ABSTRACT
The accompanying story begins as a typical day in the life of Karen Finley, an “art adventure.” Finley walks the streets of New York with her plaid knit cap bobbing up and down as she strides jauntily to the printer’s shop, her scarf wrapped “firmly around her pretty, pale neck.” “Are you cold?”, Finley asks her companion, “wanna wear my gloves?” (Linn 1991:17). She is not only beautiful, but also nurturing. The orthodox Jewish printer recoils from her “immodest” handshake, a fitting anecdote for a performer who ironizes discourses of defilement, pollution, and the unclean, improper body of woman. He attempts to find technical reasons for his
Image rights not available
inability to print her poster depicting a nude woman with three breasts standing in a garden with a naked man whose snaky penis splashes her with sperm. The caption reads: “Don’t Blame Eve.” Finley wins the printer over with her exuberant appreciation of the beauty of his stock. Soon the printers are all exclaiming with her about the incredible quality of the paper. The political message of the poster disappears in their mutual love for the aesthetics of the work. Finley explains to them that the poster is art, therefore it is supposed to have some “distressing” qualities. The ironizing aggression of Finley’s “It’s Only Art” monolog from We Keep Our Victims Ready (1990), the title of the monolog being Jesse Helms’ last ditch cry for mercy when he is arrested by the confiscation police for making art, is recuperated as an apology for Finley. The article emphasizes that Finley is as “normal” as the next person. She might keep up her Christmas tree a little too far into January, but besides such small eccentricities, she lives in a “normal” house,
with a “normal” husband, and lives an “incredibly normal life” (Linn 1991:19). This emphasis on her domestic/sexual “normality” comes just a bit less than a year after she was casually tossed in with the homosexual threesome-Holly Hughes, John Fleck, and Tim Miller. The heterosexual family circle strives to reenclose the author of the “Black Sheep” monologFinley’s assault on the nuclear family as a primary site of oppression.3
