George & Martha

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.

"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." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

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

Karen Finley has performed and exhibited her artwork at cultural centers and universities worldwide. Her books includes Shock Treatment, A Different Kind of Intimacy, Enough Is Enough and Living It Up. She teaches Art and Public Policy at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University.