Although many artists have used food in performance,Footnote 1 few are as famously or firmly associated with it as Karen Finley. At the start of Finley's career, almost all of her work was marked by unusual uses of food.Footnote 2 Examples include sugared yams dumped over her backside while describing ageist rape in I'm an Ass Man (1985) and the concoction of crushed raw eggs and confetti sponged over her body to analogize social oppression in A Constant State of Desire (1986). Finley intended to channel spectators' excessive emotional and sensual reactions to her extreme, sometimes nauseating uses of food into an indictment of abusive attitudes toward people of marginalized identities. In this sense, the excess of the medium and the excess of the message were intended to correspond, creating a synergistic effect on the spectator.Footnote 3
The reaction of the national press to such explicit art complicated the relationship between content and performance material. Launched into the spotlight after the famous 1990 ruling on the NEA Four, Finley became known nationwide as “the chocolate-smeared woman,” based on a portion of her well-known performance We Keep Our Victims Ready (1990). The appellation was more than descriptive; it was a belittlement, suggesting deviance. Her work was often examined and discussed in the press as disgusting or viscerally upsetting, linked simultaneously if not explicitly to her use of food. Through this repetitive circulation of Finley's acts with food, her work acquired an affect of disgust politically different and more virulent than Finley had ever intended. She responded to this not by eliminating food as a performance material, but by attempting to change the associated affect, a feat easier to attempt than accomplish. Here, I examine three of Finley's major midcareer performances—We Keep Our Victims Ready (1990), The Return of the Chocolate-Smeared Woman (1998), and Shut Up and Love Me (2001)—and the press surrounding them, in order to track the way Finley's altered use of food addressed the accrual of negative affect to guide spectator response.
Food in performance has a life of its own that the performer must attempt to frame for optimal audience understanding—it never signifies singularly or objectively. Finley's career reveals the complex challenge of using such a sensually provocative material in performance. Hers is both a cautionary tale about the way food can overtake message, and a triumph of material strategy in that Finley was (eventually) able to change the rhetoric applied her work, from one with an affect of disgust to ambiguous delight. I argue that the evolving trajectory of Finley's performances indicates the unruly power of food as an evocative performance material as well as the potential for managing it. Although it may have taken a decade to accomplish, Finley's body of work suggests that a performer can harness both the sensual and ideological aspects of food to powerful effect.
Making Meaning in Sensually Provocative Performance
The (problem of determining) meaning in Finley's performances has been a subject for debate between scholars for decades. Indicatively, in 1990, Catherine Schuler published an article in TDR called “Spectator Response and Comprehension: The Problem of Karen Finley's ‘Constant State of Desire,’”Footnote 4 concerning one of Finley's most famous works, which debuted in 1986. It examined a relatively common theme in performance art analysis: Who is the audience for the work, and do they understand the ideas communicated by the artist? Schuler's article presented doubts about spectators' ability to grasp a cohesive message from Finley's impassioned (read filthy) monologues and unusual (read grotesque) body acts. As she characterized it,
In spite of recent efforts to reevaluate her work and identify it more closely with a feminist politic, Karen Finley's name continues to be associated with pornographic images of canned yams and naked buttocks. Her material is angry, confrontational, and deliberately provocative … her performances continue to provoke more hostility and confusion over objectives than any women's theatre in recent memory.Footnote 5
In an attempt to gauge what spectators actually took away, Schuler surveyed the audience at a performance of The Constant State of Desire in Washington, DC. Her data suggested that even though Finley's intentions were “clearly feminist,” many spectators were unable to comprehend the implied content.Footnote 6 She concluded: “If Finley's desire is to titillate and shock audiences with pornographic rhetoric, she is succeeding. If her objective is to destroy traditional images and mannerisms of women…and ultimately to transform society, audience response forces us to question the efficacy of her methods.”Footnote 7
In the next issue of TDR, Finley responded to Schuler's claims, denouncing the assessment that her methods were unsuccessful for conveying the meaning she wished:
Schuler contributes to the destructive political climate of this era by trying to prove that an artist is misunderstood or invaluable if the audience is inarticulate immediately after viewing the art, or if they don't have the same reference point as the artist. A similar scale is being used by Jesse Helms and his cronies in trying to rate the importance and effectiveness of art if the artist does not use a language of symbols that respond to the viewers[’] needs, aesthetics, or morals. This type of judgment is unnecessary and dangerous to the future of American contemporary art as we know it today.Footnote 8
While Schuler's critique may have been too focused on received messaging for Finley's liking, it asked a provocative implicit question by extension. If the audience and the national press misunderstand the performance, how should the performer proceed? And more generally, what is the performer's role in determining how spectators make meaning out of a performance in the first place?
The most common scholarly interpretations of meaning in Finley's work involve a focus on her explicit body. Scholars and critics like Rebecca Schneider,Footnote 9 Maria Pramaggiore,Footnote 10 and Cynthia CarrFootnote 11 all penned works concerning Finley's feminist politics, her nude body and striking performance practices, and her (in)ability to subvert the traditional masculinist gaze.Footnote 12 Jill Dolan sums up the transgressive feminist approach to her work:
Rather than offering her body as a sadistically inaccessible commodity, an ideal for male spectators to consume in a masochistic exchange, Finley offers herself as already consumed. … What remains of the body and sexuality has … to be meaningfully reassembled only by spectators with stomachs strong enough for such consumption.Footnote 13
Erin Striff takes the opposite response, suggesting that Finley does not seem “to be aware of the ambiguity of [her] performance and the cultural meaning of [her] own nudity. [She assumes that she] can control the spectator, who is actually free to view [her] in any way that he or she chooses.”Footnote 14 While this assertion may be a simplification—by the time Striff was writing in 1997, it would have been patently clear to Finley that she could not control the way spectators understood her message (a point to which I will return in more detail shortly)—these two opposing views indicate the common themes for those interpreting Finley's performances. Whether casting her work as a triumph of feminist politics or an ambiguous regression, most scholarship on Finley tends to focus on her explicit acts of the body in order to determine message.
