Fri. June 4 

   Karen Finley cqwon’t be naked or covered in chocolate. Candied yams will not penetrate her body. No honey drips.
  Those are the totems by which you might identify Finley. Now 54, she is the performance artist who got in all sorts of hot water in the early ‘90s when the National Endowment for the Arts took heat for granting her money to stage transgressive, angry, feminist – and often nude – performance pieces.
   On June 4 at the Peabody Essex Museum, Finley will be wearing a tailored black jacket and white slacks, pearls and iconic dark sunglasses. Finley will be Jackie K., or Jackie O. Or Karen Finley channeling America’s most famous First Lady and Grieving Widow in “The Jackie Look.” (Can’t help but think of the Human Sexual Response song “Jackie Onassis.” Look it up on www.youtube.com or the new disco version by HSR’s Dini Lamot.)
   We spoke from on the phone, with Finley back in New York state. She had just returned from Austria, where she had sculpted “Open Heart,” a glazed seven-foot ceramic heart composed of 420 tiny hearts. They represent 420 children killed by lethal heart injections at the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp. It was an exhibit outside the crematorium site.
   
JSInk: What made you want to do Jackie?
Finley: Since 2001, I’ve been doing performances where I’ve been integrating public figures into them. After 9/11, I did a performance looking at it through the eyes of Liza Minnelli.  I also created a play, “George & Martha,” which was about an affair between George Bush and Martha Stewart. It was like the George and Martha of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” I did “The Dreams of Laura Bush,” where I created Laura Bush’s dream journal. I narrated the dream and projected the dreams on screen. And then two years ago, I was in Albany at the time of the Eliot Spitzer scandal, and I created a performance as Spitzer, his wife and the sex worker. There was a line where I was examining the apology, the women, and the larger issues. As his wife I said, “You haven’t seen grief like this since Jackie.” And I started thinking about women and emotion and what is projected onto them. That’s how I became interested in Jackie.
And then…
I was invited to give a talk on photography in Dallas – only two blocks from the grassy knoll - and I decided to give a lecture as Jackie Kennedy returning to Dallas, looking at the images.
How do you regard this piece? I’m doing it as an illusion or an appropriation rather than a traditional theater piece.

It’s not Walt Disney or Tina Fey doing it. Consider it impressionism in the application.
How does your Jackie look?
That’s a very important question and that’s what I had to deliberate. I decided to have several pieces of timeless clothing, a classic look, including an Oleg Cassini jacket, and three different wigs. I feel it would be perverse for me to be wearing something from that famous day in 1963. People have an idea from the pictures, but when she’d go out she’d wear different types of clothing. 

Is this piece as if Jackie were alive and commenting on what's gone down over the years?
 Do I think she could have said some of these things? I would hope to think so. But it would be naive to think because I’ve read 12 books and studied her for six months, that I could actually get her completely. I feel what I do know is about her thoughtfulness and sense of reflection. I would hope that would be in there. It’s definitely not a crude work. It’s an emotional work. There are people that start crying when they come to the performance.
You visited the museum at the old Texas Book Despository, where Oswald shot Kennedy. Isn’t there something strange about that being a museum?
In my performance, there are parts where you look at the irony,or the macabre, in terms of American capitalism and I use the museum.

This piece is your extrapolation of what you think she might say have said.
 I think the piece is what we didn’t get to see her say. It’s also about the audience, how America uses photography. That’s the reason why I’m here with the JFK/Avedon collection at PEM. I’m really talking about the function of looking at trauma in photography, how we distance ourselves and how we use it.
What attitude do you bring?

I consider it to be an homage. I don’t consider it to be a parody. I consider it to be fiction, even though everything I’m writing is based on research. What I do is I photograph the photographs of Jackie and then create montages with pictures and music. In the beginning, it’s light-spirited, using Britney Spears’ “Piece of Me” and Fergie’s “Glamorous.” And that would be a commentary on our way of memory and commemoration. At another point, I’m talking about the aggressiveness in Jackie’s shopping, that being the only allowed place for a woman to show her aggressiveness. She was a shopper. How does that fit in?
This piece has no nudity. No foodstuff. Would it be PG-rated if it were a movie? 
I don’t think so because I think the violence wouldn’t be suitable for eight-year-old children to see. I think high school is fine. As to the other situation in my work, I’ve used nudity just in the same way that let’s say Picasso did – not in every painting, but he did paint nudes. I’m coming from a visual background. When I’m about to create a work, I’m not thinking: “OK, how can I get naked? Where does naked come in?” Here, I wanted to look at the idea of giving a talk and have that be a performance.

The 75-minute performance starts at 7:30. Tickets: $30.

(This is an expanded version of a piece that ran in last week’s Boston Phoenix, www.thephoenix.com.)

161 Essex St, Salem, 978-745-9500 www.pem.org