1994
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Aug 24, 2015 · Karen Finley. Photo: Dona Ann McAdams. Karen Finley is a performance artist based in New York who has long charted the political underpinnings and trauma of stigma and notoriety through her performances and writings. To mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of its initial publication, City Lights is reissuing Shock Treatment, her provocative ...
Finley arrived in New York, after growing up in a Chicago suburb and art school in San Francisco, in 1984. Since then, in downtown clubs like the Palladium, the Cat Club, and Danceteria, in art spaces like P.S. 122 and the Kitchen, in this archipelago within our city island, she has proposed a performance formula that achieves structural rigor (from her repetition of her texts) but that ...
Karen Finley, force of nature. If you saw her in an ’80s performance club you might have called her that, so powerful was she—but then you’d quickly have felt ridiculous, because it was her particular brilliance to see through any behavioral straitjacket imagined for her, or for women generally, and to dynamite it on the spot.
Before Finley gets to this primal stuff in performance, however, she always shows the audience the real Karen Finley—the picture of vulnerability. The point, again, is to hold nothing back. She will customarily and relentlessly expose her own struggle to perform—telling us at the Pyramid Club, for example, that she was afraid, she was having her period, she’d forgotten a costume, etc.
By Melissa Harris. Mixing futurist aggression, Brechtian political performance strategies, Artaud’s sensualism, and Allen Ginsberg’s hypnotic zeitgeist-attuned chanting, Karen Finley’s work has always elicited impassioned response. Her recent performance, We Keep Our Victims Ready, and her first site-specific installation at Franklin ...
Karen Finley’s installation, Written in Sand, 1992, adopted a subtle and dark strategy which eschewed the emphasis on the sheer number of deaths characteristic of the most publicized tributes to the victims of AIDS.
Finley seems to conjecture that violence begets violence, replacing images of falling bombs with shots of Rice’s eyeballs in a wallpaper mural. Titling the work My Eyes Have Seen the Glory: The Eyes of Condoleezza Rice , 2007, Finley thus also ties Rice’s symbolic significance to a patriotic song and a line from Martin Luther King’s final speech.
A performance artist who honed her act on the club circuit, Karen Finley is the latest late-night skit-maker to move to prime-time alternative performance spaces. Her performance trademark has been ranting monologues, in form not unlike John Giomo’s breath-defined chanting poetry, and in content similar to the “obscene,” taboo-attacking jeremiads of singer-poet Lydia Lunch and writer ...
Karen Finley’s exhibition “St. Kilda” presented an assortment of works that dealt with bereavement and the regressive, helpless condition it can reduce us to. In Written in Sand , 1992–94, a memorial installation first shown at HallWalls in Buffalo, ten tons of damp sand were deposited in a dim, gilded room, and the sand hillocks that formed were topped with flickering white votive ...
Karen Finley Contributor. More. DEMOCRACY. OUR BEATING HEARTS, a project for Artforum. By Karen Finley ...