In this article, I challenge this typical narrative by shifting the object of study. Although important and revelatory, the fixation on body is obscuring another vibrant, overpowering component of Finley's performances—her material interactions with food. Here I analyze Finley's use of food as a sensually provocative material that makes the body visible in the first place, sticks to the body, and at times overwhelms the body, changing the way it signifies. Shifting attention off Finley's explicit body in performance, and toward an analysis of her use of food instead, alters the trajectory of the story to one about the resignification of material objects and the affect associated. This becomes an important statement about the relation of human performers to nonhuman objects and the vital matter that has the potential to affect audience members both because of and despite the web of social and cultural meanings associated.
By focusing on the material power and affective circulation of Finley's use of food, I identify and analyze what the consequences are of using such sensually provocative substances in performance. As Finley's work bears out, even the suggestion of a deviant use of food colors the imagination, evoking visceral rejections and dismissals despite carefully coded content connections. Finley's midcareer performances reveal both the remarkably disruptive but also productive powers of food use in performance. This is not a tale, then, about the victimization of an artist and her eventual turn away from overtly feminist ideology, but rather a demonstration of the significant presence of sensually provocative material. In this analysis, I tilt toward materialist formations of the power of objects outside the realm of explicit signification, gesturing toward food's ability to be both agent provocateur as well as symbol in performance. This approach does not neglect message. I analyze Finley's experience with how food affects spectatorship to suggest the ability for artists to grapple with and hopefully commandeer sensually provocative materials for their ideological purposes. My essay, then, concerns the transformation of food use in Finley's 1990s performances that grants meaning to her attempts to shape spectator understandings. I illuminate how Finley's performance choices evidence an intentional (even if not conscious) engagement with the power of food as a complicated material force.
Before turning to an analysis of Finley's work, I must offer some cursory comments on food's power. Food is a provocative, sensual material that has the potential to affect spectators viscerally and even interrupt the way they receive messaging in performance. Eating is a physical necessity but also an act coded with personal, cultural, social, and political meaning. When food enters a performance, therefore, it provides a unique intersection of the universally biological, intensely personal, and ideologically specific.Footnote 15 It belongs to a unique category of real materials that increasingly made their way into performances since the advent of naturalism in the late nineteenth century. When food appears in performance, it is always itself, provoking a phenomenological response from spectators who can smell it, see it, sometimes even feel and taste it. It is simultaneously, however, intensely subjective, eliciting different associations various spectators may have with it. These provocations work in concert with, or sometimes in opposition to, the intentions of the artist, who has often meticulously coded the substance semiotically to grant meaning to performance context and content. As Sally Banes and André Lepecki argue, the senses give the theorist a total package to analyze spectatorship because performances are “where the corporeal meets the social, the somatic meets the historical, the cultural meets the biological, and imagination meets the flesh.”Footnote 16
Food and eating acts in performance foreground sensual experiences that are traditionally absent or at least downplayed in Western theatre: smell and, even on occasion, taste. As Richard Schechner reminds us,Footnote 17 studies of theatre and performance usually focus on the most commonly drawn-upon senses—sight and sound. The separate senses have distinct effects, and thus differently impact spectators when they appear in performance. Environmental aesthetics philosopher J. Douglas Porteous elaborates: “Vision clearly distances us from the object. We frame ‘views’ in pictures and camera lenses; the likelihood of an intellectual response is considerable. By contrast, smells environ. They penetrate the body and permeate the immediate environment, and thus one's response is much more likely to involve strong affect.”Footnote 18 When food is sensually present, it has the potential to change the spectators' environment. Theatre phenomenologist Stephen Di Benedetto suggests smell is the “the most direct route to memory, and the longest lasting,” which can “enrich the theatrical experience and add layers of intimacy to the performance.”Footnote 19 Well-known aspects of smell memory include what is known as the “Proust Effect,” where a person sensing an odor associates it with a prior personal experience, prompting the recall of a memory.Footnote 20 (The sense of taste can have similar effects, too.)Footnote 21 Provoking the senses in this way stimulates a subjective reaction to the performance, one that likely differs from person to person.
Food has its own unique material presence, one that is able to affect spectators. Jane Bennett offers the term “vibrant materiality” for looking at the “active powers issuing from nonsubjects … the material agency or effectivity of nonhuman or not-quite-human things.”Footnote 22 She draws on Bruno Latour's notion of the actant, “a source of action that can be either human or nonhuman; it is that which has efficacy, can do things, has sufficient coherence to make a difference, produce effects, alter the course of events.”Footnote 23 Food, then, is an actant that operates “inside and alongside humankind, exerting influence on moods, dispositions, and decisions.”Footnote 24 While I admire Bennett's approach, I am not literalizing my analysis of food as an actant here—I am not examining how food physically changes the way a human is made up and how she acts. However, I am interested in the challenge food presents to performance as a sensual, material presence not wholly governable by the artist or performer. I am most attentive to Bennett's suggestion that things are “vivid entities not entirely reducible to the contexts in which human subjects set them, never entirely exhausted by their semiotics.”Footnote 25 No matter how hard a performer may try, food will push beyond the boundary of the performance, signifying outside of and beyond the ideology set for it. In the desire to expose, to match medium to message, Finley used food in different ways, to encode affect appropriate to her feminist concept. The excess (in every subjective way possible—emotional, ideological, cultural, etc.) that the material carries, however, muddied a clearly interpretable message, and sparked a decadelong struggle for the management of affect.
