Karen Finley (b. 1956, Chicago, Illinois) is an American performance artist, whose theatrical pieces and recordings have often been labelled "obscene" due to their graphic depictions of sexuality, abuse, and disenfranchisement. She was notably one of the NEA Four, four performance artists whose grants from the National Endowment for the Arts were vetoed in 1990 by John Frohnmayer after the process was condemned by Senator Jesse Helms under "decency" issues.
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Having received an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, Finley procured her first NEA grant and moved to New York City. She quickly became part of the city's art scene, collaborating with artists such as the Kipper Kids (Brian Routh — whom she married/divorced — and Martin von Haselberg) and David Wojnarowicz.
Finley's early recordings featured her ranting provocative monologues over disco beats (and she would often perform her songs late night at the famed club Danceteria, where she worked). These recordings include the singles "Tales of Taboo" from 1986 and "Lick It" from 1988 (both produced by Madonna collaborator Mark Kamins) plus the 1988 album, The Truth Is Hard To Swallow (re-released on CD, with a slightly different track listing, as Fear Of Living in 1994; in conjunction with the re-release, both "Tales Of Taboo" and "Lick It" appeared on 12-inch again with new remixes by Super DJ Dmitri, Junior Vasquez, and other DJs of note). She collaborated with Sinéad O'Connor on "Jump in the River," and was prominently sampled by S'Express on the classic dance floor cut-up, "Theme from S'Express" (her "Drop that ghetto blaster/suck me off" vocal - sampled from "Tales of Taboo" - formed something of a chorus in the song).
In 1991 she created the Memento Mori installation in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, as part of the Burning the Flag? festival examining American live art and censorship.
In 1994, she released a double-disc set on the Rykodisc label, A Certain Level of Denial, a studio version of the performance piece. Following that piece came The Return of the Chocolate-smeared Woman,[1] her performance rebuttal to Helms and the NEA controversy. The U.S. Congress, controlled by Democrats at the time of the controversy, imposed restrictions on grants for indecent art. The Republican-appointed NEA head, John Frohnmayer, took the side of the targeted artists, which included Finley.[2] The case, U.S. v Finley, argued in front of the U. S. Supreme Court, was decided against Finley and the other artists.
Finley has expressed delight at the fact that she appeared in Playboy (in July, 1999) and received a Ms. Magazine Woman of the Year award within months of each other. She was also featured in TIME during this period, though she felt that the magazine misrepresented her by "eroticizing" works (such as one that addressed rape) based on her nudity alone; in other words, that they couldn't absorb any information beyond her naked body.
Among Finley's books are Shock Treatment, Enough is Enough: Weekly Meditations for Living Dysfunctionally, the Martha Stewart satire Living it Up: Humorous Adventures in Hyperdomesticity, Pooh Unplugged (detailing the eating and psychological disorders of Winnie the Pooh and his friends),[3] and A Different Kind of Intimacy - the latter a collection of her works. Her poem "The Black Sheep" is among her best-known works, and has been immortalized on a sculpture in New York City.
She has also created gallery installations that include together decorated walls, inscriptions, manufactured libraries of imaginary books, mock documents and objects associated with real and imagined persons.
The Karen Finley Live DVD (2004) compiles performances of Shut Up and Love Me and Make Love. Finley also played a doctor in the movie Philadelphia starring Tom Hanks. Finley revived a slightly updated version of "Make Love" September 10–11, 2008 at the Cutting Room in New York to commemorate the seventh anniversary of 9/11; she will mark the tenth anniversary of 9/11 with a performance of "Make Love" at the Laurie Beechman Theatre in Times Square.
In 2009, Finley created a memorial at the concentration camp in Gusen, Austria to commemorate the murder of 420 Jewish children by the Nazis in February, 1945. The installation, "Open Heart," was created with the assistance of Austrian school children, and assisted by the Austrian artist Hannes Priesch. In 2011, she lectured at the Museum of Modern Art in New York about Music and Art, reflecting on her inclusion in the MOMA exhibition Music 3.0 of her composition Tales of Taboo.
In 2011, Finley published The Reality Shows through The Feminist Press at CUNY, a compendium of her work from 2001-2010.
Finley's work was influenced by her professor at San Francisco Art Institute, Linda Montana, and also by Howard Fried. She was influenced by jazz artists such as Billie Holiday and the beat poets of San Francisco such as Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg. In 2011, she was especially honored to read from her ten-year retrospective, "The Reality Shows," at City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, the publisher of her first book "Shock Treatment."
Finley is the recipient of both an Obie Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship for The American Chestnut, and was chosen as Coagula Art Journal Artist of the Decade as the 90's came to a close. Finley is a Professor at New York University in the Tisch School, where she teaches at both the undergraduate and graduate level. She is a frequent lecturer at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. Finley was awarded an honorary doctorate from the San Francisco Art Institute.