Sinéad O'Connor And Karen Finley | Jump In The River

Sinéad O'Connor with Karen Finley

Jump In The River

London, UK: Ensign Records, 1988

12", 45 RPM, vinyl record

Edition size unknown

Sinead O'Connor and performance artist Karen Finley both released their debut albums in 1987; The Lion and the Cobra and The Truth Is Hard to Swallow, respectively. 

The pair met the following year when they were both performing as part of a concert hosted by the human rights activist group Refuse & Resist (see their Keith Haring designed logo below). The event took place the New York Palladium, and featured performances by Afrika Bambaataa, De La Soul, Lenny Kaye, D.O.A., MC Lyte, and others. 

O'Connor had recently contributed a new song to Jonathan Demme's film Married to the Mob, and was preparing a single release. She invited Finley to participate in the 12" remix of Jump in the River, to be issued that October. 

True to form, Finley's vocal contribution ensured no radio station would ever play it: 

Mother, do you have a prick?

Yes, I do, just like cows do

Mother, do you have a prick?

Yes, I do, just like cows do

After my mother washed me, powdered me, I insisted that she masturbate me

You wonder why I got panic attacks

You dreamed you ate me through my silken panties

But baby, you got it wrong

I don’t smile when I come

Jump-start me

Jump-start me

Jump, jump, jump, jump

Ain't got a leg, but i got a stump

Ain't got a dick, baby, but i got a pump

Ain't got a titty, but i got a lump

Never knew how to walk, so i gotta jump

Jump-start me

Jump-start me

Jump in my arch

Jump on the starch

He loved to wear silk knotted scarves around his neck, baby

Finger them, finger the scarves

He twists the scarf around my neck, baby

I wish he was twisting it around my clit

I mean, my dick, i mean, my cock, baby

Twist it, twist it good, twist that silky scarf

Well, you sell those ties on madison avenue

Work me, work me good

And you perform that magic trick good

By taking that silk tie, oiled, knotted

Pull it out of my ass

Oh, let me come, let me come

(I used to play it at closing time, when I wanted to empty the record store where I worked of customers). 

Village Voice critic Robert Christgau described Finley's part as "the voice of mad lust on a dance remix of the ravishingly sexual Jump in the River." The single failed to chart and the song (without Finley) was included on O'Connor's breakthrough smash sophomore album I Do Not Want What I Have Not Got. 

It was announced yesterday by her family that Sinéad O'Connor had died at the age of 56. No date or cause of death were given. 

For another performance artist related track by O'Connor, click here for her cover of Yoko Ono's Death of Samantha. 

Karen Finley | Enough Is Enough

Karen Finley

Enough Is Enough

New York City, USA: Poseidon Press, 1993

[110] pp., 13.34 x 1.27 x 20.32 cm., hardcover

Edition size unknown

Subtitled Weekly Meditations for Living Dysfunctionally, this slim volume with pictorial laminated boards promises readers that they too can be "glamorous, chic, popular and dysfunctionally correct". It is the artist's second book, following 1990's Shock Treatment.

"Multimedia artist Karen Finley, best known for enraging Jesse Helms with her NEA-funded acts involving yams and chocolate, will enjoy the best sort of revenge if this slyly hilarious lampoon of the self-help and daily meditation genres gains the attention that it deserves. Fifty-two entries instruct post-dysfunctional and recovered readers in such arts as "Bragging," "Being a Bitch" and "Staying in Bed all Day." Bizarre, child-like illustrations of people heighten the humor; the punch line is that Finley's advice on these topics is sound. Each entry ends with a hint, tip, example or motto: "Everything is always more pleasant when we are the center of attention" ("Self-Centering"); "Make sure that you still brush your teeth even if you're staying in bed all day." This slender volume is a potential point-of-purchase phenomenon."

- Publishers Weekly

Lawrence Weiner | New Order, Certain General + Karen Finley poster

Lawrence Weiner 

New Order, Certain General + Karen Finley poster

New York City, USA: Club "1018", 1986

14.9 x 10.8 cm.

