Karen Finley looks back - and forward - in anger

The expanded 25th-anniversary edition of Karen Finley's Shock Treatment brings her Thursday to the Free Library. In the introduction, Finley reminds readers of the 1980s and '90s culture wars and social divides that first brought the performance artist/poet to prominence.

The new edition of the 1990 book contains the raw record of Finley's controversial late-'80s and early-'90s theatrical performances, embracing then-taboo topics. Her graphic discussion (and frenetic, naked depiction) of AIDS, disenfranchisement, sexual abuse, and racism helped provoke a signal change in U.S. arts law.

Congress directed the National Endowment of the Arts to screen grant applicants for decency, and Finley and other performance artists - the "NEA Four" - sued. That became the landmark 1998 case of National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley, argued before the U.S. Supreme Court. And the NEA Four lost. In essence, Finley suffered for the future of art.

"What happened between me and politicians like Sen. Jesse Helms was that I was demonized because of perceived sexuality," says Finley from the offices of New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, where she's a professor.

"There were real issues of censorship after that," Finley says. "My work got returned from museums. Exhibitions were canceled. I can rarely get produced. That's still the case. . . . I was downsized."

She acknowledges that, despite the mischaracterizations, her work was seen as worthy of dissection at the highest levels. But too many dissectors "commented without seeing my work," Finely says. "That was a public, sexually abusive relationship, in my mind."

And so many of her interpreters, according to Finley, just got it wrong. Early on, she drew outrage for what she did with and to her naked body: slathering it with chocolate, inserting yams. The meaning of all that, she insists, was mischaracterized, the symbolism ignored. That chocolate? It concerned the notorious 1987-88 case of Tawana Brawley, a black woman in upstate New York found in a plastic bag and smeared with feces; Brawley initially claimed she had been defiled and raped by six white men.

"A white woman covering her body in chocolate represented fecal matter and the relationship between men and Tawana Brawley," Finley says. A grand jury in New York eventually found no evidence that a rape occurred. But the point, Finley insists, is the art. Provocative, yes, but nothing sexual or eroticized.

"I had the joy of growing up in the '70s with a tremendous idealism, so it was difficult discovering so-called progressives weren't that progressive at all," Finley says. Too many critics couldn't get beyond nudity and harsh language, by "a straight, white married woman at that," she says. "My conversation embraced years of misogyny, racism, and patriarchal societies. My body was a replacement for the scars of the national psyche."

A new poem in the new Shock Treatment touches on current issues - #BlackLivesMatter, Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin - while looking back to the literary inspirations, such as Bob Kaufman and Allen Ginsberg, who led Finley to poetry and eventually to her publisher, City Lights Books.

And works such as Written in the Sand of 2014 - which she performed at the University of Pennsylvania's Kelly Writers House in an early permutation - were tributes to artist friends David Wojnarowicz and Ethyl Eichelberger, who died of AIDS. In the backward looks of Sand and the Shock Treatment anniversary, there is a sensibility not found in Finley's earlier works. Do we detect . . . sentiment?

"Ah, but isn't sentiment the shadow of rage?" she asks. "I won't say anger, because that's a word given to women who are being deliberate in terms of emotion. My rage came out of sadness because I couldn't do anything about the loss I felt." Today, her rage is directed toward Pope Francis and what she sees as egregious oppression on his part. "If you're queer or a woman, his is an institution that is supposed to be benevolent," she says. "All that adulation. It's hypocrisy."

So the Finley of Shock Treatment is looking to treat society to more shock. Just as she was once moved to action by the poetry of Ginsberg, she is now moved by the need for action. "There is a feeling that nothing works, and, well, the artist isn't a historical reporter, but an interpreter," she says. "Look, social media is fine and will take care of one end - but the artist must open up possibilities, to imagine a new way, to change the policy."

AUTHOR APPEARANCE
Karen Finley, "Shock Treatment"
7 p.m. Thursday at the Free Library of Philadelphia, 19th & Vine Streets.
Admission: Free.
Information: 215-567-4341 or www.freelibrary.org.