Finley draws crowd to Hall for lackluster show

Performer's show does not quite live up to crowd's expectations

Last weekend's much-touted Karen Finley appearance in Hall Auditorium was an attempt to bring the cutting-edge to Oberlin. Unfortunately for Oberlin, it was the newest and most cutting edge material to surface out of the 1970s. Thirty years on, Finley's shtick was a little difficult to swallow seriously.

Finley opened her performance by coming down the aisle in a wedding gown, worn backwards so the trail tripped up the performer, who was vacuuming. A potentially interesting image-too bad the performer's program notes (would it have killed her to spell check? one audience member wondered aloud) gave it away.

Finley stood on the floor of the house, microphone in hand, and attempted to banter cheerily with the audience, reminiscent of Sandra Bernhard, but not nearly as funny. She instead offered the usual criticisms of the town of Oberlin, touching on some genuinely humorous stuff, and maddeningly eliciting tremendous audience response. But what was so funny?

Was the audience uncomfortable with Finley's subject matter? She suggested that Oberlin needed some more sex to lighten things up. Hardly new, hardly controversial. One certainly hopes people weren't shocked. One would like to imagine that, in this day and age, the points of view expressed by Finley would not be shocking to a primarily undergraduate and academic audience. If students and professors have not heard these ideas before, then Oberlin as a school is in serious trouble. Perhaps people were simply laughing because they felt they were supposed to be laughing.

However, the audience was thrilled by Finley's half-hearted and insincere "apology" to Theater and Dance Professor Roger Copeland. But should the Oberlin audience really be applauding her for walking out of a class? A grown woman and a grown man disagree. One storms out of the room. Is this radical? Finley was not subverting the institution of the college, though members of the audience who cheered seemed to applaud her for just that. There is an important difference between being subversive and being a brat.

The American Chestnut was a stilted attempt to blend the visual artistic tradition with the realm of more traditional theater. Stilted, perhaps, because the artist had little idea of what either of these realms can mean or accomplish. If anything, her strengths lay in the visual world. Some of her slides and projections were beautifully composed, but to little end. The way her performance overlapped was either simplistic-a projection of hands and a story about a gardener with remarkable hands-or overly elusive. A projection of earthworms being butchered overlay a tale about racism and police brutality. It was nicely done, and one of the memorable moments of the show. Unfortunately, it was perhaps seven minutes of 120 which were truly engaging.

There was little development of the ostensible plot, which focused on two female characters whose relationship exists of mysterious telephone calls. It was difficult to tell which character Finley was inhabiting from time to time, but by no means was this really important. In traditional theater, the distinctions between characters are usually very significant, but not in the world of Finley's work. She drifted from persona to persona, sometimes well done, often not. Her confusing and detracting vocal aerobics sometimes made it difficult to take her seriously.

One audience member suggested that perhaps Finley was working from within an archetype long neglected by establishment feminism: the hysterical woman. It was suggested that Finley herself is her greatest creation, the hysterical heightened voice of pre-feminism. If this is her intention, then surely she was successful. There must be a reason she has managed to steal the spotlight in the art world, besides the fact that she was controversial a few years ago. However, the point is lost on audiences. More than a hysterical woman, Finley comes across as a ridiculous and self-indulgent artist playing the role of an artist, with her tantrums and sheer presence.

Credit must be given for the way she filled the overwhelming cavern of Hall Auditorium. Few performers could do that, before even opening their mouths, and few performers could keep audiences in their seats for two hours of ranting. Unfortunately, it seemed that more people came to cheer on or despise Finley the person, not the artist. If she wants to have this effect, to reach people as a person, than she is as viable an artist as Madonna, who is more a persona than an artistic force. So Finley should drop the guise of being a serious artist-it detracts from other, legitimate, performers.

It might be said that the audience (this reviewer will no doubt be accused of the same) demonstrated a misunderstanding of the genre of performance. One probably understood that Finley is an artist not troubled by the need to polish her performances, which is perfectly legitimate. Even so, there were people frustrated by the script in her hand, the way she announced arbitrary changes in her performance, interrupting the proceedings when one of the projector bulbs fused.

But that is the raw and intimate nature of this kind of art. An art which attempts to engage the audience in a conversation about issues, an art in which the performer can speak to the audience and feel comfortable on stage. It is a difficult territory, and Finley did well with it, though she perhaps was at times overly-conscious of how raw her performance was. But all the same, it was nice to have her explain to the audience why one per formative decision would not work, and that she would instead do things differently.

More troubling than the rawness of the performance were the actual issues raised by the artist in her various monologues. She dwelt on all of the stock types of feminism, fleshing out the victim mentality at length, reprimanding fashion for failing to eroticize men, lamenting racism, commenting on her own role as a "bitch." None of these ideas are original to the artist, which is not exactly problematic. She might have just been working with contemporary ideas. Therein lay the largest problem. None of these ideas are new. In fact, most of them, specifically the victim mind-set, are tired. True, intellectualism is as trendy as fashion, and old ideas are constantly being unfairly overturned in favor of the new.

Even so, one might as well have stayed at home and read some Camille Paglia, maybe caught an episode of Cagney and Lacey, before bed. Both that critic and that television show raise the same ideas as Finley's show, and in a far more successful way. If Finley herself was to be the art on display, she might have warned us. It takes a very patient viewer to bother to think about Finley the creator as the creation as well. Most audience members seemed to lack the patience. Many filed out early on, which was unfortunate. If you're going to bother going to such a show, one should at least have the respect to stay through the whole thing. There was a waiting list of people who would have jumped at the opportunity for a seat.

This show was successful in one notable regard. It left a bad taste in many people's mouths. Regardless of how one feels about the show, about the genre of performance, it is nice to hear debate about these issues. Had the artist been more effective, the debate might fall instead into the realm of actual issues raised.