Word: finleyism
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...Karen Finley and Eric Bogosian are about as serious as artists can get before they become indistinguishable from evangelical preachers, and even these two occasionally push the envelope. Their agendas are a little different from most preachers: "A Certain Level of Denial" and "Dog Show, Pounding Nails in the Floor with my Forehead," presented back to back as part of the A.R.T. Fall Festival, both excoriate mainstream America for closing its eyes to the crises of our day--suicide, AIDS, abortion, homophobia, permanent impoverishment. Their respective portraits of the national psyche are grim and unremittingly scathing, but there...
Purging is probably not the exact word either of them would use for it; minutes into Finley's first monologue, she is "bleeding and puking on your mauve living room" because she finds no other way of rousing us from our apathy: "hello America, no answer, hello society, no answer...no more comfort." References to the Rodney King riots, the Clarence Thomas trial and the William Kennedy affair back up her mournful claim that "this is the the age of reverse." Even in her more humorous moments, she refuses to compromise her political sensibility: "I want all girl bands...
...Finley doesn't really ever want, or let, the audience laugh with her; we are meant to be uneasy, our laughter always self-conscious, her pain pointedly indigestible. Her predilection for the strangely dramatic keeps us even more off-balance. In front of three slide projectors projecting white light with no pictures, Finley strides onstage wearing only black mules, her posture, tone and demeanor daring us to make her into a sex object. We can't because she won't allow us to, her voice stronger than our gaze, conquering and shaming her would-be voyeurs. She puts...
Entirely dressed in black, with no props at all, Bogosian effortlessly transforms himself into vastly different characters (unlike Finley, whose characters are more like multiple variations on a theme). One of Bogosian's best portraits was that of a man from the Robert Bly school of self-discovery: "Hi, I'm Eric and I'm a recovering male..." Eric proceeds to confess shame-facedly to noticing women's bodies on the street, sadly apologizing "I'm a human trapped in a man's body...
...fuel further controversy over the NEA is a verdict just handed down by a federal court in Los Angeles. In 1990 Frohnmayer, hoping to mollify the Republican right, introduced a clause requiring "general standards of decency" as a basis for NEA grants. On that standard, four performance artists (Karen Finley, Holly Hughes, John Fleck and Tim Miller) saw their applications for grants rejected and sued the NEA. Last week Judge A. Wallace Tashima struck down the "decency" clause as vague and unconstitutional. The government, he said, does not have "free rein to impose ( whatever content restrictions it chooses" on federally...