Word: finley
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Karen Finley...
...Enough is Enough: Weekly meditations for Living Dysfunctionally, Karen Finley turns pop psychology and accepted rules of etiquette on their heads in a cutesy way that begins to grate after about five pages...
...Finley is a multimedia artist best known as one of 1990s "NEA Five," the five performance artists whose work was deemed so controversial that the National Endowment for the Arts rescinded their funding. With this fluffy little book, as indeed with all her projects, she seems determined to knock over as many sacred cows as she can lay her hands on--and have a jolly good time, to boot! Good for her. But Enough is Enough, a slim volume of jocular ripostes interspersed with Finley's childlike line drawings, is the most standard and facile anti-establishment fare imaginable...
...Finley's strategy is to say "no" to anything that conventional mores say "yes" to, and vice-versa: probably a good idea in general, but nothing we haven't heard before. Little gems like, "Whining is a useful technique for getting your own way, because people will just want to shut you up and will give you just about anything," appear designed to provoke first a raised eyebrow and a burst of scandalized laughter, and then a self-indulgent rethinking of how we conduct our quotidian existences...
Bogosian and Finley sometimes strike so hard and so brutally that the social criticism can be self-defeating, making its audience feel distant rather than implicated and aroused to action. But they show us the selves we'd often rather not see, and make us acutely aware of the cost of any level of denial. One of Bogosian's characters scoffs, "the world is a complicated place and trying to understand it ain't gonna make it any less complicated." Trying to understand the world Finley and Bogosian confront us with may not make our lives any less complicated...