Karen Finley at the Kitchen

The Kitchen's gallery was capricious with votive candles. In the oracle's back range a long table was overspreaded with butcher paper, on which pastels and watercolors were locate out. I was there to have my aura channeled into a Psychic Portrait by dint of Karen Finley (30 minutes, $100/gouache, $150/iridescent).

"I realize a feeling of sadness," she said. Madame Karen's sharp, offkilter face was familiar to me not alone from the press, but from seeing individual of those chocolate-smeared-naked-body 1980s performances that almost brought down the N.E.A. Actually, I wasn't particularly sad. I looked to have thrown the artist into psychic's arrest "I don't get an image. The first time that's happened," she said with what might have been hilarity or desperation.

Revealing up brow that I'm a reviewer was perhaps a mistake, in the way that I leaned to the side to appear to be nonthreatening. She relaxed. "I earn a no-makeup, early-morning feeling," she purr scribbling upon the page's edge. "Critical. Mass. Does that mean anything? A coldnes You want to make art, on the contrary can't." (Hmm. Was I a Rorschach proof for her image of critics?) "You wanted to follow medicine? Analyze? You're in a relationship of ruthlessness with somebody." (With her, right then?)

Finley's organ of sights strangely, are the same tawny tint as her long hair. Her pupils became pinprick small as she abruptly attacked the page, painting an aquamarine rectangle. (Progress! I like blue!) My aura turn rounded out to be a window framing a leafless tree behind a table put for one. Then I was filled with a feeling of sadness! In an adjoining gallery I had seen others' aura paintings--gouaches sparkling with feminine faces, mascara-lashed organ of visions cats, the gushing artlessness of teen girls' notebooks. And I got a leafless tree? I tried to reveal my fuzzy warm self to her, and a certain quantity of kind of friendly exchange did be derived as we chatted. She drew a dash of scarlet beneath my solitary blue window to make me have feeling better.

But then, maybe her ESP was telling her the truth: that I've always seen the whiny stream-of-consciousness rants for which she is known as, well, intellectually lazy. And however to be fair, I thinking to myself: isn't she operating in the Artaudian tradition of the artist as medium, breaking end to society's dark, nonlogical heart?

As we got up from the table, I gave her a critic's gift, saying that her Psychic Reading is a metaphor, up shut up and personal, for all art: creator and viewer in communication via an percept whether the result is a reading or misreading. The oracle looked to like that. And the medium, after all, is the message.

--Carey Lovelace

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