Having somewhat familiarity with Karen Finley's work, most recently to note, having seen her perform at the Pussy Riot defense team conference last September at NYU School of Law, I was not surprised by the title of her latest talk: The Money Shot: Roundtable with Karen Finley.  Presented last Friday at the New Museum to kick off the Ideas City Festival, it brought together creatives around the obstacles of funding and supporting one's own practice.  Having come this far as one of the NEA 4, the four artists who were defunded during the culture wars in the 90's due to provocative work, Finley chose a topic of discussion that was neither a surprise.  And discussions were to be had.  They were not unlike those during a workshop on re-thinking systems and artistic processes at Invisible Dog in Brooklyn this past March.

We arrived to find workshop worksheets lovingly placed on each chair.  The workshop worksheet demanded: "Liberate yourself from the end product and commit to the process." To destabilize process, vitalize the artist space as generative, opening up possibilities within us, self-determinacy.  How are we supporting our work already?  Empowering reciprocity.  Does anyone ever work by themselves?

At one moment, Finley described how endless and impossible it is to escape public funding from the park to the museum, recognizing the proximities of sanctioned spaces in everyday encounters.  How are we implicated?  How do we participate in exploiting influences?  To honestly critique the process, finding tempo, timing within it without exterior markers.

What was not addressed however was the erotic opening of the talk's moniker: The Money Shot.  Not a peep from Finley, or the institution.

The Money Shot has two meanings.  One: it is defined as the most provocative moment in a film or performance.  The most profitable. (This is what the dictionary told me.)  Two: It is also known as the moment, or series of moments perhaps, when a guy orgasms in a porno. The cum shot.  This is what I thought of.  For better or worse.

Which brings me to write of secondly, though by no means the lesser of importance, the series of four performances that shortly followed Finley's Roundtable, Performance Beyond the Limits: Short Works.  The NEA 4 collaborated with four other curators to select four New York-based artists whose work questioned the limits of status quo funding for performance.  The four artists were invited for a week-long research residency to create more sustaining artistic practices exceeding those limits.  Limits delineated by whom, you might wonder, are we outside the limits?  Is this about inclusivity?

Salley May, "You're just a sex fiend looking for a biscuit."                            

Beyond

First to go is Salley May with "The Flip Side."  A tall, heavily-made-up vaudevillian.  She leaves the room, the lights go off.  She comes back, wrapped in lights.  A leggy Christmas tree.  She leaves.  A spotlight comes.  She comes back.  The tree is actually a paper dress with money stuck to it, somewhat erratically.  Her hands are handcuffed behind her back.  She stomps off the dress.  She screams, "You're just a sex fiend looking for a biscuit."  She's wrapped in caution tape.  "Guess what I am! Neeeeew Yooork Cityyyy!"  She approaches the audience.  "YOU can't keep me in the corner!"  They start to unravel her as she moves around the crowd. "YOU'RE in on it and that's the news.  If you're there, you're part of it."

Salley Mae is a downtown artist since '87.  She curates Avant-Garde-Arama at P.S.122 and works with the mentally disabled through theater workshops.

Then there's Brigham Mosley with "Saint Brando."  Grey slacks, blue lips, blue eyebrows, black and white video projection of the Marlon Brando behind him.  "No one can touch my sexiness."  He says his boyfriend has an obsession with Brando.  "I don't think we know how to be with other people now.  I don't know how to be with people anymore."  He talks quickly. He's afraid he can't measure up.  He rips open his shirt.  "Now I am Beyonce."  He states, "My sentimentality has become radical."  His speech slows.  "I'm just a boy in blue lipstick."

Mosley is a queer writer/performer from southwest Oklahoma. He has a BFA in Theatre Studies.  His other solo works include: Body Talk, Glitter Nation, Magic Man, and Oh Whatta Beautiful Mo[u]rnin,' which have been shown throughout New York City.

Next, Erin Markey. "$ong$ by Hurricane Sandy and the Dardy Family Live at the Psoriasis Teen Chapel."  A willingness to pursue austerity: a fresh face, a mic, no raging costume. Stand-up comedy.  Using the Dardy Family to talk about her own.  She sings.  With an accompanist, with an imaginary piano.  About Hurricane Sandy.  "Hurr is not afraid of my body.  Hurr is not afraid to go deep."

Markey is a performer.  She is part of the New York-based company Half Straddle.  She has received NYFA's 2012 Cutting Edge Artist Fund Grant.

Lastly, Tobaron Waxman's "Anthem."  A video projection of a vague body in black paint appears.  It dissolves.  He walks on-stage.  He picks up the electric razor from the table.  He picks up a mirror.  He begins to shave his hair.  Front to back.  It is longish, dark, unruly.  He is careful.  He stops.  He puts the mirror down.  He puts the electric razor down.  He sweeps the hair into a clear bowl.  He picks up the electric razor.  He picks up the mirror.  He begins again.  Stops.  Sweeps.  Shaves.  And again, so on.  Stops, sweeps, much to the impatient audience's dismay, shaves.  After some time it becomes amusing— stops, sweeps, shaves— he burns the hair in the bowl.  He stands next to the table behind a music stand.  He begins to sing versions of the Star Spangled Banner in another language woven into other anthems I assume.  I later find out it is Hebrew.

Waxman is an interdisciplinary time-based artist working particularly in performance and digital media.

How the four artists stretched the ways in which humor allows us to articulate and explore a darker shade of sensuality, to re-examine the body perhaps beyond fetish into emergences and agencies of desire, remind me of how the female orgasm is actually accounted for with

A Scene of Ringing Bells in the 1972 Infamous Campy Porn Flick Deep Throat 

And how the money shot is no longer reserved for a predominantly male-oriented economy of pleasure. (1)  There was an explicit performative framing of all four bodies inherent in the viewing apparatus of the museum, and yet how to shift pleasures in viewing, a re-making of identity narratives through desire.  They, and maybe directly less so with Waxman, were looking at us as we were looking at them.  It was an invited exchange of display through the mechanisms of labor of accommodating each other in humor.  We were entertaining them as they were entertaining us, the live body feeding off such economies of pleasure exchange, the joke, the satisfaction of the laughter that follows, the back and forth, the suspended in-between.  In some ways extending ourselves beyond our boundaries of comfort, encompassing our zones of familiarity in others, as what makes us laugh can often bring about a release from fear, or at least a minimization of what is at stake to manageability.

In conflating money and pleasure, the money shot brings to surface the dirty, desirable, almost unspeakable.  It brings us to fetish.  And after the fetishistic money shot, what is left?  A comedown from a high, a drug, a downward slope?  What is left to consume after we've already consumed it?  What is left is to be desired.  Desire needs nothing, at once upbeat and vacuous.  Where does that leave us and how do we go beyond the sensationalism, the varied and complex nuances of shock value?  What is the orgasmic surplus?  Commodifed desires?  Nothing tangible, that's for sure.  Conditions for the appearance of deviant bodies, maybe, those extreme ends of desire.

Maybe it's more to do with giving ourselves a certain amount of room and permisivity.  A space of honesty.  And how rarely we are honest with ourselves and those around us moving meaning in the fragile texture of desire.

We are all hungering to be filled.  To thrive on the threshold of an inside, outside as encounter, peristaltic.  How do I desire to participate in the world and how does it participate in me?

During the roundtable, Finley asked, as if a dissatisfied skeptic, "What does humor cost us?"

Artist in photos: Salley May              

Photos by: Angeli 

ENDNOTES

1. Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and The "Frenzy of the Visible," (University of California Press, 1989), 106 - 119.