Karen Finley reflects on her legendary performance pieces, censorship and decades of groundbreaking work—and the sheer joy in creating art.
Karen Finley reflects on her legendary performance pieces, censorship and decades of groundbreaking work—and the sheer joy in creating art.
Debbie Millman:
Most political art doesn’t change much. Occasionally though, art becomes the cutting edge of political activism. Karen Finley has spent her career on and even over that edge. Her boundary-shattering performance art, her searing readings and recordings, her incisive visual art, and her many books have been getting people talking about equality, sexuality, sexism and violence for many decades. She joins me today to talk about her long and provocative career. Karen Finley, welcome to Design Matters.
Karen Finley:
It’s lovely to be here. Thank you for inviting me.
Debbie Millman:
Karen, my first question to you is something I just learned about you, is it true you started a group called Artists Anonymous.
Karen Finley:
Yes, I have. Yes, and we still meet. Yes.
Debbie Millman:
And I understand, pre-COVID, you’d meet at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City to talk about artistic issues and concerns, and you also have a 13-step program. Can you talk about some of the steps?
Karen Finley:
Well, the program for us started at Museum of Art and design, but it meets at libraries or at other places and has met in other parts of the country pre-COVID. We have been doing some meetings online. But I do have 13 steps, and the first step is admitted that we were addicted to art, that I’m addicted to art, and that our life became unmanageable because of art. And is sort of a humorous but also a very serious fellowship for people that are stigmatized by the art world, women, people of color, queer people that really feel that they’re not part of the mainstream art opportunities.
Debbie Millman:
You were born in Chicago, the oldest of six children. You were raised in Evanston, Illinois, and you’ve described your upbringing like growing up in a John Irving novel. In what way?
Karen Finley:
Well, I think that it was a family that was very involved in the arts and politics, and everyone was very involved in different interests, and that that was supported. And it wasn’t a town of where Northwestern is. So, education was a focus, research, any types of interest. But there’s also, I don’t know if it would be John Irving, but there was also trauma in my family. My father committed suicide and there were different issues that went on as in many families. And I also grew up during the era of the ’60s and ’70s.
Debbie Millman:
Your dad was a jazz drummer who also sold vacuum cleaners, and your mom ran a sewing business out of your house. So did mine, by the way. She advertised in the Pennysaver on Long Island. Your mom was also a member of the Jungian Institute, and you’ve said that to her, dreams were more important than even having food on the table. Do you mean sleep dreams or dreams of the future?
Karen Finley:
I think I mean about in terms of the nourishment. My mother was very interested in divination. She had learned all the divination arts from her mother, so that within that world, you’re not always having to be thinking about the practicals. But my mother was also a very practical woman too. And she also worked in an insurance company as well, and she was a vice president of that company. So, yes, she did start doing sewing. And my grandmother also was a tailor, and I still have that sewing machine. I keep that sewing machine nearby me. And my father, yes, he was involved in jazz early on, he also then, I think, left that business because I think of drugs, and he then went into sales. But he carried that, music was part of my life growing up.
Karen Finley:
And it was a very privileged household that my father would say, “Oh, I would like to show you this poem by Rabindranath Tagore,” or we’re having conversations about Carl Jung and synchronicity. So, I had that type of an intellectual household.
Debbie Millman:
You’ve talked about how your mother’s creative talents were considered to be just as important as your father’s. And you began drawing when you were about two years old, and started performing by 12. You joined the Chicago Art Institute’s Young Artists Program when you were 12. And I read that when you first visited the art institute and were perusing the collection, you thought that the artists Joan Miro and Jean Dubuffet were women.
Karen Finley:
Yes.
Debbie Millman:
How did you find out otherwise?
Karen Finley:
Probably when I started taking French, and then all of a sudden, autonomy, “Oh.” But, yeah. And you know what? I mean, I just assumed that they were women. And I think it’s good I did because I think probably in the museum, there was Georgia O’Keeffe and Mary Cassatt. And that would probably been it at that time.
Debbie Millman:
The first public performance that you gave, I believe was actually in the cafeteria of the Art Institute of Chicago. Can you talk about what that was?
Karen Finley:
This was in high school. I did a performance with music, my father was playing drums and I was dancing and moving to that music. There were some high school friends of mine that were playing some instruments that didn’t make sound, and that was considered very conceptual. But I also did costumes, where I would be sewing stockings together, pantyhose together. But my first performance that I did that was, I would say really like a public performance in the style that I started to do that would have some type of a semblance of what I’m doing now is that I performed it at the Gay Community Center in San Francisco, and when I was at school there, and I performed in a group show.
Debbie Millman:
Was that when you were smashing bananas against the window?
Karen Finley:
I did things. There were many at that time I did that. I went into a JCPenney window that was, I think the store had been closed and one of the other students had organized a show. So, like, let’s say, every week, there’d be a different performer. And so, I went and rode up on a motorcycle. My roommate’s boyfriend had a motorcycle, so, drove me right up, I don’t even know if it was right to the window, and I went into this window display and I started smashing my body against the window, and convulsing and eating many bananas. And the police were called and I was put into a squad car. I laugh because I was a little bit scared. I just continued performing while I went into the place.