We Keep Our Victims Ready and the NEA
Although far from the first performance of Finley's to use food, her piece We Keep Our Victims Ready (1990), presented in a two-week run at the nonprofit experimental performance space The Kitchen in New York City,Footnote 26 contained her most widely circulated image—her chocolate-smeared body. At the midpoint in the piece, as a response to the abuses women suffer in a masculinist society in the name of romantic, heterosexual love, Finley smeared her naked body with chocolate and decorated herself with candy sprinkles, bean sprouts, and tinsel. This image was inspired by a 1987 story concerning Tawana Brawley, a sixteen-year-old African-American woman found in a trash bag in upstate New York covered in human excrement. She claimed several white policemen had raped her. Finley locked onto the image of an exploited, abused Brawley. She writes, “I couldn't get the image of the young woman smeared with feces out of my mind. To me, what had happened to Tawana Brawley seemed like some kind of biblical tale, but one where all the symbols and the meanings had been scrambled and confused. I decided to try to create a performance out of the chaos.”Footnote 27
The chocolate smearing is one in a long line of sensually provocative moments in We Keep Our Victims Ready.Footnote 28 I detail the moment in its entirety here, because it came to code associations with Finley for the rest of her career. The famed exchange comprises only ten of the work's eighty minutes. The performance begins with Finley seated in a rocking chair, telling multiple monologues from the perspective of marginalized, ignored, or abused women. She rants in heightened, poetic speech about social inequalities, botched abortions, and women's lack of (political) control over their own bodies. Though the subject matter in this portion of the performance is horrifying, what follows is light and humorous. Finley stands up from her rocking chair and strips out of her dress, revealing red panties and a black lace teddy. She takes several bowls of red gelatin and dumps them into the bra area. She circles the stage a bit, the gelatin jiggling riotously. The audience laughs, and Finley comments, “If this was in the good old days of performance art, I could just walk around for about 4 hours with this.”Footnote 29 Although this section corresponds to the previous monologues of abuse—Finley is still calling attention to the degrading social expectations placed on a woman's body—this time the presentation is meant for laughs. It is almost as though she recognizes the need for reprieve, and the need to connect with her audience more fully before her next horrific segment begins.
After this comic break, Finley returns directly to the heavy material. Following a monologue titled “St. Valentine's Massacre” about bulimia, which finishes with the repetition of the phrase, “My life is worth nothing but shit, yeah,” Finley drops the gelatinous mass to the floor along with her teddy.Footnote 30 She wipes her breasts with a towel, standing on top of the melting gelatin. She grabs a flat heart-shaped box, almost like a painter's pallet, covered with chocolate icing, and begins to spread it across her body, starting with her legs, then her arms, breasts, and belly. Finley does this in a careful, perfunctory manner, and though the spectators laugh a little at first, they soon quiet. She wipes her hands on a towel, and jokes one last time, “You should see when I bring the laundry in!” before beginning one of her most devastating critiques of abuse.Footnote 31 In it, she inhabits the position of an abuser, shouting, “I'm beating you with this belt, this whip, this stick / because I love you. … I sleep with your best friend because I love you. … I shot myself because I love you. / If I loved myself I'd be shooting you.”Footnote 32 Finley's chocolate-covered body, smothered in a substance usually a symbol of romantic love, evokes pain and shame. She ends by repeating the phrase, “It's better to feel abuse than to feel nothing at all,” before she showers herself with chocolate sprinkles.Footnote 33 They bounce haphazardly, coating her top half while pattering to the floor. The chocolate's sensual imagery clashes spectacularly with the degrading, abusive text, likely intending a mixture of revulsion and pathos.
To this bodyscape, Finley adds alfalfa sprouts, which she explains are supposed to represent sperm. She drops them down her legs, belly, and chest, tucking a few into her underwear; the audience titters a bit, although Finley remains serious. They fall wetly off of her in clumps; she looks like some kind of monstrous soil bed. The earthy, dark smell of the chocolate and alfalfa sprouts must further enhance the viewing experience. Spectators sense her presence on a more intimate level, perceived as more than just vision and sound. Finley then begins a monologue about the Nazi death camps as an explicit analogy for the modern treatment of those with AIDS. She repeats, “In principle we are not very different. We keep our victims ready” several times in a hypnotic rhythm.Footnote 34 After this, she drapes herself in shiny tinsel, adding inorganic material to the previously edible body. As Finley explains in retrospect, “no matter how badly a woman has been treated, she'll still get it together to dress for dinner.”Footnote 35 She then starts a monologue called “Why Can't This Veal Calf Walk,” which analogizes the experience of women to chained veal calves awaiting slaughter.
This dark, sensually excessive middle section ends when Finley moves to the back of the stage and pours water from a pitcher into a large glass bowl. She alternates between washing her face and drinking. She covers herself in a white sheet like a robe, hiding the mess that the spectators know remains. She sits beside what could be a bed or a coffin, and speaks as if to a sick or dead friend or lover, as the one left behind. The tone is funereal; there is no humor at all, and she takes a moment to weep quietly beside the bed. She hits herself in the chest, crying, “I wish I could relieve you of your pain.” The sheet begins to gap in the middle; one can see the chocolate, tinsel, and sprouts beneath it. The sheet becomes more and more coated in the residue, getting dirtier and dirtier as the monologue continues. She chants, “There's always silence at the end of the phone” at the close, striking her chest in a beat now. Footnote 36 The hypnotic repetition fades quietly into nothingness. Finley walks back to center stage, still wrapped in her sheet, and bows several times. She never returns to the playful, humorous Finley of before, but stays quiet, almost shell-shocked. The labor of the performance is evident on her body, decorated, debased, wrapped in dirty white. It is upsetting, and evokes a feeling of deep empathy, as if the multiple forms of injustice and abuse depicted in the performance have stuck to Finley along with the food coating her body.
