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Chocoholic
National Review, July 20, 1998 by Christopher Rapp
With or without government support, Karen Finley will bravely smear herself with chocolate.
`I want my money! ... Get me my grant!" The speaker, or rather screamer, was performance artist Karen Finley, and these demands were part of her new show, which opened in Manhattan in mid June. A week later the Supreme Court gave her, in effect, a one-word reply: No.
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In doing so the Court ended a cultural skirmish that had begun eight years ago, when public outrage over the National Endowment for the Arts' sponsorship of morally obnoxious material had convinced the agency to tighten its screening process. In keeping with this new (and, as it turned out, short-lived) attitude of responsibility, then-Chairman John Frohnmeyer rejected the applications of Miss Finley--a grant recipient since 1984 best known for smearing herself with chocolate and canned yams--and three other performance artists who had previously received funding. Later that year Congress passed a requirement that the NEA consider "general standards of decency and respect for the diverse beliefs and values of the American public" when awarding grants.
In response, Miss Finley and the other three artists, together known as the NEA Four, filed suit in federal court, arguing that the decency clause violated the First Amendment. Last month the Supreme Court disagreed, in an 8 to 1 decision. As Justice Scalia said in his concurring opinion, "Avant-garde artistes ... remain entirely free to epater la bourgeoisie; they are merely deprived of the additional satisfaction of having the bourgeoisie taxed to pay for it."
If the bourgeoisie only knew. Miss Finley's new show, which in a jab at her critics she has titled The Return of the Chocolate-Smeared Woman, opened with a half-dozen twenty-somethings on stage dressed only in brown velvet bras and underpants, kicking and shimmying to the disco classic "Do the Hustle." All eyes, however, were on the back of the room, where the star of the show gyrated to the music wearing only black bikini briefs and silver high-heels. Shrieking wildly, Miss Finley slathered what looked like chocolate frosting all over her bare breasts, abdomen, and legs. The dancers had chocolate on them too, little flowers and curlicues, which Miss Finley proceeded to lick. In the swirling lights it looked like a remake of Laugh-In, directed by Bob Guccione and brought to you by Hershey's.
When the music stopped, Miss Finley launched into a variety of personas, each with multiple claims to victimhood. In one sketch, she became an alcoholic mother who molests, whips, and otherwise torments her son, telling him (no doubt needlessly) that "I can cause deliberate, psychic, permanent pain." She then shoots herself, posthumously informing her son that it is all "because I love you." Later, Miss Finley covered herself in silver tinsel--frosting is surprisingly adhesive--and compared herself to a "veal calf."
Reading from a script, she described imagined sexual escapades involving herself and Kenneth Starr, Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, Orrin Hatch, Ted Kennedy, and her arch-nemesis Jesse Helms. She then filled a metal basin with water, took off her underwear, and bathed in full view of the audience, who had been warned in a maximum-decibel screech: "This is experimental theater!"
As in all Miss Finley's shows the broader message here seemed to be that the world is a horrible place, especially for women. Her trademark chocolate is meant to symbolize feces, and spreading it all over herself is her way of protesting society's oppression of women. As a young woman working at the theater explained, Miss Finley takes the female body "and totally demystifies it and defiles it, something that the feminists had been trying to do for years." For once, women's-studies gobbledygook is absolutely on target: Miss Finley does an exceptional job of defiling her body.
The Supreme Court's decision will no doubt be condemned as "McCarthyism," but the NEA Four themselves don't seem to have suffered. Miss Finley's comrades all still perform, their careers imbued with the radical chic of having gone to battle with the government. John Fleck, who ended one government-sponsored performance by urinating on stage, has found steady work in mainstream TV and film, including roles in Murder One and Mad about You. Holly Hughes went on to receive NEA and Ford fellowships and now teaches at New York University, while Tim Miller is an instructor in the UCLA theater program. Mr. Miller's piece de resistance, readers may recall, is lighting his pubic hair on fire. ("I'm not that hairy," he has said, "so I start running out of' areas to set on fire"). Aesthetic quibbles aside, you have to give these people credit for persistence.
That goes double for Miss Finley, whose act doesn't really change from year to year; it just gets more or less sticky, depending on what substance she happens to be coating her body with. At one point she repeats the line, "I will say the same thing over and over and over again, and I'll never stop, even if you want me too." Undoubtedly she's speaking from the heart. She has been doing the same shtick for twenty years. And the critics have praised her as a revolutionary every retraced step of the way ("A fiercely vivid presence," wrote the New York Times last month; "joyous as an idyll ... the essence of theater" chimed The Village Voice). The noncognoscenti, however, may ask how many times you can do the same thing and still call it "experimental."
