A Different Kind of Intimacy: The Collected Writings of Karen Finley

In 1978, Karen Finley was arrested while portraying ""a mix of red-light-district prostitute and locked-up psychopath"" in the window of a defunct JC Penney. This was, as she puts it, ""the beginning of my career causing psychic disturbances."" In a retrospective that should appeal to fans and scholars of performance art, Finley, well-known as one of the NEA 4, presents the full scope of her socially conscious art, from performance texts and elaborate installations to segments of her already-published parodies of the self-help movement and Winnie-the-Pooh. Her direct imagery has forced her audience to look at the hopelessness of the disenfranchised, the cruelty of misogyny and the heartbreaking self-betrayal in a victim's own sense of shame. In short, muddled transitional essays, Finley describes her growth as an artist in the pressure cooker created by an eight-year First Amendment battle, the AIDS crisis and her father's suicide. Numerous photographs, drawings and reproduced documents, including a copy of her father's suicide note, deliver the visual context for her writings. Often distressing and downright ugly, this collection expresses the enormous personal and creative costs Finley absorbed while fighting in the culture wars, but, better yet, it presents the ""organic explosion"" at the heart of her confrontational art. (Nov.)