Finley's interaction with food was key to the performance as both a metaphor and a disturbing, affective way to call attention to a present, degraded body. Despite this explicit correlation between content and performance material, some members of the media used the excessive image of Finley's chocolate-smeared body to signal deviance and disgust for a different political endpoint. Although Finley had been using food in her work for years,Footnote 37 the press regarding We Keep Our Victims Ready effectively cemented Finley's relationship with it and fed the uproar between the National Endowment for the Arts and the artists denied their grants. Much has been written about Finley's relationship to the NEA. I am not retelling her experiences here for historical purposes, but rather detailing how food (successfully) became the trademark of her smear campaign, despite the rather obvious symbolic functioning in performance. The material presence of food did something more, and something different, than what Finley intended.
In 1990, a peer panel of the NEA selected eighteen performing artists out of ninety-five applicants to receive NEA grants.Footnote 38 Instead of following general procedure and funding all artists recommended, the national Council on the Arts voted against funding four of them: Karen Finley, John Fleck, Holly Hughes, and Tim Miller, known now as the “NEA Four.” Although all four artists had progressive sexual politics, Finley was the only heterosexual artist singled out. Theatre scholar Theodore Shank suggests she was considered obscene for her politics, but also “because her language was irreverent, scatological, and sexual, and in her performances she was sometimes naked and usually smeared with food of some sort.”Footnote 39 Finley's relationship to food became shorthand for her deviance and obscenity during the course of the ensuing lawsuit, and long after, even for those who had not seen the performance itself. The very suggestion of her deviant use of food in performance was enough to code her career.
On 11 May 1990, two conservative columnists, Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, publicized a campaign against Finley's NEA funding, ridiculing We Keep Our Victims Ready in an article entitled “The NEA's Suicide Charge” that appeared in dailies across the country.Footnote 40 Derisively calling her a “nude, chocolate-smeared young women,” they implied that her performance antics called into question the function of the NEA. While they did include a quote from pro-Finley journalist Mike Steele about her theme of women's victimization, they focused on her provocative use of food, detailing the gelatin, chocolate, and bean sprouts. They remarked, “Tough stuff … for members of Congress, liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, old or young, man or woman,” implying that all should find her work equally offensive and unworthy of funding.Footnote 41 North Carolina Republican senator Jesse Helms provided another voice of opposition.Footnote 42 As Roudané succinctly puts it, “Something about a nude woman smeared in chocolate railing against a conservative culture upset Helms.”Footnote 43
On 29 June, the committee officially vetoed the four artists' grants. In response, the artists banded together and garnered representation from the National Campaign for Freedom of Expression and the Center for Constitutional Rights, as well as support from the ACLU.Footnote 44 The four did eventually win back their grants and pressed forward in their lawsuit, challenging the NEA's “standards of decency” clause in a case that took them all the way to the Supreme Court.Footnote 45 The clause stated the NEA would fund only work that did not “‘promote, disseminate or produce materials which in the judgment of the NEA [… ] may be considered obscene.’”Footnote 46 Though others were involved in the court case, Finley received the most attention. Reflecting on the reasoning behind this, she writes, “whether it was because chocolate is titillating, because I was straight and the press is homophobic, or just because it was my name in the title of the court case, I don't know.”Footnote 47 I will focus here on Finley's work with chocolate, as it came to represent her politics with a negative affective stickiness that was hard to shake off.
One of the most fascinating developments of the smear campaign against Finley was this: both supporters and detractors of Finley's work began to use the “chocolate-smeared” phrase, keeping the emphasis on chocolaty disgust alive, even when the meaning associated was intended to signify differently. As New York Times reviewer Stephen Holden describes, “Ms. Finley strips to her panties and smears chocolate over her body from the neck down. Not a comic or sexual gesture, this ritual signifies the mortification of the body by a psychically battered character whose self-image is so damaged that she thinks of herself as nothing more than excrement.”Footnote 48 This description places the emphasis on the chocolate act, even as it foregrounds its symbolic social message. Harlan Jacobson in the Globe and Mail provides a similar depiction: “Finley strips and smears her nearly nude body in chocolate in symbolic self-degradation. ‘This is what they're scared of,’ Finley say[s] offhandedly, before launching into a series of characters' howls of pain or hate.”Footnote 49 One might (rightly) ask, How else one could describe Finley's work, if not in terms of her unusual acts with food? My goal here is not to blame the supportive press for using the phrase, but rather to suggest that “chocolate-smeared” became imbued with a political significance that recalled deviance and disgust no matter what the journalists' perspectives were. This uptake has to do with the wide circulation of the associated term but also, likely, the imaginative linkage of Finley to the object—a grotesque intermixture of body heat, sweat, and chocolate.
