The Wake

President George W. Bush has inspired larger protests than any other person in history. On the University of Minnesota campus, he’s also inspired artistic reactions to his personality and policies. Four artists shared their presidential work with me, and they all had one thing in common: When I asked each of them what our commander in chief would think of their artwork, I invariably got some version of the phrase, “He wouldn’t get it.”

Colleen Mullins

Although most of her recent artwork has been large-scale, a leather-bound handmade book by Colleen Mullins is just about the size of a tic-tac dispenser. It contains her thoughts on the U.S.A. Patriot Act–an initiative passed shortly after September 11, 2001 that gives broader authority to law enforcement to monitor the public and makes it more difficult for citizens to receive information that used to be public record. Mullins feels that we are living in a country that increasingly resembles George Orwell’s 1984, and the small size of her book represents a whisper rather than shout. The tiny artwork can be passed from hand to hand, and talking with Mullins makes me think of Marcel Duchamp’s Portable Museums, which contained miniature replicas of the artist’s works that could be packed up and transported, and which the artist smuggled out of France during the turmoil of 1941. “This is the voice we have,” said Mullins, an adjunct faculty member in the University of Minnesota’s art department. “I keep telling my friends, ‘Look for me at Guantanamo Bay if I disappear.’”

The book is decorated on the cover with red and blue stars, and the pages are made from old sheets of paper doll children dressed in vintage soldier costumes of cheerful red, white and blue. These are interleaved with pages from an antique medical text. Mullins likes to use materials that have history, and wanted to use the text’s focus on eyes, ears, mouths and noses. Over page after page of the printed text, she has used a typewriter to repeat words from an oft-stated George W. Bush campaign slogan, “My opponent trusts the federal government. I trust you the people.”

Mullins hopes that her work will make viewers pay attention to the upcoming primary elections, and what our politicians say in general. She had trouble getting her message out at the University of Arizona, where her book was exhibited. The staff chose to put it in a case, ostensibly to keep it from theft or harm, but Mullins suspected they may have been censoring her words. The staff denied her request that they change the display, perhaps using a wire to attach the book but allow patrons to read it.

Historically in repressive regimes, Mullins said, artists have been the first to be thrown in jail. Today, though, she sees artists allowing themselves to be marginalized. Anti-establishment art often takes on the role of graffiti, like stickers by Creative Electric Studios of Northeast Minneapolis that criticize members of the Bush administration. Mullins struggles with the usefulness, or non-usefulness, of art during war. She wonders whether art has a legitimate voice, or if she should pick up a protest sign instead. Artists, Mullins said, should be asking themselves, “Why isn’t this freaking them out?”

Matt Pekuri

Matt Pekuri, a senior in the University of Minnesota’s art department, addressed what he feels are the president’s conflicting statements that too few Americans have noticed in a digital print with handwritten text. The image is a photograph of George W. Bush holding his dog and giving the viewer an enthusiastic thumbs-up. Computer-printed text, running vertically up the portrait, is made up of statements about George W. Bush from a U.S. Embassy website. Pekuri has handwritten in ink quotes from Bush speeches horizontally over the whole surface of the piece. Each layer obscures the others. One of his favorite lines used in the work is one in which Bush addresses the Iraqi people, “Your enemy is not surrounding your country. Your enemy is running your country.” Pekuri made the piece hoping that it would generate discussion, and said he wishes people would pay closer attention to Bush’s rhetoric. “You could easily read between the lines.”

Sandy Bartel

University of Minnesota art student Sandy Bartel fused two weighty subjects to create a visually lighthearted jab at George W. Bush in her series of baseball-card-sized images titled George W. Bush Finds Redemption and Rebirth through the Art of Frida Kahlo. Kahlo, who is Bartel’s favorite painter, earned fame in the 1930s for her tortured and highly personal self-portraits. In the series, Bartel inserted the president’s head into several Kahlo works. In The Two Presidents, a manipulated version of Kahlo’s double self-portrait, the artist replaced Kahlo’s two faces with over-sized heads of Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. In Self-Portrait with Monkeys, Bartel replaced a simian face with that of Bush.

Bartel made the series not to play on any relationship between the two, but because she feels that Bush, whom she calls a “destroyer of good will,” might become a more compassionate person if he could see life through Frida’s eyes.

Jes Schrom

Jes Schrom’s Freedom Kit includes a stars-and-stripes cell phone face, some red rubber bands with GOD BLESS AMERICA printed on them, and various other patriotic novelties that can be found at any Wal-Mart all nestled in a plastic blue emergency case. She showed me a contact lens holder, the left side a field of blue with white stars and the right side bearing a stripe for each of the original colonies. “This is out of hand,” Schrom said. She made the Freedom Kit as an observation of the capitalization of the American flag since September 11, 2001. “You can’t desecrate the flag, but you can make a meaningless commodity out of it.”

Schrom’s studio is full of works in progress that were inspired by America’s recently escalating nationalism. She has lined one part of a wall with snapshots taken in Fargo/Moorhead, where she grew up. Each photo shows an American flag being displayed in some altered state such as sticker, sunshade, or windsock.

I visited Schrom to check out a mixed-media piece she’s working on that explores the way ideas are disseminated through language, particularly in the form of propaganda. She photographed her own mouth as she spoke the words, “Either you are with us or you are against us,” a post-9/11 sentiment of George W. Bush. Images of the mouth uttering each syllable were printed on translucent fabric, behind which Schrom will place handwritten text of the statement. She conceived the piece not as an attack on the president, but as a comment on language. Voice and symbol are separated. The viewer cannot see all of the syllables without standing back, but must move in close to read the text.

Another of Schrom’s current projects is a stack of I.D. Cards, each showing a photo of a young man and listing his name and hometown. Schrom hopes to laminate the cards and exhibit them in a pile, inviting patrons to sift through them. Each card represents a soldier killed since the start of the war in Iraq, so Schrom is constantly updating them. She reminded me of something Michael Moore said when he was in Minneapolis last month, about how some people are willing to give their lives for our freedom, but they trust the government not to make them do that unless it’s absolutely necessary. “I feel really sad that they’re dying for no reason. All these people are dying. We don’t know who they are.”