At 62 years old, artistic provocateur Karen Finley has worn many outfits over her storied lifetime. Most recently she’s donned a red Make America Great Again baseball cap, as well as a frumpy, untailored blue suit, a billowy blue cotton dress with a headscarf, and a white power suit topped with a blond wig, variously impersonating Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump and Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress.
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No one knows provocative quite like Karen Finley. The artist’s politically charged writing and performances have brought her both admiration and notoriety since the early 1980s. Her ninth and most recent book, Grabbing Pussy, is an outrage-driven, anger-filled, yet often satirical examination of the psychosexual obsessions of men in power. Bill Clinton, Anthony Weiner, Harvey Weinstein and, of course, President Donald Trump all get the Finley treatment.
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Where is Yams Up My Grannie’s Ass? When Maggie Nelson mentioned Karen Finley’s 1986 performance piece in Art of Cruelty, I plunged into internet research. Yams is nowhere on Google. As a millennial, it has taken a while for me to realize that not everything is compatible and available in digital format, particularly performance art. When I saw Finley on ISSUE Project Room’s calendar, I pushed the keyboard aside, eager to witness the salaciousness off-screen.
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In Grabbing Pussy (OR Books), performance artist and professor Karen Finley achieves the unthinkable: out of America’s unstoppable news cycle and its disturbing undercurrents of psychosexually charged politics, she forges poetry with a punk sensibility (plus, a dash of unfiltered raunchiness, in keeping with the times), skewering Donald Trump, the Clintons, Harvey Weinstein, and Anthony Weiner in the process.
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The controversial performance artist and social commentator indulges in a Trump-bashing frenzy.
Finley (The Reality Shows, 2011, etc.) finds her ultimate target in the current president. This amalgam of creative prose and freestyle poetry floods vitriol on the words and actions of Trump. Like in some of her previous works—e.g. George and Martha, her burlesque of a love affair between George Bush and Martha Stewart—the author attempts to transmogrify a bottomless liberal rage into moving, provocative, and occasionally hilarious art..
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One of the most exciting and important voices to emerge from the 1980s-90s American performance art movement, Karen Finley might be regarded as one of the country’s most noted censored artists.
As one of the four 1990 NEA grant recipients whose funding was revoked at the insistence of a faction led by North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms – whose description of her performance piece “We Keep Our Victims Ready” reduced it to the action of a naked Finley smearing chocolate sauce over her body, ignoring the literary content of her monologue about smothering patriarchy the symbolic gesture was a part of – Finley’s name will forever be associated with a United States Supreme Court case that not only prompted discussions of the definition of art, but of the definition of decency.
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A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I went to see Karen Finley’s show, Grabbing Pussy (based on her new book, coincidentally published by a company partially owned by a friend). If you have never seen Karen, one of the most famous performance artists ever, you really should. Her shows, which focus on political and social issues, are always thought provoking. She makes connections and observations that are truly astounding. Watching her shows is like trying to drink from a fire hose–her words and ideas come at you in torrents, you can’t take it all in, but what you are able to digest is pretty incredible.
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This may sound weird but you kind of need to read this book out loud.
Karen Finley, its author, is of course most famous as a mesmerizingly boundary-smashing performance artist; throughout her written body of work, the purring and percussive performative voice remains very much in evidence even on the page. All the more so in this case because the contents of Grabbing Pussy are essentially the libretto from Finley’s 2017 stage work, the multi-act one-woman political mad scene Unicorn Gratitude Mystery.
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Performance Artist and poet, Karen Finley, creates for an adult audience and speaks up for those that are silenced or victimised. Her latest book, Grabbing Pussy, based on a performance piece, Unicorn Gratitude Mystery, combines Language and Beat poetry in a bravura display employing the deeply limited and limiting sexual vocabulary of recent American political discourse.
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