BOLDTYPE ISSUE #52: Artwork By
Tim Davis
This issue's cover is a detail of Bush Cutout, a photograph by Tim Davis from his series My Life in Politics, taken from 2002 to 2004. Davis' book of the same name, published by Aperture in 2006, includes essays by the author, who also writes poems; writings by Jack Hitt; and a patriotic stars-and-stripes design by Andrew Sloat.
In the accompanying annotation to Bush Cutout, Davis writes, "A small business on Pennsylvania. G, and 17th, operated by a Kurd named Sala, not, he insisted, after Saladin, Islam's greatest crusader. Sala (after a grandfather/scholar) sat in a low-slung chair reading Pascal in English and quoting Dante in Kurdish (his translation) and offering Polaroids of presidents for a fiver a pop."
A particularly strange image, Bush Cutout features a Polaroid of a mother and son with a George W. cutout clipped to the face of another cutout, putting an image of the 43rd president where his own mouth should be. The remarkable triple remove (that is, a photograph of a Polaroid of a life-size reproduction of the president) echoes Jack Hitt's insight in his sardonic "3000 Word Essay: The Vacant Public Square." Hitt characterizes Bush's peculiar rhetoric as "a way of distancing himself from the substance of his own politics in ways that are strange and baroque."
Throughout My Life in Politics, Davis represents politicians only as they are seen on TV or in posters, paintings, and sculptures. Speaking to the remove of Washington politics from ordinary citizens' lives, his photographs portray the trickle-down, bipartisan dysfunction that plagues the United States. In Davis' images, disaffection is widespread, but at least we can occasionally laugh about it — as in his depiction of red plastic cups poked though a fence to spell out "ARAB = JEW," an attempted slur so muddled that if it were true, there'd be peace in the Middle East.
- H.G. Masters
