In the world according to Karen Finley, George W. Bush’s Oedipal complex propelled the US invasion of Iraq, and the infantile president carries on an imagined long-running affair with domestic diva Martha Stewart. Finley says she wrote George & Martha (Verso, 2006) from Stewart’s perspective because she doesn’t think Bush would be interested in writing a book.
George & Martha is filled with its share of outrageous moments — the president sniffs coke, smokes dope, expresses fear that Osama bin Laden has inhabited his being, and gets fellated by Stewart’s patient, long-suffering mother figure. Such stuff isn’t surprising coming from Finley, a New York-based performance artist whose edgier work has incurred the wrath of the National Endowment for the Arts. Her satire, set during the time of the 2004 Republican National Convention, nonetheless resonates with a certain magic realism, at least for critics of the Bush administration.
While the text more than holds up as a distinct satire, the artist contextualizes it in her usual role of “infiltrating and appropriating” culture. The book is adorned with Finley’s lush and amusing New Yorker-style illustrations — a nod to both Seymour Hersh’s groundbreaking reporting on the Iraq war and to how the most dismal news of the nation is regularly interspersed with ridiculously sunny diversions. George & Martha is also marked by references to Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, described by Finley as the first American drama. All in all, says the performance artist, who wore a red, white, and blue cape as she spoke before a sparse audience Monday evening at the RISD Auditorium, “I am considering the trauma of our nation.”
Finley, whose credits include serving as a professor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, has the lucid intelligence to easily fit in an academic setting. To hear her tell it, though, being cast as a troublemaker is never far away, even in more innocent moments. Arriving by train in Providence, she says, a police officer began following her “because he said I had a certain look about me.” Citing this encounter, Finley says, “The artist is so often written off just as being the crazy one.”
The pointed pairing of George W. Bush and Martha Stewart speaks to her belief that the country is led by a privileged boob, while the far more talented Stewart is relegated to being a national domestic figure, even though she “has the ability to micromanage better than Rumsfeld.” In response to an audience question, Finley says she believes Stewart, who spoke to RISD students just a few days earlier, “is an artist. I think she’s a very creative person.”
For all its deliberately absurdist elements, George & Martha is also a serious work, and Finley is hardly alone in believing that Bush, because of the ill-fated war in Iraq, should be on trial. The more interesting question is why most Americans regard his increasingly unpopular presidency with abiding apathy.