Karen Finley:
But when you think about that in terms of events with the police, there still was a certain sense of innocence there. And I think that the organizer was able to explain that this was art. I mean, it was San Francisco, but the art…
Debbie Millman:
I read that somebody reported that you were on drugs and convulsing in the way though.
Karen Finley:
They thought I was insane. I mean, I think that they wanted to take me to a psychiatric ward or something.
Debbie Millman:
You mentioned attending the San Francisco Art Institute, while you were there, you became immersed in the Bay Area’s punk music scene, you also worked in strip joints to help pay for school. And I’m wondering if that experience gave you insight in the range of ways people respond to bodies.
Karen Finley:
Yes, I do. It’s a mixed feeling. My father had committed suicide and I needed money to go to school. In fact, I even paid for my father’s funeral. So, I was working there and it was, I would say, a positive experience. But I wouldn’t have been doing it if I came from a family with money. I did it for economic reasons. So, yes, I met wonderful people there and it was much more kind of an, I would call it burlesque. It was, the women and the artists there really took their art forms seriously. I was a cocktail waitress, and there were many tourists that would come in. And the feeling that I felt in the club was different than on the street because the female body was revered and respected there. That is what really, really moved me, and to be thinking about that respect and these different levels in terms of desire, gaze, and the economy.
Debbie Millman:
Karen, you’ve brought your dad up a few times, and if it’s okay, I’d love to talk to you a little bit more about what his death did to you. I understand that before he committed suicide, you were having recurring dreams about him dying.
Karen Finley:
Yes, it wasn’t right beforehand, but I had some. I consider myself to be, if you want to say, clairvoyant. I consider that I’m intuitive or even if I want to say the word, a psych, I have a psychic ability. But, yes, I did have dreams. And earlier, and I actually told him about it and the events that happened at the dream. And also, I was at my family’s psychic at the time that my father committed suicide, and she did not know why I was there, but she told me exactly what was going to happen when I got home. She closed the business and she poured me a drink, and she then told me the events that were to happen, not that he had committed suicide, but just all of the events that were to happen, and it did happen.
Karen Finley:
The certain people and everything, I think, for this conversation, I’m not going to go into each detail here, but, yes, I am very much part of the belief of different dimensions of the psychic and the ethereal. And that’s been a very strong part of my life.
Debbie Millman:
You wrote about it really beautifully in a different kind of intimacy, which I have really ravished. And you’ve said that it was only after your dad dying that you understood how depressed he was, and it was the last time you would allow yourself to be so out of sync with someone suffering. And I read that after he died, you couldn’t paint because you couldn’t be alone by yourself, and you had to cut that feeling out. Is that why you started performing instead?
Karen Finley:
I think that there isn’t ever one particular reason and the different selves of how we answer things, change and grow. Now in looking back at how I answered that is that depression is so… we don’t talk about depression. And in that time, I didn’t have a training or to know or to speak about or to understand. And I think that I was saying that I wanted to be more sensitive, and that I didn’t really understand all that was going on. But in adding to that is the emotional space of loss or trauma, and there’s been other things in my life, is that because I had that pain or that loss that one carries with themselves, is that from there, you’re able to empathize with other people.
Karen Finley:
And so, that’s what I think is part of more of my momentum in making art after that experience. Do you see? So, it was no longer just on the aesthetic, it wasn’t just on the idea of representing nature, it really was supposed to be representing an inner nature within the work, or things that couldn’t necessarily be represented. And in that, in the combination of with my femaleness, and that the female is so accused of being hysterical, I use those emotions because I understood those emotions, I had confidence in those emotions, and I could share that. And that is where I think I brought my work to.
Debbie Millman:
You said that the wellspring of that pain is what you express on stage. How were you able to channel it, or how are you able to channel that wellspring of pain?
Karen Finley:
I think that my work also is about the joy that comes out of that pain, because I think much of my work is that my performance is a celebration of living, and that I think that celebration and performing and having people come together and being there in the room and assembling together, and the physicality, which I think we’re all missing so much in terms of this quarantine in COVID is also what my work is about. My work is about the resilience of speaking up and out, of expressing the vulnerability and the strength and the courage, and the resistance which occurs in the actual act of creativity. And the rearrangement poetically is an attempt by the re-imagining of events or the interpreting the witnessing provides, or what I’m interested in providing is a portal to an imagined space, and that then is this potential for an inspired future, or an inspired presence. So, that’s what I try to do within my work.
Karen Finley:
The other point that I would like to make is, when I wrote that book, I was just beginning in this process, which took me many years to do, but another part of my life is the censorship that occurred in unpolitical situations and the NEA, and when all the worlds that went on without that. And I had to come to a certain decision, which is the joy in making art, the joy, the joy. The joy actually right now here in this opportunity to be here with you, Debbie, how joyous this is, of that we both came into New York at the same time, all that we’ve really been trying to organize here, doing this during quarantine, we have a new administration. We’re speaking, I know that we both are professors, the work and what we’ve done. I consider this to be a joyous moment, and there’s a joyous potential.
