Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Karen Finley's “The Jackie Look”

2013; Wayne State University Press; Volume: 9; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.13110/storselfsoci.9.1.0135

1932-0280

Holly Hughes,

Cultural Studies and Interdisciplinary Research

Storytelling, Self, Society, Vol. 9, No. 1 (2013), pp. 135–139 Copyright © 2013 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, MI 48201 P E R F O R M A N C E R E V I E W Karen Finley's "The Jackie Look" Holly Hughes I n Karen Finley's latest solo piece, "The Jackie Look," performed at the Laurie Beechman Theater in New York City from January through March 2010, the woman once described in the Village Voice as "a raw quaking id taking the stage" was wearing a crisp, tailored pantsuit, pearls, her dark brown hair styled in an homage to the former First Lady, her delivery more reminiscent of her subject's breathy whisper than the searing rant for which Finley is best known. The press release describes the show as "a present day lecture given by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis at a Dallas photography school." But Finley moved between various styles of delivery ranging from academic lecture referencing psychoanalytic theories of the gaze to personal confession and political satire, shifting from a deliberately imprecise performance of Onassis to an array of Karen Finleys; she changed eyewear , taking off the sunglasses and donning the reading glasses a fifty-something performer requires. The gesture didn't seem to be rehearsed, a signal that "Now I'm Karen" or "Now I'm Jackie"; it seemed to suggest a blurry line between the character performed and the various selves doing the performance. Finley is not interested in mere impersonation or even much in biographical details, though during the seventy-minute lecture projections repeat familiar photos and video clips. She assumes we know plenty about Onassis already. She wore the costume loosely; we could see it slip and slide off; we could see the gaps between the performance and performer. She was less like Meryl Streep or even Karen Finley's "The Jackie Look" Hughes 136 n Karen Finley's "The Jackie Look" Anna Deavere Smith, immersing herself in another to the point of disappearance, than a drag queen who chooses to let you see the male body inside the gestures of femininity, who reminds you that this is a performance, not the real thing. Whatever that is. The congruencies, the gaps, seeing the man behind the curtains: that's the whole point of it. Finley assumed a familiarity with her notoriety as one of the artists targeted by the religious right during the culture wars of the nineties. The audience laughed whenshemadeherentranceinwhitepants andgold-buttonednavyblazerbecause many of Finley's best known works involve nudity and use of her body as a kind of canvas. Finley has referenced other female celebrities in the past. In "Make Love," staged in downtown Manhattan's Fez Club, Finley invited a large and shifting cast of performers to join her onstage in their interpretations of Liza Minnelli; references to 9/11 were mixed with show tunes and stories about Minnelli, who emerged as a symbol of New York City, the talented but self-destructive trouper who never gives up. Martha Stewart has made appearances in both Finley's solo performances and plays; she's a symbol of consumptive greed, of the suffocating trap of traditional female roles. Onassis, the embodiment of glamour, of good taste, of grace under fire, would seem to be the polar opposite of Finley, a prolific artist who's authored several books, exhibited paintings, cut records, and written plays and who is best known for solo performances that feel deliberately unpolished and often provocative. The scripts, a mash up of rant and incantation, laced with poetry, profanity, and politics, are delivered raw; they are meant to jar, disturb, discomfit. Her performance is a clear heir to that of the beat poets but also to that of tent revivalists and street-corner conspiracy theorists, aimed to burn through the comfort of rehearsed virtuosity most actors aim for with a more shamanistic, less-domesticated presence. Former Village Voice critic C. Carr chronicled Finley in her column "On Edge": "She might say or do anything. . . . Onstage Karen Finley represents a frightening and rare presence: an unsocialized woman." Writing in 1990, after Finley and three other performance artists (including myself) had been stripped of...