Product Description

An outrageous political satire by America's most daring performance artist and writer.

George and Martha meet in a seedy motel room on the night before the Republican National Convention. Their affair goes way back, before George stole the election, before Martha built an empire on fascist domesticity. As usual, George numbs his pain over waging perpetual war with cocaine and the promise of kinky sex. Martha is forced to take a long view of her life as she suffers the public humiliation of corporate scandal, on the brink of going to prison. Written in the style of Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, George & Martha is Karen Finley's most scandalous work to date, a hilarious satire that takes a radical stand on political power, psychosexual relations between men and women, and the current state of affairs. Lavishly illustrated with drawings by the author.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #931895 in Books
• Published on: 2006-04-15
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 108 pages

From Publishers Weekly
As one would expect from '80s erotic art performance queen (and NEA witch-hunt target) Karen Finley, this fantasy about a tryst between George Bush and Martha Stewart in a seedy Gotham hotel—the thread count on their pillowcases isn't even 200, as Martha astutely points out —pushes a lot of buttons. It depicts domination, rather lackadaisical fellatio, spanking, cocaine abuse, diaper play and baby wipes, and much pop psychoanalysis, all hung on a George and Martha as broadly drawn as Finley's doodley caricatures that adorn the pages: George is the alcoholic, Jesus-infatuated, dimwit reviled by leftists (he claims to get sexually excited when he sees soldiers or orders an execution); Martha, the narcissistic control freak who arouses herself with mental scripts of aggression like Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Finley captures Bush's uncertain relation to language (hard to quote here) and through that lens George comes out as surprisingly down-home and playful, as when he delightedly wraps himself, nude, in the plastic that his dry-cleaned suit comes in. The whole is and will be greeted as a provocation, but it is more like a highly humorous riff on dedicated celeb watching. 200 original drawings. (Apr.)
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Lawrence Ferlinghetti
A hilariously devastating satire.

Margo Jefferson, author of On Michael Jackson
Fasten your seatbelts—it's a bumpy, hilarious night.

Customer Reviews

Not worth the time or money ... much better is available.
Of all the books I have ever owned this is probably the least worth reading. While Karen Finley is sometimes brilliant and incisive, this story is not. The sexual descriptions in the book are obscene, as are the pictures, without any discernible artistic purpose (particularly when you consider that this was originally a play). It might make you laugh, but only to avoid crying. When you're done reading, you'll wonder why you did. My advice is to choose something/anything else to spend an afternoon reading.

Sheer Brilliance!
An ideal summer read for the alternatively-minded: brisk, hilarious, and smart as all hell. Pass it along!

A unique piece of protest literature
This is a very short book which can be read in about 2 hours. Karen Finley is a professor of art and public policy in a New York academic setting. It appears that Finely is using the art of satire to explore two boundaries; taboo sexual expression and respect for conservative political leaders. recently I read a good book on transgression in art. The author identified three types of transgressions in art: transgressions against the definition of art, transgressions against current notions of morality, and transgressions against the state. This short book is primarily a work of transgression against the state, using transgression against moral sexual behavior to reinforce her attack on the political status quo. Whereas President Bush is attacked as the political leader, Martha Sewart is attacked as the symbol of upper middle class values and morality.

Finley is a bright artist, she is aware of the transgressions and boundaries which she explores. She explores two transgressions against current sensibilities, that of exploring moral sensibility and taboo sexuality and combining that transgression with exploring the inner psyche of President George W Bush. She does this through an odd tale of a night of odd dialogue and pleasure between Martha Stewart and President Bush on the night before she must report to prison.

The sex gets kinky fast, complete with baby wipes and diapers. But Finley always weaves a tale where the sexual perversions are a bi-product of Ms. Stewart and President Bush's inner psychopathology. As Ms. Stewart and the President discuss Iraq, Dick Cheney, the first President Bush and his wife Barbara, Condoleza Rice, etc. we see Finley's world view come into focus. The same kinky psychopathology that guides the President's sex life also guides his political philosophy and foreigh policy. His lack of substantive analysis, as if he had attention deficit disorder, influences his sexual behavior and his political philosophy.

Thus Finley's work is political rebellion at its core. She uses humor, sexuality, and psycho-babble dialogue to undermine the idealogy that drives the current President and she is asking the reader to also question the President's assumptions that influence all of our lives.

At times extremely funny, at other times gross with too many bodily function details, and at other times dark satire aimed at the President's vast vulnerabilities; this book would confirm that the President is a second rate intellect to those that hate him but would be incredibly shocking to those that follow him and the ideology to which he clings.

I predict a scandal in the making here. Whereas the President and his camp would probably not attack Ms. Finley openly in the press or news shows, some conservative groups will find this book and make it a national scadal. Of course, a scandal does wonders for an artist and for book sales, so Finley may be wishing that her little book raises the roof - as they say, she will be laughing all the way to the bank.