Luc Sante's article in The New Republic leads with the usual introduction:
Anybody who has read a newspaper in the last six months knows what Karen Finley does on stage. While delivering monologues, she slathers her nude body with various substances. … The act sounds freakish and unwholesome in a very particular way, some combination of the stag show and the soapbox speech. … If you wanted to market provocation, could you do any better?Footnote 50
Although he continues to suggest that Finley is in fact pushed to these drastic measures by a polarized society whose “religious right finds it convenient to isolate such imagery from context and use it as a public-relations bludgeon,” Sante still reinforces the stigma within his review.Footnote 51 Despite the fact that the interplay with chocolate takes up a relatively short amount of time, Finley primarily remains an artist who does unusual acts with food. Sante even criticizes her use of language, suggesting Finley's powers of speech are second to her physical presence, her delivery, and, indeed, her acts with food. He concludes almost condescendingly, “Finley lacks the skill to crystallize this articulation into poetry, but she has a raw and unusual talent, which makes something intangible but real happen in front of an audience. It is easy to misrepresent her work, but it is impossible to duplicate it.”Footnote 52 Although positioned in her defense, Sante in fact reinforces the view of Finley as an inarticulate, chocolate-smeared woman. On the surface, there is nothing ostensibly wrong with Sante critiquing Finley's monologues if he found her physical presence and chocolate-display more powerful. When placed alongside Finley's detractors, however, he corroborates a focus on chocolate at the expense of an apt explication of her content.
Although Finley's provocative acts with food had a clear, corresponding ideological component, that meaning became more and more buried in the chocolate-smeared repetition. David Frankel highlights this when reviewing a later art show of Finley's: “her monologues were blistering, and because they were part rant … , part nudity, and part sticky mess, her enemies could tar her crazy. They missed, or refused, her ideas, as if they were incompatible with such deeply felt expulsions.”Footnote 53 Although Finley's performances brought the theoretical objectification and consumption of women's bodies to the forefront, the circulation of those physical acts and the affect they accrued outside of the moment of performance endangered reception of the message. Anyone who wished to discount Finley needed only to intone the phrase “chocolate-smeared” in order to deride her message by making her seem slight, deviant, and disgusting. Her supporters who kept this emphasis on the chocolate alive continued (although possibly unknowingly) to keep this affect in play.
Stickiness and The Return of the Chocolate-Smeared Woman
The chocolate-smeared repetition carried affective significance. As media scholars Beverley Skeggs and Helen Wood describe succinctly, affect is feeling that produces an effect in the world.Footnote 54 I argue that the primary affect in the widespread circulation of the phrase “chocolate-smeared” to describe Finley became disgust. This affect obscured her work by redirecting disgusted reactions from the act contained—namely, abuse of women in a masculinist society—to the body performing the act. It is not the body itself that creates this feeling, but the combined interplay with the material presence of the food with the body. Here I turn to cultural theorist Sara Ahmed's notion of stickiness for elaboration. Ahmed writes, “feelings do not reside in subjects or objects, but are produced as effects of circulation. … The circulation of objects allows us to think about the ‘sociality’ of emotion.”Footnote 55 In this way, Ahmed suggests that feelings and emotions are not preexisting psychological states, but are rather produced according to social and cultural practices. Neither do they circulate on their own. They circulate when they become attached to certain objects, when the “objects become sticky, or saturated with affect, as sites of personal and social tension,” creating a widespread experience of a certain feeling or emotion.Footnote 56 Naming, speaking, or writing about the feeling of disgust calls it into being, creating a performative connection that is enacted again and again as the term or object circulates. As Ahmed suggests, “signs become sticky through repetition; if a word is used in a certain way, again and again, then that ‘use’ becomes intrinsic; it becomes a form of signing.”Footnote 57 The constant association of Finley with the phrase “chocolate-smeared” became a way to attach that affect to her as a sort of brand, and eventually became a metonym for Finley herself. Ahmed writes:
[T]o say something is disgusting is still to ‘make something’; it generates a set of effects, which then adhere as a disgusting object. … To name something as disgusting is to transfer the stickiness of the word ‘disgust’ to an object, which henceforth becomes generated as the very thing that is spoken.Footnote 58
Those signs had more of an effect in the real world than Finley had intended. As she discovered, once those signs have stuck, it is difficult to unstick them.
While awaiting the Supreme Court ruling, Finley took the sticky stigmatization back into her own hands with her 1998 four-week extended run of The Return of the Chocolate-Smeared Woman at the Flea Theater in TriBeCa on Manhattan's Lower West Side.Footnote 59 Feeling harassed by Jesse Helms and demoralized by the scrutiny of the NEA case, Finley decided to play out her alleged chocolate erotica to its most ridiculous end. As Finley states, “Instead of the chocolate representing the humiliation of the past, I now wanted to play it up as an erotic element. I invited the audience to lick the chocolate off my body for twenty dollars.”Footnote 60 She danced with a troupe of chocolate painted go-go dancers, and “also included tales of lust between me and politicians, and other bawdy material. By embracing the deviant character that the right had imposed on me, I felt I was in control. I no longer needed to defend or explain.”Footnote 61 While her assertion of control over the material is somewhat suspect—if nothing else, Finley's performance history suggests how difficult it is to control sensually provocative performances, despite intentional messaging—Finley's new performance openly addressed her public derision and the widely circulated affect of disgust.
