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Aug 24, 2015 · Karen Finley is a performance artist based in New York who has long charted the political underpinnings and trauma of stigma and notoriety through her performances and writings. To mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of its initial publication, City Lights is reissuing Shock Treatment , her provocative collection of monologues and poetry this September.
Finley arrived in New York, after growing up in a Chicago suburb and art school in San Francisco, in 1984. Since then, in downtown clubs like the Palladium, the Cat Club, and Danceteria, in art spaces like P.S. 122 and the Kitchen, in this archipelago within our city island, she has proposed a performance formula that achieves structural rigor (from her repetition of her texts) but that ...
Before Finley gets to this primal stuff in performance, however, she always shows the audience the real Karen Finley—the picture of vulnerability. The point, again, is to hold nothing back. She will customarily and relentlessly expose her own struggle to perform—telling us at the Pyramid Club, for example, that she was afraid, she was having her period, she’d forgotten a costume, etc.
Karen Finley, force of nature. If you saw her in an ’80s performance club you might have called her that, so powerful was she—but then you’d quickly have felt ridiculous, because it was her particular brilliance to see through any behavioral straitjacket imagined for her, or for women generally, and to dynamite it on the spot.
Other components of A Woman’s Life Isn’t Worth Much combined the blunt wit, audacity, and political street-smarts that constitute Finley’s trademark, and her challenge. Together, the various texts and images, like the sequence of monologues comprising We Keep Our Victims Ready , offer an experience of profound catharsis that is simultaneously emotionally draining and rejuvenating ...
In her role as Emerson College’s 2007 School of the Arts Visiting Artist, provocateur Karen Finley produced “Nation Building,” a thoughtful exhibition of drawings, sculpture, and mixed-media works. She also performed two monologues, The Dreams of Laura Bush and The Passion of Terry Schiavo. These may have disappointed an audience ...
Karen Finley’s installation, Written in Sand, 1992, adopted a subtle and dark strategy which eschewed the emphasis on the sheer number of deaths characteristic of the most publicized tributes to the victims of AIDS. Emblematic of those works, Gran Fury’s 1987-88 LED installation stated “One AIDS death every ten minutes”; its latest incarnation reflects the continual increase in those ...
A performance artist who honed her act on the club circuit, Karen Finley is the latest late-night skit-maker to move to prime-time alternative performance spaces. Her performance trademark has been ranting monologues, in form not unlike John Giomo’s breath-defined chanting poetry, and in content similar to the “obscene,” taboo-attacking jeremiads of singer-poet Lydia Lunch and writer ...
Karen Finley’s exhibition “St. Kilda” presented an assortment of works that dealt with bereavement and the regressive, helpless condition it can reduce us to. In Written in Sand , 1992–94, a memorial installation first shown at HallWalls in Buffalo, ten tons of damp sand were deposited in a dim, gilded room, and the sand hillocks that formed were topped with flickering white votive ...
Karen Finley Contributor. More. DEMOCRACY. OUR BEATING HEARTS, a project for Artforum. By Karen Finley ...
