Vacant Chair (Small)
1997
© ArtNet Worldwide 1997
Relaxation Room
1997
I shot myself because I love you. If I loved myself I'd be shooting you.
1997
Pooh please spank me first...
1997
Moral History
1994 - 1997
Moral History (Detail)
1994 - 1997
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A few years ago I visited the freak show at Coney Island after
it was colonized by East Village performance artists and
transformed into a self-consciously hip outpost of retro-styled
hucksterism. With a wink at the presiding spirit of P.T. Barnum,
the MC good-naturedly set out to fleece the amenable audience
out of another dollar -- an extra admission charge to a very
special exhibit in the back room. "Never have you seen
anything so revolting," he promised in an elaborate build-up,
"This sight will turn even the strongest stomachs! One look and
this horrible image will be burned forever into your mind's eye!"
We suckers each coughed up another buck and filed into a
darkened back room, where we watched, with a combination of
amusement and disappointment, a graphic color videotape of a
woman giving birth.
Karen Finley's back room installation at Fotouhi Cramer offers a
similarly in-your-face look at the harrowing facts of life. In
Finley's Relaxation Room, three large color photos show a
baby's bloody head gradually emerging from between
Mommy's spread legs, accompanied by a tape-loop of her
anguished yelps. Plastered on the hospital-green walls around
the photos are yellow Post-It notes bearing the phrases that
midwives and nurses must use in a vain attempt to quiet a
woman in the midst of labor, patronizing imperatives like "Have
a happy birthday!" and "Get back on your cloud!" Finley's point
about the sanitization of women's experience is well taken, but
the real spectacle here is the disconcerting sight a baby being
squeezed out of its mother's body like a hairy turd.
The work forcefully demonstrates the conceptual wall that
separates the coarse facts of childbirth from the fetish and
fantasy of female sexual appeal. In a further elaboration on the
artist as supermom, Finley presents an almost invisible painting
on black velvet done with breast milk, called Nursing. Next to it
is a short video tape-loop of the artist making the work, flinging
her breast milk in what appears to be a feminization of the
macho, muscular and male wet dream that was Abstract
Expressionism. Body fluids are back -- and men don't have
`em!
The front gallery is filled with a collection of objects and
drawings that are more "domestic" and relatively lackluster,
including two flower-encrusted chairs and several large floral
paintings with melodramatic cursive inscriptions ("I shot myself
because I loved you. If I loved myself I'd be shooting you"). A
wall covered with X-rated Winnie the Pooh cartoons did
provoke a few giggles -- mostly for the way they combine
recovery-movement homilies with the traditional British
penchant for filthy baby-talk.
The centerpiece of the show is Moral History, a large library
table filled with opened art history books under a sheet of glass
on which Finley has scrawled her comments in red grease
pencil. "Great spread," she writes across two facing pages of
classical nudes, foregrounding with her sarcasm their sex
appeal as high-class pinups. "Fucking beautiful" is her
judgment of an arty black-and-white photo of two nude (and
totally depersonalized) models who have abstract flower
shadows cast across their bodies. Other comments focus on
biography rather than esthetics, like the snide inscription
branding Carl Andre "the OJ of the art world." A bit closer to
home is her gripe about Yves Klein's 1960s paintings made by
using nude women as paintbrushes: "Yves Klein got away
with it. I didn't."
A decade or so ago Finley gained notoriety for brief, intense
performance pieces in which she seemed possessed by a
banshee narrative of sexual violence, often smearing her body
with chocolate or other food (canned yams, in particular). Since
then she has become, along with Kiki Smith, one our most
complicated and rewarding body artists, whose work reflects
the anomalous range of anger and eroticism that is woman's
experience.
MIA FINEMAN is a New York writer.
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