists must work "not as the shock therapists of some imaginary middle class, but as collaborators and participants in the daily struggles of life under an increasingly oppressive and divisive economic regime."(21) His critique pointed to a larger cultural shift away from individual, political performance art in the late 1990's; as government monies allotted to the NEA dwindled, economic concerns played ever larger roles in deciding whose artworks would be publicly shown. The Whitney Museum cancelled a show of Finley's shortly after the Supreme Court decision.

Finley's work was under attack from all sides during this time. Liberal critics expected her to act as the poster child of the First Amendment, and denigrated her for the consistency and elitism of her style and subject matter; audiences expected her to be obscene, and were often disappointed; conservatives sought to make her the pinup girl for perversity. Finley describes part of her daily experience during the trials in A Different Kind of Intimacy as follows: "One day in Nyack I picked up the local Catholic church's Sunday bulletin, and there was a diatribe against me. [...] The feeling of going to church, or getting into a cab in a distant town, and seeing or hearing yourself being condemned, is difficult to take."(22)

[page 202] After the NEA trials concluded, Finley moved to Los Angeles, in an attempt to move beyond the trials and work on new subject matter. In our April 2002 interview, she mentioned that she had been "excommunicated by a bishop in Los Angeles"(23) because of the controversy surrounding her work.(24) Clearly, the public condemnation of her work which began in the late 1980's changed the content and form of her future installations and performances. In the 1990's, as she grew more distant from the Catholic Church as institution, Finley began to create rituals for herself and others who had been displaced from traditional forms of religious worship.

Dr. Heather A. Beasley received her doctorate from the University of Colorado-Boulder in 2003, and now works as an arts education administrator for the city of Tempe, Arizona. She served as the graduate student representative for ATHE's Religion and Theatre focus group and is the current [2004] treasurer. Her dissertation focuses on the intersections of feminist theory, Roman Catholic feminist theology, and performance art.