Karen Finley:
And so, that is something also that I intentionally carry with me as a space of resistance, to be joyous despite whatever administration or dictator or authoritarian regime is there.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. I want to talk a bit about the issues that you’ve had with censorship, and I’m going to get to that really soon. But I want to talk for a moment about the work you did before you came to New York. You work with Brian Ruth, a member of the legendary performance art team called The Kipper Kids, and you and Brian went to Germany to perform together and actually got chased off the stage because of the performance. And I’m wondering if you can share for my listeners what you did that got you chased off the stage.
Karen Finley:
Well, Brian’s name was Brian Routh, and-
Debbie Millman:
Brian, I’m sorry.
Karen Finley:
… later was like mouth.
Debbie Millman:
Brian Routh.
Karen Finley:
We actually even did a performance, Mr. And Mrs. Mouth. But The Kipper Kids was an extraordinary performance dual that performed usually without a specific language. And I got clowning and avant-garde clowning approach. And what we did in Germany at a Theater of the World Festival, basically what we’re doing is performing as Hitler and Eva Braun, and we also started performing as dogs. We had still been seeing anti-sematic graffiti in the city, and we were really making this staunch work about anti-Nazi imagery by taking on and making this parody. And so, at one point, Brian went back and he actually, I guess where they laughed up or were hit because they didn’t have bathrooms over there, and went to where I had pooped and he went up to it and he just, he laughed, and I know this is going to be so extreme here and for it, but that’s what he did at this time.
Karen Finley:
And I guess, beforehand, we were sniffing each other’s bums, and that is actually, they could have really cared less about poop, what they got really, really upset was us eating our food like dogs, we put the dog food in it. And they said, “The Germans are not dogs,” and people came down from the audience and started attacking me in particular with brooms. And this isn’t like hundreds of people coming down, but it’s definitely more than 10 people, to the point where Brian had to move the person off of me whereas I’m being attacked and we had to run out of the circus tent. And Fassbender was there that night, and the next day then he filmed the performance, the second night of the performance, but there wasn’t the same amount of outrage the second night. But you can see that film sometimes shows it. At certain point, it showed at the Museum of Modern Art and places like that.
Debbie Millman:
You’ve said that performance art is a response to capitalism, that it’s a space about going against the audition process, going against the space of acceptance and rejection. And you are your own director, you’re creating a performance and a ritual. Were you ever scared as you were creating these new rituals? Were you scared that day on the stage being hit by brooms?
Karen Finley:
No, I wasn’t scared because I could see the venom in the people’s eyes, and I could see the hate in the people’s eyes. The anti-Semitism had not gone away, and which actually then we can see what’s happening, I think it could be continuing thinking about white supremacy. It was about white supremacy, and that white supremacy we see still continuing here with Trump and the administration. So, what I saw there then opened my eyes and gave me the knowledge for doing the work, then I continue here.
Debbie Millman:
How do you feel that performance art is a response to capitalism?
Karen Finley:
Because of the object, so that in the art market, when you’re making the art and you look at museums and who’s on the board, and I think there’s been much happening about that in terms of within the Whitney museums all the time on boards, the Sacklers. We can give many examples. And that relationship between the art market and the money put into these objects as a place of holding the money, holding the economy. When you don’t have the object, but yet it’s an art and it’s an experience, and you can’t then be bought or collected in that same way, it’s subverting a system, it’s subverting the art market. That system is definitely developed in terms of capitalism because of the prices, so that the prices determine the value and the worthiness of what that artwork is.
Karen Finley:
So, in performance, you’re subverting that object, you’re fragmenting it. It’s like a rebellion. That was something that was important to me of coming from the background that I do, from a working class. And that’s the reason why I have such a strong belief in terms of public funding for the arts, so that the arts aren’t just funded by those who have money, and that there can be art making and art appreciation that isn’t solely dependent on inherited wealth or a certain profit or a marketability. That market is there, but it’s not the only market.
Debbie Millman:
You moved to New York City in 1983 and began working in clubs like Danceteria, performing at venues, including P.S. 122, which is now Performance Space New York, Franklin Furnace, how did you get your first gigs?
Karen Finley:
Well, for free. It’s all about who you know and friends and doing things, right? So, I think in New York, there are non… that’s why I came to New York, because there isn’t economy of the arts, so, I am part of that economy, which is the nonprofit economy, because we have a strong state support system for supporting the arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts. The New York City supports the arts, and that’s why I live in this state. I’m very proud to live here and the way how the arts are supported. So, some of them were nonprofit spaces, but then many New Yorkers, young people were coming into New York and it was just post the collapse of New York City with the bankruptcy. So, you could find buildings for nothing. There’s been so much written about that.
