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all karen, all the time______
BY CHRISTOPHER HAWTHORNE | Pretend, for the moment, that you've never heard of performance artist Karen Finley. Forget the controversy that erupted in 1990 after congressional conservatives -- eager to remove all the naughty bits from federally funded arts projects -- attacked her work (along with three other artists) as obscene. Forget the naked smear-fests (hello, canned yams!) that raised the ire of those politicians. Forget the fact that the Supreme Court recently agreed to hear her lawsuit against the government, in a March 31 hearing that promises some of the juiciest testimony in the High Court since the People vs. Larry Flynt. Imagine instead that Finley is merely some unknown performance artist. Would there be any compelling reason to pick up the phone and dial 1-900-ALL-KAREN? To shell out $1.75 for the first minute and $1.25 per minute thereafter for the privilege of hearing one of her daily phone-based performance pieces? Not likely. Notoriety, after all, is the engine that drives 1-900-ALL-KAREN: Only an artist with a reputation tethered to controversy could even attempt this sort of project. (1-900-SCHNABEL? 1-900-DBNKORN? Fuhgedaboutit.) Sure, a few art groupies will dial the number to see how Finley is using phone technology to "test genre boundaries," but for the most part, Karen Finley is banking on name recognition -- and hers, though it may not match that of 1-900 veterans O.J. Simpson or the Wu-Tang Clan, is awfully high for an artist. Every day since Feb. 16, Finley has been recording a new message, averaging about 90 seconds in length. (A nonprofit New York arts group called Creative Time and a dozen small museums across the country helped fund and organize the project.) The pieces, which are accessible 24/7 through the middle of August, offer an unfiltered stream of Finleyesque consciousness. While Finley's celebrity alone may set your fingers dialing, what the artist delivers probably won't keep you coming back. The messages have their entertaining and even enlightening bits, but for the most part these free-form ruminations showcase no more than Finley's habitual willingness to go with her first idea. In her stage shows over the last few years, Finley has adopted a conspicuously self-conscious performance style. She interrupts her own monologues to badger people who laugh at the wrong time or try to sneak out before she's finished. She clutches her script onstage and makes a point of rustling through it when her memory begins to falter. While many critics find those tactics grating, others say they're a brilliant way of keeping audiences alert to the political content of her shows. Finley is not sloppy or grumpy, argues Village Voice critic Michael Feingold; rather, in a brilliant mix of Brecht and postmodern feminist theory, she "eschews technique, with its tactics and duplicities." Technique gets eschewed quite a bit in the phone messages, too. When you dial 1-900-ALL-KAREN (that last letter is not strictly necessary: 1-900-ALL-KARE will get you to the same spot), Finley comes on the line and gives a breathy intro, which hints at some of the halting, deliberately blemish-filled material to come. When she promises "a more personal experience with me than ever before," it doesn't sound titillating -- it sounds utterly sarcastic, especially since she quickly interrupts herself to ask, "What the hell does that mean?" Finley then reads a menu of options: "For today's message, press 1." "For yesterday's message, press 2." And my personal favorite, "To order your 1-900-ALL-KAREN baseball cap, press 4." As an experiment in the formal organization of an art piece, 1-900-ALL-KAREN has a certain novelty value: a fresh, choose-your-own-adventure flavor. The messages themselves, though, hold few surprises. Recent topics have included Finley's thoughts on a trip to Berlin; a talky poem that imagines the characters from Winnie the Pooh in an S&M parlor ("the ow! of Pooh," you might call it); and a minute-long piece on police brutality lifted straight from "The American Chestnut," a stage show she's been performing for almost three years. A recent installment, recorded on her 42nd birthday, was typically rudderless, but captured Finley's inclination to make a spectacle of her most banal experiences. To get ready for a piece where she played an old woman with a drinking problem, Finley went out and hit the bottle herself. "Hi, this is Karen," the message began, "and I have to admit, I'm a little drunk right now! Um, today's my birthday, and I've just been out with my friend Virginia, and we went out and we got steak, and it's Friday night, and this is for Saturday, and I just, um, had, um, some pinot grigio, and then I had some red wine, and I'm having a great time!" I have plenty of friends who will leave messages like that on my answering machine for free, and I don't exactly save them for posterity. So what drove Finley to set up shop alongside Dionne Warwick and Girl 6? Though she gets to keep all the profits from the project, her motivation doesn't seem to be money. According to organizers, Finley pockets between 20 cents and a quarter for each call. At the present rate -- about 450 callers per week, each of whom is spending an average of about two minutes connected -- she stands to make about $2,600 for the six-month duration of the project. Hardly a get-rich-quick scheme. And it's not as though Finley has to seek out new media to get her message out. The art establishment loves Karen Finley -- not only has she become something of a martyr for its cause, but her shows sell loads of tickets. A dozen arts organizations jumped on board 1-900-ALL-KAREN, publicizing the project with postcards and matchbooks touting the 900 number. Officials at one of the co-sponsoring museums, San Francisco's Center for the Arts at Yerba Buena Gardens, admitted that they signed on to the project precisely in hopes of convincing Finley to perform on their stage during her next tour. In the end, the whole project looks like an ambitious lark. It's not hard to guess how the remaining months at 1-900-ALL-KAREN will unfold: Some days Finley will get inspired and deliver a rousing sermon on the twisted state of American society; others she'll get just get loaded and ramble, or lift a passage from one of her old shows. She'll have her fun, get some publicity and make enough money to pay off a few of those steak-and-pinot grigio dinners. And when August rolls around, Finley will turn the 1-900 business back over to psychics, phone-sex operators and bankrupt celebrities, in no hurry to return.
Christopher Hawthorne is a writer and editor in Berkeley. |
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