His self-portraits in the shower and bath are flat and filled with quietude. Linearity juxtaposed with flesh, plus something unspoken, being charitable I see Hockney. What it lacks besides depth is color, being only tan, black, white, grey, and George’s pink flesh. The shadows are confusing, the perspective somehow warped, the shower seems both vast and crowded, Dubya is standing awkwardly to the side as the viewer looks on… at the subject looking at himself in a tiny mirror. People are busy looking into his soul, asking if there is one. They call this evidence of the emptiness of his mind. What, exactly, are ex-presidents supposed to paint?
How do we value Dubya’s work? Take the Francis Bacon triptych of Lucian Freud, which was sold for $142M, the highest sum ever paid for art at auction. Here is a famous artist painting three perspectives of another famous artist, but here is an ex-president of America painting world leaders. What is the meaning of Bacon’s representation of Freud, and what motivations and momentous trades were transferred from Dubya’s memory and onto the creases on his counterparts’ brows? Or are these mediocre portraits evidence that he understood nothing about leaders of men besides their golf swing? Or are we supposed to realize that the portraits are only practice, and it is technique that brings value to art?
What is art, and who gets to do it? The odd thing is that George W. Bush is spending his post-presidential years grappling with representation, reinforcing our belief that he never wanted to be a public servant. Maybe we are thinking, you might have inherited your way into the presidency, but it is a bit ridiculous to have to look upon your paintings. Maybe we’ve got an analogy we’d like to impose: marginal painter, marginal president. Please just go away, you’ve done enough, we don’t need your pop culture moment.
What is a president, and who gets to be it, and then how do we judge? His choices may have put the world in a dangerous equilibrium, but the people in these portraits, including Tony Blair, Vladimir Putin, and Angela Merkel, were there too. Despite his amateurish and buffoonish behavior, his presentation of presidency as a corporate conduit and decider at the top of an organization of hawks, despite how shitty of a president we think he might have been, the era was important, and he was there. For this reason alone, history may never forget him. Perhaps he too is unable to forget this. Perhaps these portraits are the inevitable emanations from the repressed memories of a man who never wanted to be president.