Ben Brantley's review of her performance, facetiously entitled “There's No Vanilla in a Finley Encounter,” places the emphasis on Finley's body and what she does with it. He suggests that “every inch of that body is visible,” and that “yes, it is again lathered up in some chocolatey substance (you can tell that it's chocolate by the smell), a not-so-sentimental nod to the routine that made her a figure of angry debate on the floor of the United States Senate eight years ago.”Footnote 62 Like other reviewers before him, Brantley mentions Finley's content but largely dwells on the embodied stickiness of her performance:
Wearing nothing but bikini briefs, a pink feather boa, silver spiked heels and the obligatory coat of chocolate, she hawks the chance to taste that coat for $20 a lick. … Only one person obliged the night I saw the show: a young man who had only $7 and change. Ms. Finley accepted his bid and told the man, who had put his tongue on the middle of her leg, that he could go higher if he wanted to. He did.Footnote 63
Brantley then explains Finley did this in order to “explore the chafed underbelly of this sort of self-objectification,” which is likely true, though as usual he focuses on the embodied encounter instead of the content of Finley's message that dealt with victimization and abuse.Footnote 64 This time, however, the chocolate was associated with something salacious, lightly altering the typical association with degradation and disgust. As journalist Michele McPhee writes, “Painted in chocolate, with a pink feather boa draped over her naked breasts, Karen Finley looks more a dancer who just jumped out of a birthday cake [than] a catalyst for the most explosive Supreme Court decision to hit the art world in the last decade.”Footnote 65
During the monthlong run of the show, the Supreme Court came back with a ruling concerning the decency clause. The artists lost the case. A few articles used the chocolate-smeared rhetoric to derisively call attention to the artists' failure. Although Finley had intentionally begun the transformation of affect, the feelings of disgust and derision were not entirely unstuck. Simon Beck's article in the South China Morning Post begins, “The chocolate-covered woman has been defeated,” before detailing the events surrounding the Supreme Court's decision.Footnote 66 Christopher Rapp's piece in the National Review starts by trivializing her performance: “With or without government support, Karen Finley will bravely smear herself with chocolate.”Footnote 67 He then dwells on the physical moments of Finley's performance, as if to illustrate why she did not receive funding: “Shrieking wildly, Miss Finley slathered what looked like chocolate frosting all over her bare breasts, abdomen, and legs.” He repeats the sensationalist details that he feels are in keeping with the rhetoric surrounding Finley's sticky aura, and continues his critique by suggesting that Finley's act has not changed over the years: “it just gets more or less sticky, depending on what substance she happens to be coating her body with.”Footnote 68
Rapp's final statement makes a valid point, but perhaps not in the way he intended it. Finley's act does continue to accrue an Ahmedian stickiness, in part because of reviews such as these that continue to associate deviance and disgust—even boredom or silliness—with her work. I do, however, take issue with Rapp's summative comments that Finley is “a fossil, of which some are preserved in ice, some in resin, others in sandstone, and this one in chocolate.”Footnote 69 It was not Finley who preserved herself as a chocolate fossil (if such a thing were possible). She continued to confront a heteronormative, masculinist society with different, complex iterations of food use, in context-specific, meaningful ways. It was the rhetoric surrounding her that continued to associate her with the same old thing: chocolate smearing, and the affect of deviance and disgust attached to it. Even when attempting to change the affect surrounding the chocolate, Finley largely found herself stuck in the same position. This suggests two things—first, that the tenacity of the written words continued to circulate the same old affect, but second, that chocolate had its own significant material presence. Could chocolate ever be repurposed here? Or was it doomed to signify darkness, deviance, and excrement?
Repurposing Affect in Shut Up and Love Me
In the late 1990s, after The Return of the Chocolate-Smeared Woman, Finley began to change her associated affect in earnest.Footnote 70 She explains, “I couldn't stand being the Joan of Arc of the art world anymore,”Footnote 71 and generally began to take herself less seriously. She moved out of New York to Los Angeles, and posed for Playboy in chocolate: “My enemies had eroticized me against my will, so this was like taking control and ending things myself. It was a way of saying ‘Case Closed’—and getting the last word.”Footnote 72 While Finley had not escaped the chocolate-smeared haunting, she more actively and obviously attempted to repurpose it, celebrating the stickiness and playing with the affect, instead of continuing to use it as an expression of body horror and violence. She began to parody her own image.
Shut Up and Love Me (2001), performed in a run at NYC's famous performance art venue Performance Space 122,Footnote 73 became a more serious answer back to the dialogue concerning chocolaty disgust over the years. Finley admonished spectators and critics alike in the very title. She began to reclaim the joy of performing at the same time. Fellow NEA Four performer Holly Hughes describes her performance this way: “Following the example of gay activists who reclaimed the word ‘queer’ for activism, she's tried to embrace and retool the image in ‘Attack of the Chocolate-Smeared Woman’; she's changed the chocolate to honey, the action from smearing to celebratory wallowing as she commanded us to ‘Shut Up and Love Me.’”Footnote 74 Ben Brantley's review “A Taste of Honey (Hold the Chocolate)” suggests the shift, though without recording her intention in the same way Hughes does. He writes instead, “Ladies and gentlemen, there's a surprise substitute on the dessert cart this evening. Chocolate is no longer on the menu. Instead, it's gold, gleaming honey that is being served, by the gallon and on the skin.”Footnote 75 He enumerates the differences between the chocolate smearing of the past and her current, almost celebratory use of honey: “clothed in absolutely nothing but her sheath of shimmering honey, she has turned into the ultimate objectified woman. … If the context of the image weren't so ridiculous—and if Ms. Finley weren't obviously enjoying the joke of it all so much—you would indeed call it a thing of beauty.”Footnote 76 This comes in direct contrast to his description of her past use of chocolate, which he implies was “willful self-degradation,” asking the audience to “feel … her pain.”Footnote 77 Though Finley's message continued to revolve around the exploration of sexual dysfunction, in Shut Up and Love Me she was open to multiple, even humorous interpretations of the images. She describes the performance: “This time it isn't about violence. It is the simple pleasures of the flesh. Honey has so many meanings, but it is also just sweet.”Footnote 78
Unlike her post–We Keep Our Victims Ready work with chocolate, where Finley intentionally eroticized it (both humorously with The Return of the Chocolate-Smeared Woman and more salaciously with the Playboy shoot), Finley's work with honey demonstrated a new tactic. Honey is significantly more beautiful when applied to the body—it does not carry the same material associations with an excrement smear as the chocolate had. She abandoned her initial material object (chocolate), but not the strategy (smearing with food). The act worked in a way her prior tactics had not—it seemed to signify beauty and delight (albeit deviant), more than revulsion and disgust. Finley writes, “It's a political statement in the lack of a political statement. … It's just about sensuality and enjoying it.”Footnote 79 She elaborates more explicitly:
In this show, I'm getting rid of the archetypes that have been given to me … the archetypes I have volunteered for—the politically correct heroine fighting for freedom of speech. This work is a reaction against my prior work and image. I am embracing the criticisms that my detractors have leveled against me. I am embracing sexuality without apology. I am not a victim and there is no rhetoric.Footnote 80
While one could fault her for relinquishing a tight hold on the ideology that made her food use so confrontational at the start, given the trajectory of her career, Finley's desire to shift her associated affect from shameful disgust to playful lightness is understandable. In Shut Up and Love Me, Finley deemphasizes message for a focus on sensual embodied response, and, for the reader/interpreter outside the room, for an association with light and beauty.
