In the late 1980s, performance artists such as Tim Miller and Karen Finley shook up the arts world with their radical and unembarrased use of sex in their agit-prop attacks on the foibles and injustices of Reagan-era America. Mixing sex and social/political criticism, however, aroused certain Southern Senators, notably the late and unlamented Jesse Helms, who nearly shut down the National Endowment for the Arts for its support of Finley and Miller.

With the eventual concurrence of the U.S. Supreme Court, Miller, Finley and two other provocative performance artists (who were given a very 1960s sobriquet “the NEA Four”) were denied federal funding, and it appeared to many decent citizens that politicians had struck a mighty blow for morality and decency. But things are seldom as they seem.

In reality, the politicians themselves were eager to take center stage in any and all highly-publicized sexual dramas. They simply needed to get pesky, puny actors out of their way. The list of scene-chewing sexual “performance” artists who were once mere politicians includes William Jefferson Clinton, Jim McGreevey, Mark Foley, Larry Craig, David Vitter, and the ex-governer of New York, Eliot Spitzer.

Finley chose Spitzer and his addiction to over-priced hookers as her lecture topic—“The Performance of the Apology and the Separation of Sex and State”—in her Thursday (Jan. 29) performance piece at the new Sushi urban arts center in downtown’s trendy East Village. Yes, it has come to this (you may wipe away that tear from your cheek): talented, versatile performance artists are reduced to giving power-point, university style lectures about the real performance artists, our national politicians.

I am aching to judge Finley by her own high standards of performance, but when ex-governor Rod Blagojevich takes center stage spouting complete poems by Alfred Lord Tennyson in response to pointed questions from the press and later suavely re-invents himself as the new Ghandi on TV talk shows, the bar has been raised significantly. Politics has upstaged performance art.

Changing costumes to signal the personnae of Eliot (oversized white shirt and a thick swath of ties around her neck) and Silda Wall Spitzer (tastefully tailored blue suit jacket), Finley rifled through a stack of weighty topics from the perspective of each Spitzer: love and hate, shame and pride, sexual satisfaction and dis-satisfaction, parental control and parental neglect, spinning apology and craving apology. Her best line was a snappy take-off on that tacky 1970 movie “Love Story”: “Love means having to say you’re sorry.”

Nearly every point of Finley’s lecture was covered in Maureen Dowd’s NY Times columns after last spring’s airing of the Spitzer debacle, although Finley gets higher marks for more poetic expression and the ability to use specific sexual language that the limitations of Times’ style prevents.

Tapping into the anger of the younger Finley, professor Finley mounted a stirring defense of legalizing prostitution and expounded on the continuing plight of women as exploited and colonized beings by the male hierarchy. But this came rather late in the 90-minute show and sounded more obligatory than urgent. And the confident, assertive Finley is the last woman I expect to see “colonized” by male manipulation.

I should add that there is no derisive intent calling Finley professor: her program bio states that her current position is “arts professor in Art and Public Policy at New York University.” At least we did not have to turn in our blue books at the end of the evening.

CLICK PROGRAM HERE