Artist Relies on Shock Therapy to Send Message

SAN DIEGO —  Don’t get the wrong idea from titles such as “The Cervix Banger” or “Yams”--the latter a show in which performance artist Karen Finley smeared liverwurst, ice cream and canned yams all over her body during a monologue about a grandmother being abused by her grandson.

The media, Finley says, play up the shock value of her work because it makes a good read; such elements are actually just a small fraction of what she does and are usually there to make emotional or political points.

Take her show at Sushi Performance Gallery’s 10th anniversary season opener, Wednesday through Sunday. Finley will present a world premiere of a work-in-progress called “We Keep Our Victims Ready,” in which the subject matter is rape, incest, AIDS, pregnancy, alcoholism, censorship and the landmark Roe vs. Wade abortion case.

She doesn’t mind if people come to the show because they expect her to do something outrageous. The important thing is that they come, Finley said by phone from San Francisco, where her paintings are on exhibit.

Because, once they are there, she believes, they may learn something.

“I talk about how bad things happen to good people,” Finley said. “In Christianity, people believe if you’re good, bad things don’t happen to you. So they feel guilty when bad things happen, as if they’ve done something wrong.

“I’m trying to examine the classes of people--women--who are put in the position of being victims from the moment they are born.”

Only a small number of her horror stories are autobiographical, Finley said. The rest can be credited to empathy. But empathy exacts a price.

“After I perform, I’m shaking. I feel like I’m going to be sick,” she said. “It does wear me down.”

Finley, 33, calls her own family “dysfunctional,” but only in the sense that all families are dysfunctional. “I love my family very much, but whenever you go back to your family, you revert to the position of being a child.”

As one of six children growing up in Evanston, Ill., Finley recalls a warm and nurturing environment in which her parents were “extremely good to me. I was encouraged to take whatever my talent was and do the best I could with it. That was my religious instruction. Contributing to society was my duty.”

Finley, who now lives in New York, remains close to her mother, a vice president of a corporation who comes to see her shows and offers her suggestions on how she might probe more deeply into the psyche of her characters.

One event in her life that Finley prefers not to dwell on is the suicide of her father when she was 21.

“That affected my work,” she acknowledged. “I bottomed out emotionally. The idea of making money or things that are banal lost their importance. What is important now is feeling or connection.”

Finley describes the desire to connect as an end in itself. “I think art is a great form of therapy, and I think everyone should attempt to make art--not just the talented.”

Finley began her own artistic exploration with performance art in high school. In addition to painting and writing, she has performed in movies--in an eight-minute segment in the documentary “Mondo New York” and as a gun-toting art terrorist in “In Between Lives,” which finished filming this summer.

Her second and most recent play, “The Theory of Total Blame,” about a dysfunctional family, will play at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions in November.

At Sushi, where she has performed six times in six years, Finley returns to a familiar and welcoming venue where her performances sold out during her past two visits. She acknowledges some nervousness along with the excitement of debuting the work here.

“It’s like making love with somebody for the first time,” she said.

Finley said she trusts Sushi as a place to try out new work because of Lynn Schuette, Sushi’s executive director, who booked her, in Finley’s words, “years ago, before anybody knew about me.”

Schuette said she was drawn to Finley’s work because of “an honesty and a courage. Karen is not an actress. Even though she is scripted, what she does is very real. The media sensationalize it, but anyone who comes to see her knows she is not here to shock but to take people through something and give them a voice. The way she affects an audience is cathartic.”

Finley also credits Sushi’s continued interest in her work for boosting her confidence during a low point, three years ago, when Pete Hamill--writing in the Village Voice--ravaged her work in “Yams” as offensive

“That almost destroyed me,” she said quietly.

How did she get through it?

“I just continued. I’m very lucky and secure in my own personal life. My husband is very supportive to me,” she said, referring to Michael Overn, who is also her manager. “And I think the Lord works in mysterious ways. People come to see (‘Yams’), and I realized I would have to take that as a challenge. What I’ve had to depend on is that people may come with a sensational expectation, but will end up affected and transcended by what I do.”