The press's reaction to Shut Up and Love Me reflects the difference in affect. Leonard Jacobs's review praises, “Regardless of how or whether she utters it, you'll invariably respond to Karen Finley's Shut Up and Love Me by saying, ‘Okay, I love you!’ under your breath. … [S]he's tenacious. She wears you down.”Footnote 81 This is a marked shift in understanding from The Return of the Chocolate-Smeared Woman, which at best was treated by critics with a kind of snide wink and at worst completely derided. Jacobs continues that Finley is “finest at the finale, naturally, when she eschews her trademark smothering in chocolate in favor of slickly slathering herself in honey … it's a rather sweet climax.”Footnote 82 Jacobs's review evidences that the shift in meaning comes as an effect of the change in substance—one cannot happen without the other. Simi Horwitz makes similar comments in her review: “It's not that the controversial performance artist Karen Finley has gone all warm and fuzzy on stage. … Nonetheless, her new solo show … marks an aesthetic and political departure.”Footnote 83 Horwitz focuses on Finley's humor and use of burlesque, different from what she calls Finley's earlier career as an “enraged feminist.” Finley's altered use of food also makes an impact. Unlike her trademark chocolate of ten years that is visually similar to feces (and, when associated with Finley, is also symbolically and affectively imbued with deviance, disgust, and degradation), honey is light, shimmering, and golden. As Horwitz asserts, “There's a quantum leap between wallowing nude in honey, as opposed to chocolate.”Footnote 84 Finley explains: “The chocolate image is degrading. Honey, on the other hand, brings to mind religious rituals, high holidays. The bee evokes sexuality with its smell and nectar. And, of course, the picture of a woman gliding in the honey is provocative. It's a simplistic dance, and it's beautiful.”Footnote 85 While the reviews continue to mention Finley's association with chocolate, it no longer sticks in quite the same deviant, disgusting way. The honey outshines it.
I base the following description on a live filming of Shut Up and Love Me at P.S. 122.Footnote 86 Finley's use of honey in the performance is, as Brantley suggests, sensuous, strange, provocative, funny, disgusting, and somewhat beautiful. It is the climax of the show; she looks into the audience and pronounces loudly and declaratively, “It's Honey Time!” In some ways, this is the moment the audience has been waiting for the entire show—not just because spectators may have known it was coming, but because of Finley's career-long association with food. Music begins to play, and Finley dances toward the audience to select participants.
Finley returns to the stage with three audience members, one white woman, one black woman, and one white man; all seem to be in their thirties, all willing to participate. They do not appear to know Finley, or to have been prepped in advance. (There are certainly political ways one could read her choices—Why a black woman? To make the performance more diverse? To problematize the image of women of color with the sweet and edible? Why a white man? Easier to emasculate?—although ultimately I think her inclusion of audience members was more about inviting them to play, rather than coding them with any kind of ideological significance.) She invites them to a newly lit area of the stage, ushering them onto a springy pad covered in plastic sheeting. Each audience member stands on the plastic, dancing congenially if awkwardly with Finley. The audience members seem to shift between baffled good humor and slight mortification as they gamely participate. The women each receive a large pitcher filled with gleaming honey, and the man receives a little honey bear. Finley dances around them, whispering instructions, and soon the participants start pouring their containers of honey onto the floor. The man has trouble squeezing the honey out of the plastic bear, and Finley returns to help him drip the last bits out of it. Once the majority of the honey is gone, she sidles up next to each participant, starting with the women, encouraging them to lick honey off the pitchers. They take turns licking the honey, though it seems more contrived than actually pleasurable. She takes the honey bear from the man, and licks the tip provocatively, humorously. She then collects the honey containers, and the participants return to the audience.
Next, Finley removes her boots, sweater, and underwear with sudden abandon. She goes into a wild, acrobatic interpretive dance, leaping feet first into the pool of honey. Finley slips and twists wildly in the puddle, flinging long arcs of honey in all directions. The honey is excessive, both in quantity but also as a signifier. This is unlike her previous work that matched sensuality to content, that attempted to associate spectators' visceral responses to her use of food with degrading acts of violation. There are no angry words spewed forth, no violent stories associated. Here, her honeyed acrobatics seems to mean everything and nothing as Finley luxuriates in the sticky mass. The honey is provocative in the way it emphasizes her body; she is sticky, glistening, her chest rising and falling with exertion. The audience laughs and bursts into spontaneous applause at some of her more acrobatic movements, when she licks her own arms, and particularly when she begins to mime various sexual poses with humor and self-awareness. It is hard not to get caught up in the expression of the sensuality; the honey clings to every part of her, matting her hair, causing her eyelashes to clump.