Karen Finley:
And so, people would get storefronts or get places, and you would just do a show. If you had four people come, you’re happy. 14 people would come to it, that was a success. So, that’s the way how it happened. We were excited to do things, this is before Facebook. You would make a little poster, you would invite a few friends and you would do it in your living room, you’d do it on a street, and it was a lot of fun. And it’s still a lot of fun to put on a show, it’s still a lot of fun to be around people, making art together, and to be part of a community.
Debbie Millman:
You wrote and performed I’m an Ass Man in 1984. The title piece was performed in a man voice about to rape a woman on the subway. Another piece is titled Mr. Hirsch, and you performed it in the voice of a small girl who was forced to perform oral sex on her friend’s father. One of your most famous pieces from that time is titled Yams Up My Granny’s Ass, which you performed in the voice of a drug addict who celebrates Thanksgiving by abusing his grandmother. And you did this while dumping candy yams over your naked backside. One of the things that I’ve always wanted to ask you, Karen, is, you seem to be really comfortable in your own skin, whether it be stripping or doing burlesque through college, or performing with your body in some type of nudity. Have you ever felt insecure about being so physically vulnerable in this way?
Karen Finley:
I think that I would feel vulnerable about it now, because at that time, you have to be looking at my body, my whiteness, my femme presentation of my gender, the way that I presented myself, my body was the prized possession in terms of male desire, right? And so, in that way, that’s what I was doing. That’s what I was presenting within that space. So, I hear what you’re saying, and so, that is a very, very interesting question. I’m going to think about that further. It’s also interesting to be thinking about the woman’s body then at my age, in that representation. But I think that my work really wasn’t necessarily about completely nudity, and I have to think about it, it was about at that time of me claiming.
Karen Finley:
And I think at my age, and events that had happened to me, and just being… This is before Me Too movement, it was my form of Me Too. It was my way to articulate so many times and so many times for my, when I say sisters, not being able to have that space. And so, I wanted to take that on.
Debbie Millman:
In 1986, Cynthia Carr wrote a cover story about you for the Village Voice, and it was titled Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts: The Taboo Art of Karen Finley, wherein she stated this about you, “Finley performs on the club circuit, wafting on to the stage in her polyester good-girl getup at 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning to wail like some degenerate apparition about incest, priests’ assholes, the cum on the bedpost, bulimics upchucking in their stilettos. The fuck-and-shit vocabulary draw shrieks, backtalk, occasional hysteria from the rowdy drunk crowds. Her monologues are obscenity in its purest form, never just a litany of four-letter expletives, but an attempt to express emotions for which there are perhaps no words. An attempt to approach the unspeakable.”
Debbie Millman:
The article changed your life, changed the trajectory of your work and your awareness. Before we talk about Pete Hamill’s response also in the Village Voice, how did you feel about what Cynthia wrote?
Karen Finley:
I was very moved. I felt understood. I felt very, very privileged for the fact that at this time in history, that there would be a woman writer who would be able to speak about my work. And I knew that this was something that was very new, and that she had women editors. I felt like I had a responsibility with the work I was doing, and so, it was an honor and also to be able to speak to her. And I became friends with Cynthia.
Debbie Millman:
She has a remarkable book of essays that includes the piece that she wrote about you in the Village Voice. It’s very difficult to find online, but it is available in her book.
Karen Finley:
And she also then did the biography on David Wojnarowicz. We were friends with him together, and so, she’s had a very illustrious career.
Debbie Millman:
I think that one of the most remarkable things that she wrote about your work, which really led me to believe that she totally got what you were trying to do, was she wrote that your work moves beyond rage to the trigger for that rage. Would you say that that’s accurate?
Karen Finley:
I think that’s very powerful and transformative. I mean, that’s what I’m trying to get into some spaces like that. Yes. And I think it had something to do with the time when I was doing it as well. I don’t know if that would have that same resonance now, but in that particular time, it resonated.
Debbie Millman:
Pete Hamill, who was also one of the writers and one of the most famous at the time at the Voice, accused Carr of writing a brilliant parody of, one, Bohemian pretentiousness, two, the emptiness of performance art, three, a strain of feminism, and four, the Village Voice itself, rather than a serious, informative, and appreciative piece of journalism. And he asked the readers who were as offended as he was to mail a single yam to the voice editor, Robert Friedman, who would know what to do with it. So, he wrote about you in a way that made it clear he had never seen any of your performances, you never in fact ever put an entire yam up your butt. And that’s followed you around for your entire career. What did you make of his article at the time?
Karen Finley:
It was all overwhelming, if you can imagine, at the Village Voice, and at such a young age, being on the cover and everything. But I think that it continued for several more issues. So, it started a fight and it made it very clear of something that I knew, wasn’t anything surprising, but that he had to offer. Pete Hamill, in fact, Pete Hamill, bless his soul, he just passed away recently, but that they’re supposed to be so liberal, and like, “Oh, we’re supposed to look him.” No, they weren’t that liberal, and they’re misogynist. And I also felt that it was very homophobic too.
