Norquist's Bathtub, Oil on Canvas
George Walker Bush, 2010
Any art critic knows that to speak of the art of W is to speak to timelessness itself. His pieces often stretch meta across the canvas of entire cultures, but Norquist's Bathtub has always been considered strictly an American reference.
Here W finds himself firmly trapped in the bathtub that Grover Norquist mandated be built. The rage of the neo-anarchist Tea Party, flat and dimensional-less, filling the bath for the POTUS, and the country's, eventual drowning.
Or course as POTUS that would be considered suicide, since Congress and the President are the government and making this one of W's darkest works.
Notice how the subject is forced into an askew point-of-view, wrapping traditional ideas of geometry and perspective, ultimately trapping the viewer in a corner characterized by irrational space and light. This zeitgeist political foreshadowing alone, and the unfolding of said prophecy, of the GOP, and W himself, snared in Norquist's Bathtub all speak to W's transgression, and transgressions, cross time.
The final question to this piece, and one left open by W himself, is who turns off the facet of Tea Party rage, that one dimensional chorus of No flooding our national bathtub. Since we do not see W's hands, maybe he attempting to be the responsible hand that turns off the spigot of incompetence and fury.
Because if not turned off, Grover will get his final delight, and our beloved nation will lie floating inanimate in the tub, strangled by the zealots spawned the GOP, by W himself.
Which is why he slowly awaits his fate in Norquist's Bathtub.