After a few (very sticky) character impressions where Finley reimagines the inhabitants of A. A. Milne's classic Winnie-the-Pooh as sexual deviants, Finley steps off of the plastic, still dripping with honey. She attempts to shake off as much as she can, crossing offstage as the lights fade to black. The spectators laugh and applaud as Finley comes back for her curtain call, still dripping with honey. It is funny and a little nauseating, and she seems to revel in the moment. She is literally overcome with her own stickiness. The music begins to play again as she luxuriates in the spectators' gaze, dripping onto the stage. The play with honey is both excessive and inevitable; it provides a culmination of the sexually explicit, somewhat deviant displays up until that point. When placed alongside the rest of Finley's work—where food is a metaphor and a stand-in for the grotesque social and cultural abuse of women—the honey becomes humorous and beautiful, albeit somewhat sensually disturbing. With Shut Up and Love Me, Finley's performance career turned a corner, where she could luxuriate in the signs and symbols the food use created, without attempting to match meaning the way she did in the past. Through changing her use of substance, Finley shifts the affect associated with her use of food from one of perpetual disgust and shame to one of ambiguous delight.
Conclusion
Although Finley seemed to alter her associated affect successfully in Shut Up and Love Me, one may question if that action was a step forward or backward. Is this decision to deemphasize content for a sensual experience giving up on the ideological content Finley once considered so central to her performances? Is Finley now unconcerned with content, interested only in provoking generalized sensual responses in her spectators? Although this is a possibility, I would argue it is not a step back or away from performance content if examined alongside the rest of Finley's career. As Gabriel Doucet Donida describes:
Finley's honey dance allows one to re-cover the floating signifier in all its potentiality, in the specific space of performative enactment, through her present glowing/gooey body … we become cognoscenti of Finley's awareness, energy, and political strategy, on stage and in the larger arena of her ‘being-in-the-world.Footnote 87
Doucet Donida believes that Shut Up and Love Me's ambiguous honey-drenched image is decipherable as a culmination of Finley's work to that point, and thus provides the audience with a sense of her own awareness and intentionality. Finley's body of work was not loaded with provocative, disgusting, deviant displays for their own sake, but richly coded in order to provide meaning appropriate and necessary for the moment. In a counterintuitive move, Finley backs off the ideological coding in Shut Up and Love Me, showing the way that food can be used in performance for a specific purpose, even if that purpose is to make meaning more ambiguous. Without considering Finley's decadelong struggle to control the way food use and meaning could work together, Shut Up and Love Me is a sensual but ideologically unclear performance. Taken alongside her entire chocolate-smeared career, though, Finley's ability to use honey as an ambivalent signifier is a remarkable achievement.
Shut Up and Love Me is one of Finley's last performances to date that used food in a provocative, explicit way. Her more recent work has focused on historical women and events: Liza Minnelli in Make Love (2003), Terri Schiavo in The Passion of Terri Schiavo (2006), and Laura Bush in The Dreams of Laura Bush (2006); and new issues regarding sex and politics: Sext Me If You Can (2013) about art, commerce, and private/public sexual behavior, and Written in Sand (2013–14) concerning remembrances of those lost to AIDS. After two decades of using various foods as performance materials, Shut Up and Love Me seems to mark an end for Finley. Coming from an artist who once responded to a question about why she continued to smear herself with food with the wry retort, “Why does Ringo play the drums?” the event is significant.Footnote 88 As of this writing, Shut Up and Love Me closes a door on Finley's use of food as her primary performance material, making a final, definitive statement.
Finley's work examined here charts a wide range of what food in performance can do—invite identification and cause revulsion, concretize meaning and absent it, reveal the body as an excessive symbol or reduce it to an object of disgust. Finley's use of honey in Shut Up and Love Me is not really as ambiguous as it first seemed. As Finley claims, the honey is political in its lack of politics. It is loaded with Finley's newfound awareness that she could indeed change the affect and thus the conversation around her work by adjusting the substance used in performance. In this sense, Finley's work in Shut Up and Love Me is not a regression to a sensually rich but meaning-deficient performance, but a meaningful provocation of a new kind—one that showcased Finley's ability to manipulate food in context to create new affect. Food in performance, then, is not just a volatile, uncontrollable material, or one that circulates at the whim of previously culturally embedded connotations. Although it can be repurposed to slanderous ends, it offers a variety of important affective possibilities that the artist can (albeit with difficulty) redirect to her own purposes. Finley may have lost the explicit horror and thus the ideological critique apparent in her earlier performances, but with Shut Up and Love Me, she was able to guide spectator response toward a more thoughtful interpretation of her body of work.Footnote 89
Determining meaning is always tenuous, especially when performances include sensually provocative materials. Introducing a real substance like food into performance cannot guarantee a specific spectator response: it is bound to reveal intense subjectivity and personal differences of interpretation, as well as accrue affect based on surrounding political and social factors. Despite this, the performance changes undertaken over the course of Karen Finley's career suggest a hopeful possibility for those attempting to use sensually provocative materials as a way to provoke embodied responses as well as intellectual understandings. Finley shows that it is possible to steer spectators' physical and emotional responses toward the reception of an intended message, although it might take a career worth of performances to make that message explicit.
