Kate Zambreno

Sedate Thursday night at Bored-ers, crowds milling around mechanically flipping through bestsellers, clutching their double-decaf somethings, while an army of zombie shoppers outside are still forcing their way through the rain on Michigan Avenue.

A wild shock of red hair saunters into the almost-empty room on black high heels, plants a designer handbag down on the table and surveys the scene. Hands on her hips, long legs wrapped in black leather pants so tight you can tell what brand of cigarettes are in her pocket, Karen Finley, the controversial performance artist and naked provocateur, leans back and belts out a sultry, quaking laugh. "It must be the Gore thing, right!"

Finley is back in Chicago, where she was born and got her start, to promote her new collection of writings "A Different Kind of Intimacy," and she is in love with the irony and just plain art of it all: where she has been, how she's arrived, especially reading at the Borders set by the backdrop of Michigan Avenue and the cheesy Victoria's Secret music from next door. Right before an orgasmic climax in a monologue she breaks character and asks the crowd, "Should I use the F-word? No, there's little children, I'll use screw," and then resumes, screaming "screw me" at the top of her lungs. And then she stops and laughs for no reason.

The next morning, I meet with the infamous "chocolate-smeared" woman who was Jessie Helm's worst wet dream as part of the NEA Four, last-year's Ms. Magazine's Woman of the Year and one-time Playboy centerfold. Intimidating to "do lunch" with a woman of such mythical credentials, intimidating also because you're not sure what to expect, whether her on-stage persona is always on. It's surprising to find her literally very much with her clothes on -- gregarious, yet slightly reserved. Between nibbles of her BLT she rambles on excitedly about anything and everything, but never really wants to stick too long with any subject that doesn't interest her. She calls her new show, "Shut Up and Love Me," "post-post-feminist": "In this one I embrace and deconstruct the desire feminists, including myself, have tried to abandon. In this piece there's the freedom, and then the chaos, that you're part of the gaze, rather than being a victim." Part of the way she does this, of course, is by deconstructing a strip show and performing a naked ballet while rolling around in honey.

"Creativity is hard to understand," she sighs, staring at me with startling, intense eyes. "And there's been a generalization in the Western world to Sylvia Plathize artists like myself." Suddenly, she seems exhausted, tired of having to explain herself, of having to repeat over and over the reasons why she is and does what she does. As she flips through her kinky red hair, I'm reminded of a line from "Lady Lazarus": "Out of the ash I arise with my red hair / and I eat men like air." Still, poking at the stiff, phallic meringue centerpiece of my key lime pie, I'm overwhelmed by the surreality of my situation -- eating lunch with the performance artist famous and infamous for using anything edible in her pieces.

(2000-11-16)

Also by Kate Zambreno

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