Karen Finley:
And the way to get back at me was then to have this certain kind of sexual act of putting the yam, which my performance wasn’t even about that, it was this tinned ass, but he then escalated this performance to fit a certain kind of a sexual act that then would be in a way of ridicule, or to demean, or to shame, or to undermine, or to neutralize anything that I was doing. But more so, it was an attack to Cynthia Carr, and then to her editor. So, it was very misogynistic, it was very hateful. But she continued on and that it was the beginning. When you have friends like that, who needs enemies? And so, that’s what it was, they’re supposed to be so liberal, and they’re supposed to be so incredible. And Pete Hamill actually, I went out with Jackie, and all these things going on. As Joe Biden says, “Shut up.”
Karen Finley:
I just look at him to be kind of… I mean, I know he had these books and everything, and all these things they did, and Norman Mailer and all of them, but I was anti that entire canon of journalists and artists because actually it was a projection. They’re the ones that are so pretentious.
Debbie Millman:
Why were people projecting their fears and anxieties onto you in that way?
Karen Finley:
Well, I was in analysis for 20 years, trying to figure that out. Projection, no, it was a projection onto me, and because, I think that, as Cynthia said, since I refused to, at that age, just to be the ingenue, that I refused to stay within a certain code of feminine persuasion or female representation. And I think that I evoked fear of the fear of the female, because there was a great deal of fear in the female and that there was some triggering that happened in that in terms of my own empowerment.
Debbie Millman:
Well, I think that I asked you about if you felt scared or vulnerable, and it just occurred to me as you were saying this, was that I think that you were making many in the audience feels scared or vulnerable. The people that were bothered by your work, I think it gave them that sense of being out of control. The people that were excited about your work, I think felt empowered by it.
Karen Finley:
I think that those are very interesting questions or observations, Debbie, of what you’re saying about with fear, or even going back to earlier questions about this idea of, “Were you ever afraid?” Well, of course, I’m afraid all the time. A woman is afraid in every elevator, every alley, every time she opens up a door, goes into her car, goes in our own house, her room, her job, you’re afraid but you live with that fear. So, when you asked that question, “Were you afraid? Do you have fear?” It’s like, how much fear? That you continue. But the situation is that with that fear that I carry with me daily, the artwork or the creativity becomes like your magic cape that you have with you while you’re going through this cruel world.
Debbie Millman:
In December of 1986, your solo performance, The Constant State of Desire, premiered at The Kitchen in New York City, and you won a Bessie Award for that work. And you follow that with performing We Keep Our Victims Ready, which was influenced by news reports of Tawana Brawley, a 15-year-old girl at the time who was raped and found smeared with excrement in a garbage bag. And in your performance, which I saw at Lincoln Center, you covered your naked body in chocolate, and then covered yourself with tinsel. Why tinsel?
Karen Finley:
Because after the woman is treated like shit, and then I had other things, then I think I had candy hearts on me, then, “You’re loved.” And then I had also like alfalfa sprouts, then it looked like sperm, you’re kind of like jerked off over. And then still you get up and you need to get dressed for dinner. And so, that silver is really about that. You get dressed for dinner. I’m sorry that if my performances would ever make people feeling… I live with the discomfort. I wouldn’t ever want to be having people feeling fearful in my work, but it is a space of testimony, that ritual then became kind of like an embodiment of a psychic practice where there aren’t words for.
Debbie Millman:
The piece drew the attention of quite a few people. Senator Jesse Helms, he claimed the work was offensive. And in 1990, you became known as one of the NEA Four, four performance artists whose national endowment of the arts grants were declined after the criticism by Helms. You took this to court, you won your first court case for reinstatement of the original grant in 1993, but this ended up going all the way to the Supreme Court, and you lost the appeal in the Supreme Court. As a result, the government was legally allowed to withhold funding if standards of decency were violated in art. And this attempt by Washington to censor the arts has forever changed the structure of public funding in the United States. Karen, is this still the current law in the United States?
Karen Finley:
Yes, it is, and it becomes a precedent to consider what the government can declare as being indecent in order not to fund it. So, that could be in healthcare, that could be in terms of books, abortion, healthcare, that’s why it’s so important, the case. So, it became a precedent. Yes.
Debbie Millman:
Yes.
Karen Finley:
And I don’t think that NEA has ever become restored since then.
Debbie Millman:
What’s truly tragic, and again, similar to the way that Pete Hamill analyzed your work without obviously having even seen it, the piece is not sexual at all. As I said, I saw the piece in Lincoln Center, it’s a show of tremendous compassion, tremendous pathos. You’ve described it as the mortification of the body by a psychically battered character whose self-image is so damaged that she thinks of herself as nothing more than excrement. I think it’s one of the most important pieces of the time, and it is truly a disservice to humanity that this went all the way to the Supreme Court and then ultimately was lost. How do you make sense of that in your own life and in your own head?
Karen Finley:
There’s different levels to making sense of it, and there is no not making sense of it. It’s law. And I think everyone gets so excited about Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but she voted against the NEA. There’s only one person who voted for the case.
Debbie Millman:
Was that David Souter?