Edition size unknown

Eye Magazine #14 "Cobalt Myth Mechanics": Karen Finley

Karen Finley

I'm an Ass Man 

Folio 25 from

[Various Artists]
Eye Magazine #14 "Cobalt Myth Mechanics"
New York City, USA: Eye Publications, 1986
[unpaginated], 27.9 × 22.9 × 1.9 cm., spiral bound
Edition of 200

I’m an Ass Man is an early monologue by Karen Finley, often performed while smearing herself with kidney beans. It opens with the bold statement "No, Herr Schmidt, I will not shit in your mouth, even if I do get to know you. I just want to smell the gas pass from your ass" and gets increasingly provocative from there. 

The work is told primarily from the perspective of a man fascinated with women's bodies but ultimately repulsed by them. It describes a rape in the subway:

"I just wanted to get my cock inside some of the rump roast action...I wanted to get her against that cold slimy rat-turd wall and fuck the hell out of her."

However, when the rapist discovers his victim is menstruating, he flees in terror: 

"I mean bitch, you on the snatch rag. How can you be on the snatch rag during the best rape in your life?"

He runs to clean his hands and learns that he can't wash it from his cuticles, his fingernails, his lifeline. The last line of the piece (which is handwritten by Finley in coloured pencil on the photocopied page in "Cobalt Myth Mechanics") is

"It would be a long time before I used that hand to shake my dick after I pissed". 

The page is available from Printed Matter, here, for $500 US. An audio version of the work can be heard on the LP The Uproar Tapes, Volume 1 (released the same year) or at Ubuweb, here. 

"Some of her work from this period--the monologue “I’m an Ass Man,” for example--shows Finley being tough-minded and funny, at once goofing on and inhabiting a vicious kind of aggression, viscerally invoking how much people want to get inside each other’s pants, revealing the lie in every kind of decorum."

- Laurie Stone, 2000, Los Angeles Times

Eye Magazine #14 "Cobalt Myth Mechanics"

[Various Artists]
Eye Magazine #14 "Cobalt Myth Mechanics"
New York City, USA: Eye Publications, 1986
[unpaginated], 27.9 × 22.9 × 1.9 cm., spiral bound
Edition of 200

Paul Hasegawa Overacker is a writer, director and producer best known for Gallery Beat and his 2008 film Guest of Cindy Sherman.

Gallery Beat was a gonzo video tour of the New York art scene, which ran from 1993 to 2001 on public access television, and was revived a few years later on the web as gallerybeat.net. The site is now too defunct, and has moved over to Youtube, with 133 subscribers. The show featured Chuck Close, Brice Marden, Andres Serrano, Cecily Brown, Alex Katz, Vanessa Beecroft, Sean Landers, Kevin Landers, Fred Tomaselli, Fred Wilson and many others.

Billed as "Art Coverage That Sucks Less", the show's irreverent take (shouting "those girls are hot" at the Guerrilla Girls, for example) quickly made it some high-profile enemies. Julian Schnabel called it “a masturbatory exercise in stupidity.”

One of the artists featured on Gallery Beat was Cindy Sherman, who Paul H-O (as he is often called) met when she arrived at an opening with Steve Martin. Six months later they began a relationship which lasted six years. He began his film about her while they were together and finished it many years later. Sherman issued a statement saying that she regretted her early cooperation. I haven't seen it, but it sounds like a film about the humiliation of having a more famous partner, and (in the spirit of revenge porn) seems designed primarily to humiliate Sherman retrospectively.

Years prior, in 1985, Paul H-O edited an issue of Eye Magazine. Possibly because of the generic name, this is the only issue I've been able to find any information about. Titled "Cobalt Myth Mechanics", the 14th issue featured featured contributions from Robert Atkins, Perry Bard, Jo Babcock, Roger Boyce, Lee Roy Champagne, Vincent Desiderio, Nancy Evans, Tom Finkelpearl, Karen Finley, Jeff Goodman, David Hammons, C K Kuebel, Dona Ann McAdams, Tom Sarrantonio, Lori Seid, Janice Yudell and John Zax.

Many of the works were handmade and unique. The work is in the collection of the MoMA and several other museums, and now sells for upwards of a thousand dollars. David Hammons' contribution is sometimes removed from the volume and sold individually, at up to three times that amount.

"Cobalt Myth Mechanics" was advertised as an edition of 200, but reportedly fewer than 150 were actually produced.

Individual entries will follow in the next few posts.