Artist’s politics there for all to see, hear

By Kristen Peterson (contact)

Thursday, May 25, 2006 | 7:16 a.m.

Diane Bush doesn't conceal her political beliefs. Her artwork is political, her personal history the same. Walk into her living room and you'll find an assortment of buttons on display: "Bush Lies," "Bush Is an Idiot" and "Give a Damn."

Her dining room is an assemblage of images of the president with whom she shares a surname. The images were photographed from television and attached to talking frames. Press a button on any and you hear the president: "If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier - just as long as I'm the dictator."

Nearby, a similar piece uses images of President Richard Nixon saying, "Well, I'm not a crook."

Pressing several sound buttons on the Nixon images creates "this cacophony of nonsense," photographer Bush says. "It just becomes gibberish."

The presidential pieces are from "Talking Pictures," a series of works that began as satire of television and pop culture.

Her "Suppose They Gave a War and Nobody Had Cable" series takes a different tone: She photographed news images from television for 43 straight days during the Gulf War, and the work shows glamorous anchors and pundits with distorted faces.

When the United States invaded Iraq, Bush took those same photos into her back yard, splattered bleach on them to create explosive and fiery images alongside the talking heads, and titled the work "Warheads."

"I was trying to portray the violence of the war," Bush says. "I knew I wanted to distress them somehow. At first I tried razor blades. Then I started tearing the paper."

Jerry Schefcik, director of the Donna Beam Fine Art Gallery at UNLV, regards the work as a powerful collection of images, and writes about the work in Bush's soon-to-be-released book "Warheads" (KuDa Editions, June). He says the images reverberate between the carnage of war and the insular descriptions projected on a TV screen:

"What she's commenting on is the media and this war and how we're fed this information in two-minute sound bites. It's kind of sad. What war is - through the loss of life, destruction of properties and families. We don't understand it."

Bush, 56, calls herself a political refugee of the Vietnam War, who moved to England with a draft dodger after graduating high school in 1968. She married him and stayed in England for 10 years while studying studio photography. During that time she created a series of black-and-white photographs that documented daily life among the British middle and working classes.

When she returned to the United States, she discovered that artists in her community weren't as concerned about making statements as in the 1960s, so she focused on nudes and still lifes, and experimented with photo techniques.

She didn't move back to politically inspired work until the Gulf War. Bush expected to be watching news footage similar to what she saw on television during the Vietnam War: "I remember being at home, eating dinner, and watching soldiers tiptoe through the jungle. With the Gulf War, all you'd see was a talking head. The Gulf War coverage was all about media censorship.

"When we invaded Iraq, I said, 'OK, I have to do something artistically because I'm so pissed off.' "

Referring to the bleach-stained "Warheads," she says, "It's supposed to remind you of all these car bombings, suicide bombers juxtaposed against the white upper middle-class anchors in the studio, safe in America, like we all are."

"Warheads" and "Talking Pictures" are part of a larger body of work called "500 Channels" and will be featured in a show next month at the Burchfield-Penny Fine Arts Center in Buffalo, N.Y., where Bush lived before moving to Las Vegas in 1997.

The images will be mounted so they resemble a bank of television monitors, and will be mixed with satires on pop culture that Bush and husband Steven Baskin, who does the sound, collaborated on after watching hours of religious evangelists and soap operas on television.

One such piece is from a soap opera, in which a young, blond woman comes unglued while on the telephone, screaming, "I know the truth! You stole my baby. How could you, Amber? How could you do that, Amber?"