Karen Finley:
Yes. Is there a lot of different levels to it? I mean, the first level I’m going to look on a larger level is that I did… at that time, I had that idealism and I felt that it was my responsibility to go forward with the lawsuit and with the other three artists, because the other three artists were gay and lesbian artists, and that I think that that is what was behind this, is that to demonize and criminalize art by feminists, but by queer artists. That’s what I think that this was about, and it was within that, and that’s what the culture wars were primarily about too. And sometimes you win by losing because since that loss, there was a rejuvenation in that there has been progress that has been made in terms of gender rights.
Karen Finley:
And so, although we lost, I feel that there were gains that the conversation started in society. So, I’m very, very happy about that, I’m pleased about that, that it’s happened, or is happening to some extent. But in terms of within my life, I feel that this is very important to say first is, I feel that I was very privileged to be censored. And what do I mean by that? Because I was in a position in society at that time as a white woman with a certain presentation of, within my body, that I would be considered that what I am saying would be that damaging or has that potential. And with that, there are many, many voices that people do not even get censored or they don’t even get heard.
Karen Finley:
My way of looking at it now is in a different way. I feel that I really kind of participated with my whiteness in the fact that the selection of may is the idea of putting it on the pedestal, there’s this preservation to the idea of preserving the white kind of strip, this female kind of version of whatever it is. So, I was used and I was used within that kind of situation. And I also feel that I was part of a movement of many boomers who went into areas, neighborhoods such as the East Village, and gentrified these neighborhoods, and then basically built on neighborhoods mostly of color. And then I speak casually about the art market, but I did profit from it.
Karen Finley:
I mean, there has to be some accountability to it, is that I have profited, I am in an art market. It might not be an art market in the millions, but there is, whether it’s a celebrity or profile, or that the work that I was doing would have a value that to a point where President Bush would have to have power breakfast to discuss my work, or that Jesse Helms would have to be discussing my work. So, that’s where I’ve changed in looking back in this experience.
Debbie Millman:
At the time though, it affected your career. I know that the Whitney Museum of Art canceled one of your shows, people were scared about what it meant to work with you, but you never, ever dulled down your work. You never changed your approach. Was it ever something that you considered? Were you ever rethinking how you might work? Was there anything that you felt like doing but felt it might be too much of a taboo?
Karen Finley:
I was sad, I was bitter, I didn’t know where I was going to work. I was very lucky, I was working in California, and I realized that I didn’t think that my future, my personality to go into the Hollywood way. I just thought that I would go into education, I wanted to continue making work, and then I had to go, as I said earlier, back into the joy of making art. I realized that I had accomplished one step, and just to continue making the art, and in some ways, taking out those opportunities that were based on a validation on institutional acceptance really is what my work was never about. So, I mean, it took me a little bit of time, but I’m not Frank Stella, I’m just not one of these artists where I’m churning it out and it’s the same thing going on.
Karen Finley:
And so, I continued making art in many different ways, and I started making art maybe even in some quieter ways, but I have never really gotten back into any grants. I have some support, I’ve received a lot of support, and lots of support is I’ve had so many friends, I’ve had families, teachers, that’s why I love being a teacher. So, it was a spiritual shift for me, and it’s actually brought me great joy, and I feel that my artwork actually has gone to other levels or capacity. I’ve been able to expand on my practice.
Debbie Millman:
You began teaching at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, and are now a professor there teaching art and politics. Does teaching impact your art practice?
Karen Finley:
I love it. I love teaching. I know that you are a professor, you’re working. I love my students. And I do use the word love, it’s something that… I love the faculty, I love being in an environment, and that’s also another environment that I think that there has been with the Trump administration of this anti-intellectualism. So, I feel that being an intellectual and participating in knowledge development, and research, and the arts, and innovation, and experimentation, and writing, and reading, and literacy, is my spiritual mission and part of my life as important as it is to brushing my teeth. So, I think that if any A’s didn’t happen, I don’t think I would have gone into teaching.
Debbie Millman:
How come?
Karen Finley:
Because I would have continued with this monetarily. I was living off of my work, I would have become more, I would say narcissistic, but just all about me, me, me, and I’ve learned a lot and I’ve developed. And so, I feel very grateful for this opportunity.
Debbie Millman:
You’ve been working on performance art, sculpture, you’ve been continuously mounting exhibitions all over the world over the past two decades, and I’d love to talk to you about several newer works. One in particular that I really loved, in 2013, the New Museum in New York City presented your show, Sext Me if You Can, which was a personal performance that took place in the public lobby of the museum, and the exhibit blurred the lines between art and commerce, and popular culture, and private behavior, taboos and sexuality, and allowed participants in the show, or participants at the museum to purchase a drawing that you created of a photographic image that they sexted to you from a private room in the museum. What was that like for you?
Karen Finley:
Oh, it was a lot of fun. It was wonderful.
Debbie Millman:
I guess you saw a lot of different kinds of photography.
