Karen Finley smears Bush all over

The notorious performance artist talks about censorship, where Bush will go after he dies, and her new work "George and Martha," in which Martha Stewart has a tryst with W. and finds Osama hiding in his colon.

By David Bowman

Read more: Books, Martha Stewart, David Bowman, Interviews, Performance Art, Authors, Books Interviews

April 22, 2006 | When I was a younger man, I once remarked to Barnard professor of philosophy Mary Mothersill that a girl I was dating was "sublime."

"Flesh-and-blood women can never be sublime," I remember her scolding. "Not even girls you meet at CBGBs. To find a sublime woman, we must go to the classic tragedies of Racine such as Phaedra and Iphigenia." Ah, those old tropes about hysterical women, incest and slaughter. Mothersill was probably right in theory, but then she had never seen Karen Finley perform.

Finley is sublime. Finley is terrifying the way Rainer Maria Rilke writes "every angel is terrifying." For 25 years, she has been performing -- usually beginning or ending up naked onstage, hollering a self-penned blue tirade dotted with scatological grunts, a verbal eruption given while Finley smears her naked self with chocolate syrup or other foodstuffs, such as the mashed yams she once stuffed in the cleft of her buttocks while mooning the audience ("Yams Up My Granny's Ass"). (For the brave, other foods smeared on, in or across her naked body include ice cream sandwiches/kidney beans ("Mr. Hirsh"); chocolate syrup ("A Different Kind of Intimacy" and "Return of the Chocolate Smeared Woman"); and honey ("Shut Up & Love Me"). She has also painted invisible black velvet paintings using her breast milk as the artistic medium.)

The narrative premise behind her tantrums is usually political. (The chocolate represents the feces that white cops were accused -- falsely -- of smearing on Tawana Brawley.) As a writer, she modulates between brilliance and simple insipidity. The vignettes in her Obie Award-winning "The American Chestnut" are incisive and biting, but also sometimes beautiful in their simplicity:

"When Nicky got to the party, her grandmother was blowing out the candles. Then Lilly stood up to make a speech. We have something else to celebrate tonight. The American chestnut has bloomed for the first time in over 75 years! You see, the American chestnut was once the most common tree in America. But a blight wiped out nearly every tree ... The disease caused the tree to never mature, but to continually send up new shoots, trying to survive ... Later at the party, Mr. Dove, Beatrice, and Lilly and other people stood around the tree ... Nicky could hear the conversation. 'Sometimes if you keep trying you just might bloom, even at our age.' Beatrice, Mr. Dove, and Lilly laughed. A warm wind swept through the tree and made beautiful sound."

Then there is Finley's newest piece, "George and Martha" -- first a play, now a novelette from Verso. During an illicit tryst with President Bush during the 2004 Republican Convention, lover Martha Stewart discovers that Osama bin Laden is literally hiding inside the president's ... rectum: "Martha, why don't you stop using my colon for comparison shopping?" Bush says. "The problem with you liberal types is that I have bin Laden up my ass and you're asking why. Honey, my ass is Central Intelligence so let's keep the whys out of it."

Try as I may, I cannot find chestnuts in Finley's dialogue about Bush's asshole. I can, however, imagine being Finley, performing on the brink of rationality, never forgetting my family history -- my bipolar Illinois dad who blew his brains out in the family garage (laying his head on a piece of cardboard to minimize the mess). The clinical depression and schizophrenia on mom's side of the tree. Finley is a woman who puts her entirety at risk with each dab of yam or squirt of chocolate.

Unfortunately, back in the early 1990s, Jesse Helms (now officially afflicted with dementia and living in a convalescent facility near his Raleigh, N.C., home) didn't see it that way. He led the charge against the National Endowment for the Arts and its funding of "indecent" artists, such as Karen "Yams" Finley. She became the poster girl for the First Amendment. The eventual trial went all the way to the Supreme Court. Finley lost. Uncle Sam would no longer pay for her grocery list of yams, ice cream sandwiches, kidney beans, chocolate syrup and honey.

You might ask, "And why should he?"

After talking with Finley you realize that the money isn't the point. The point is the legal endorsement that government money gave. Museums and theaters that receive grants or other public or corporate funding could show "dangerous" art like Finley's plays without worrying about being harassed by the police for indecency -- after all, public decency crusader Anthony Comstock had been dead since 1915. Now everything was different. In Finley's case, the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Francisco even returned one of her sculptures from its permanent collection. Before the Supreme Court ruling, the piece was art. Now, it was just potential trouble.

Back in 1998, Finley responded to the Supreme Court ruling by posing nude in the July issue of Playboy. Feminist supporters saw Finley's cheesecake as a travesty, but her centerfold dabbling emphasized an important point -- not about the First Amendment but about theatrical aesthetics. If you've ever seen Finley naked, you know that the woman sure has nice tits. Her butt isn't bad either. I don't believe anyone has expressed those obvious sentiments in print before. I do so now because I can imagine male performance artists like Britain's Kipper Kids standing onstage in their jock straps and beer bellies smearing yams upon their privates. That would be grotesque and possibly comic, but certainly not sublime. Although Finley uses her performance art to attack bad politics while exploring the perimeters of sanity, her own physical beauty allows these acts to be either entertainment or questionable art.

On a mythological level, the post-Supreme Court Karen Finley has transformed from a sublime Rilke angel to a prototype of Walter Benjamin's Angel of History -- Finley is the angel being blown backward to the future by a wind from heaven. Where we perceive a chain of events, she just sees one single theatrical catastrophe that keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage at her feet. She would like to stop moving and awaken the dead. Make whole what has been smashed. But there is that storm blowing her backward from paradise. Benjamin says this storm is what we call "progress." For Finley, her storm is what we call the Republican Party.

I interviewed this spent angel at her publisher's office. She was dressed tastefully, but she was dressed in all black.

Let's begin with your book "George and Martha." I've only seen Martha Stewart once on TV and she was demonstrating flower arrangement. I've worked as a florist -- what she was suggesting was complete nonsense. Did you spend any time watching her show?

Maybe it was on for a fleeting moment or two. What I am aware of is this nation's captive attention to her -- people putting her on a pedestal, making her a national personality. That's what intrigued me -- what motivates her to put so much involvement with the domestic arena in the public arena.

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