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Off the Wall with Karen Finley
February 17-18, 2001 The Warhol starts the new
year not with a whimper, but with a decided bang. As part of the museum’s Off the Wall joint venture with Three
Rivers Arts Festival and New York’s Performance Space (P.S.) 122, the first
two months feature artists Claude Wampler (January 27), and Karen Finley (February
17 and 18). Soon after, Will
Power (March 10), and John Kelly and David Del Tredici (May 12), grace The
Warhol with their unique performance visions. Finley’s name may be most
familiar to the audience of Off the
Wall, given the spotlight that she and three other artists (including Tim
Miller, who performed to two packed houses at The Warhol last October)
received a few years ago. Karen
Finley was dubbed by the media one of the “NEA Four” when her request for a
National Endowment for the Arts grant was denied in 1990 after her work was
considered “obscene” by committee members. As a result, she has been both vilified and
chastised. However, she says
today from her home in New York, that she was not discouraged either
personally or professionally.
Ultimately, she says, it has strengthened her both as a human being
and as an artist, recently churning out an even larger amount of work than
usual. She has just completed a
new book, A Different Kind of Intimacy,
and, as she has been for the past two decades, she performs her uber-unique,
hyper-critical, often food-covered and vulgarity-drenched
socio-cultural-savvy pieces to rave reviews. Of a recent P.S. 122 performance of Finley’s piece “Shut Up and Love Me,”
Maura Nguyn Donohue noted in the publication The Dance Insider,
“She slices through tales of a woman overcome by historically female
neuroses with a razor-sharp wit and intense self-awareness…she is a
relentless force…a demon caught in corporeal glory. Sharing the same space with her is frightening,
exhausting, and exhilarating.” Finley says her own work
is “a Rorschach test for the culture wars,” and explains in her confident tone, “I do performances,
which are not as linear as Hello Dolly,
in terms of having a story line. My performances are more associative, more
Jungian or Joycean. And I use my body,” she assuages, “but I never humiliate
people.” She calls the piece she
will do at The Warhol “a ballet in honey,” explaining, “I kind of take on
certain issues. It’s like buying a wonderful table and just going around the
room and looking at it from different points of view.” She stresses that this
piece doesn’t have a specific cause, "Which I think is probably more
like Warhol, because I don’t think that his work was ever, you
know—political… But in that way the piece is
political, because it’s really just
about sex…the message is much more psychological.” As individualistic on the
page as she is on stage, Finley's A
Different Kind of Intimacy collects not only her work as an artist, but
also her feelings about the work. “It’s a collection of some of my selected
writings, my performances, essays, and my installations and visual work,” she
says. “It’s also a memoir that weaves the personal journey that my work goes
through, and…what this work means on a more intimate level for me,
psychologically. I explore
having an 'heroic complex', and it’s fascinating, divulging that information.
It’s so personal.” As Donohue concludes in
her "Shut up and Love Me" review, “That Finley’s work is still considered explicit and shocking is
a startling reminder of how far women’s sexual liberation has still not
come.” The Off the Wall series is supported by a grant from The Heinz
Endowments.
Tresa’s Excellent
Adventure
The Warhol shares ideas with a Brazilian museum of contemporary art When Houston native
Tresa Varner signed on to The Andy Warhol Museum’s education department five
years ago, she never anticipated the exquisite travel opportunity that would
open before her. After a rigorous two-year
selection process, the American Association of Museums (AAM) picked a
Warhol-proposed program as one of only 27 recipients for their 1999—2001
International Partnership Among Museums (IPAM) award. The goal of the award,
says Ed Able, President and CEO of AAM’s Washington headquarters, is to
“provide U.S. museums with a unique opportunity to establish lasting
inter-institutional ties with partner institutions outside this country by
developing and conducting joint or complementary projects.” The Warhol's Varner was
then chosen to travel to South America for five weeks to work with the Museu
de Arte Contemporanea (MAC) in Niteroi, Brazil. During her visit, she and
Luiz Guilherme Vergara, the MAC’s Director of the Division of Art Education,
worked with his MAC staff to compare and explore the educational philosophies
and practices of the two museums. “Pittsburgh and Niteroi have a lot of
population similarities,” notes Tresa. “You have international visitors, and
you have people coming who are specifically interested in seeing the
collection of a contemporary museum. But we’re looking for ways to engage our
immediate communities--people who may not have much connection to
contemporary art at all. Our
project in Niteroi was to look at ways to engage the casual visitor into
looking at and thinking about contemporary art, to find projects that promote
interaction between the public and the art collection.” She and Guilherme,
"spent a lot of time exchanging ideas about what we do." She had arrived in Niteroi at the
right time. “I stepped into the
middle of work on an exhibition that Guilherme had curated, From Materials to Internal Differences
…. The exhibition was already
up, and they were creating resource materials that would go with the
exhibition when it travels.” Varner also had the
opportunity to travel to other cities in Brazil. "The community outreach programs I was able to visit
were inspirational to me, personally and professionally," she says. One was Projecto Axé in Salvador,
Bahia, a program that works with children who live on the street. Axé has developed an alternative
political-pedagogical approach to art education that offers students a safe
and caring environment, in which they can work on their civil rights and
responsibilities, while giving them access to art and all its forms of
expressions. “For Axé, art
is seen as education in and of itself, because no matter where people live or
what they do, art stimulates people’s feelings, thoughts and actions, and
touches their souls. I was very
lucky to be able to talk to other educators about their program’s strengths
and weaknesses. Sometimes we get so caught up in the details and logistics of
running youth programs, that we lose the sight of why we are doing this in
the first place.” In the second part of
the exchange, Guilherme visits The Warhol to work on similar projects and
programs, such as Urban Interview,
the city-sponsored program that Tresa runs for Pittsburgh youth-- a magazine
styled after Warhol’s own Interview.
Guilherme’s visit to The Warhol depends upon when he can arrange his
sabbatical at The Universidade Fluminense, where he teaches semiotics and
arts administration. He is
likely to arrive in February, or May, 2001. “We’re really excited
about having him come here,” says Tresa, “because he brings an experience
from a whole other realm. The collection in Niteroi is all contemporary
Brazilian artists, from the 1950’s through to the ‘90’s, and the meat of the
collection is abstract
artwork. So …you could have just
this one slash of paint on the wall, one square,” she notes, and this can be
even more off-putting to the casual observer than, say, eleven sequential
prints of Elvis Presley. “We have it easier with Warhol's art,” she says,
“because his work references American popular culture, and people already
have some connection to it when they walk into our museum.” “It was inspiring to see
how they’re working with these issues in Niteroi, like engaging the general
public in dialogues about works that at first they feel no immediate
connection to. It's as if a wall
comes between the public and the piece, and together we have been trying to
find new and creative ways to break down the wall." |
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Copyright (c) 2000 CARNEGIE magazine |
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