Karen Finley:
It’s a wonderful project, I still was doing it this past year in Los Angeles, and I have done this project all over the world. I’ve done it in Serbia, I’ve done it in Croatia, I’ve done it in Australia. It is a project that I started because of the shaming towards sexting, and in particular with high school students, or there was that horrible shaming of a high school, no, actually, he was is a college student, and he had a webcam up and he was having sex, then he went and he committed suicide. The work is really grounded in removing the shaming towards sexual acts, or sexuality, or being found out in the secrecy. And so, that’s what the work is about.
Karen Finley:
So, in this exhibition or in this process, people suck exhibit, but sometimes they’re not, it’s about intimacy. It’s about seeing and witnessing. It’s for me looking at them without any judge, with acceptance. And then I representing those images or words into an artwork as a sacred space in this oval. And so, that’s what the piece is about. It was fun because people, when they’re doing it, they’re happy. And so, I really enjoy looking at the human body, and I enjoy life drawing. That’s what I was trained as an artist to do.
Debbie Millman:
Full disclosure, not all the texts were photographic sexts. Karen, I actually participated in the endeavor as one of the patrons.
Karen Finley:
Oh, whoa, that’s so nice. Oh, I’m so glad. I wish you could show me which one it was.
Debbie Millman:
I’m going to.
Karen Finley:
Oh, God, I love that. Oh, whoa.
Debbie Millman:
Listeners, I’m sorry that you’re not able to see it. I will post a picture of this with the podcast. So, yeah, I went into the room, I didn’t want to do a sext because that’s not why I was there, I was there really to have an engagement with you as a fan. And so, I texted you a photograph of my face with my eyes closed, which I think at the time for me, in 2013, was really still a time when I was just managing a lot of my own shame about my childhood and my background, and you drew me quite accurately without having any other correspondence other than these texts, you drew me with three mouths, and I felt like you understood just magically that I sometimes felt like I had a lot to say, and wanted to say a lot of things, but was too afraid to, which I’ve since really dealt with in my life quite a lot. At the time, I wasn’t able to, and it was just really an incredible experience. So, I just wanted to share that with you.
Karen Finley:
Oh, that is one of the most beautiful things to hear because, oh, how beautiful, how gentle. The experiences were to be gentle experience because they were counters because sexting or in sexuality or in intimacy, that is also a part about it too, right? In that moment I’m seeing. And the intimacy, oh, that is so beautiful. And it’s interesting because yesterday, I was doing some artwork and I was actually looking at some of those colors and thinking about it, and meditating on those colors that are in your painting. So, can I look at that again?
Debbie Millman:
Sure.
Karen Finley:
I was looking at the steel gray, and then also within to see, because there’s like a grayness in that, and I was spending time with that last night and thinking about that, and the power within the grayness.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, this is one of my prized possessions.
Karen Finley:
Oh, I’m so glad. That’s so nice.
Debbie Millman:
I also want to talk to you about your latest book, which is called Grabbing Pussy. It’s an experimental book, it contains letters, prose, poetry, even word games. And I understand you started it before the 2016 election as you were investigating neo-liberalism, police brutality, Black Lives Matter, and society’s response to whiteness, which dovetails into what you were saying about your own experience back in the ’90s with your whiteness. You’ve said that Grabbing Pussy is about action and about physical assault, and I’m wondering if you can elaborate and talk a little bit about in what way it is about action and physical assault.
Karen Finley:
Well, the book began when I was exploring the spaces of gratitude or women’s response to apologies, gratitude, and that submissiveness and that expectation. So, that’s what I was interested in, and looking at the imaginary being because of unicorns or mythologies of whiteness in imaginary beings. And I was starting in looking at the genital election and what was happening with Hillary, Bill, that just all of these traumas and events, and then with Trump, and the assault with language, and even everything about the mail, the deleted mail, the deleted email. I don’t feel that she ever really handled that, seeing that scene of, with the debates, and Trump just behind her and her body, and still that’s so traumatic.
Karen Finley:
So, it’s taking the words, the language of this era that we’re still in and examining it analytically and also experimentally, and the vulgarity of these times.
Debbie Millman:
Karen, I’m wondering if you would be willing to read a piece from Grabbing Pussy, a piece of your choice.
Karen Finley:
I’m just going to read a couple of just short pieces here. Okay?
Debbie Millman:
Okay.
Karen Finley:
So, the first one here is Toilet Training. “What a disaster, a disaster, a disassturd, toilet training resistance, potty mouth, potty training, too early, too late, stool holder. Can’t help it. The pee and poop belong to you, not us. Power struggle. You have the poop now. Mommy said, ‘I knew you could do better.’ Had to run bare bottom, remove the impacted hard, release constipation, dismantle the power struggle, stool softer, rectal signals. You can’t watch TV until you have a Twitter. Tweet hand, tweet and squeeze hard for mommy. Push that tweet, hold that tweet for mommy, can’t control his feeder. No potty prodigy. Dumb shit, dumb tweet.
Karen Finley:
“I had a poop accident, conflict, poop conflict, parental diarrhea, coffee enema. Gosh, can’t control the sphincter, can’t control the ass. Child has no control over his own bowels. This is some crazy ass shit, Trump. That’s how this rump rolls, what a dump. This White House is such a dump. Pussy speak out, men pay attention, when we say no, we mean no. We do not push your body on any of us. Rape violation, assaults, hotel sex crimes, hitting kept secret harassment, assault disguised as job interview. 30 years of abuse? Try 3,000 years, over 90 accusations, just one Harvey. Every woman doesn’t expect this to happen in her lifetime, but it happens to every single woman repeatedly, guaranteed, intergenerationally, spoken between women, mothers to daughters, to granddaughters, amongst friends.
Karen Finley:
“We are taught how to use your body at times to feign interest till you get to safety, a pause in his release. How to disembody, disassociate as you are raped, taught to forget, yet remember and hold the pain, and fear, the shame. Hating your body, yet the desire is abjection. Held as object, trained and groomed, “Grab them by the pussy,” a president’s war cry, whether Bill, or some other friendly neoliberal, or some other conservative cock. It’s like eating a chicken sandwich takeout, power of pussy. Harvey handlers and enablers to keep your jobs and forcing silence for another slobbering box of popcorn for some other film, probably made and directed by a man, where a man gets girl turning down the shades to get to the script, appearing naked.
Karen Finley:
“Coaxing young women to overpower intimate grabbed encounters, massage explicit messages with oil and motion, it never stops with a back rub. Keep me safe, manipulation, fearing retaliation, embarrassment, pain, rape, sob, being Jean, sobbing, distraught, locked in a van, in a room, job, a desk, an office, a car. Get the pillow to his room, bathroom, disturbed, angry, take me out of here, let me go, no, no, no, no, no, passing out here. You are here, help me, I. Together we stand band together in solidarity, women unite. ‘Oh, hello, young beauty, here is your predator.’ When powerful male producer known as the Hollywood system, a systemic industry thin and full of Botox and cleavage to force his hairy self.
Karen Finley:
“You are perfect for the upcoming role, a ragdoll for Harvey. No one stopped him, no one from the company, no one from the board, never stopped. Too much money to be made, not too bad, put up with it. Sign a non-disclosure clause while it’s getting money to a liberal cause. Mr. Weinstein, known for outbursts, tirades, explosions, private and public pounding, but it was the particular female that he enjoyed the most, and gave her this most personal self, hurting the most vulnerable young woman, a female who wanted, who had ambition, who desired to work, had talent. He was brutal and shaming and punishing this woman of her desire to be an actress, to work in the field.
Karen Finley:
“Written off is just another form of toxicity, coercive bargaining to keep quiet, maybe a chance at a script for the hopeful actress meeting with the God, his devil, might generate a deal, an opportunity, a chance to be part of what you had trained for. But first, you had to do Harvey, penetrated, suck, let eaten. It was never your choice. The pain is so bad to keep your soul from slipping as you clutch to whatever dream you can salvage in this nightmare, as he enters, as you cry out, Harvey ejaculates, feeling her fear, that then transforms his power to prove he is a man, he’s in charge, takes her power.
Karen Finley:
“He has the plan, ‘I will force myself, eat you and you eat me, for it’s a doggy dog world. I’m so ugly, so ugly, but you’ll eat this ugly, where I’m at down your throat. You won’t have anything like me. There’s no way out. There’s only a way in. I despise women, I hate women for I want them, and I’m so ugly that I can only force myself on them for fear of rejection. They only want one thing, they are actress whores, and all this to make a moving image, where we all sit in a darkened theater, together in the dark, left alone, survivors, left in the dark. Oh, that’s entertainment.’
Karen Finley:
“It’s not just the ravishing actress on stage or screen, for it’s in all walks of life and career. A woman poses a risk to herself, her body is dangerous, a potential target of attack. She presents by her presence at all times everywhere and anywhere. The male has the dominion to punish and beat and violate a passionate, uncontrollable rage. Her body pushes him to the edge. He is built that way. He can’t help himself, that’s how men are. ‘We know your life, your body has value, women. You speak truth. You aren’t lying. You aren’t bringing this on. You didn’t dress this way, you weren’t expecting this.’ Wherever you work and live, whatever you do, whoever you are, women unite. We won’t stand to be raped, groped, abused, mocked, and violated.
Karen Finley:
“Women, girls, females, identified trans people deserve to be treated with dignity. Your body is yours. Respect our body. This body is mine, it is not here for you. The time has come for female empowerment. We won’t be ridiculed, and our bodies occupied for your benefit. No more codes of silence. No more codes of silence. No more silence. Pussy, speak out.”
Debbie Millman:
Karen, thank you so much for bringing so much truth to the world, and thank you so much for joining me today on Design Matters.
Karen Finley:
It was really a beautiful conversation for me, and thank you for this opportunity. And I wish you health and safety during this time with COVID and have a good rest of this year till we get to the next administration.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, January 21st.
Karen Finley:
Okay.
Debbie Millman:
To see Karen Finley’s work, you can follow her on Instagram @the_yam_mam, or on Twitter @kfinleyartist. This is the 16th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we could make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.