The Bush Library in America

commissioned Jonathan Yeo

(British portraitist, very establishment)

to do George Junior, then backed out

In umbrage, Yeo then did the portrait anyway,

fashioning the face of the Potus

from a collage of porn mags

The portrait is symbolic of what Bush represents

The neo-conservative, religious-right

influenced politics of America

The porn is making a comment that beneath

this facade of moral propriety

there is a level of hypocrisy and scandal

It's all to do with reality, masks,

perceptions and also repression

Pornography exists because of sexual repression

Religion is repression.

They're also both very controlling and require

everyone to suspend their imagination to exist

The Pornographic Face of Bush

Do you know what it is yet?

Well, that bit looks like a lady’s…

And that bit looks like a gentleman’s…

No, no, no – stand back and look at the whole picture…

Oh good Lord!...

We have just been looking at a new picture by British artist Jonathan Yeo. And judging by its content, we doubt that it will please his old dad – Tory Tim, the honourable member for Suffolk South.

Young Jonathan’s picture features members of a different kind. The Sun reports that he “cut up more than 100 top-shelf publications” in order to construct the collage.

All very good, but as we said before, the full effect can only be appreciated when one stands back and views the piece as a whole.

Then one can see the picture for what it really is: a portrait of the US President, George Bush.

Curators at the Bush Library had originally commissioned Yeo to do a portrait of Dubya, then had second thoughts and pulled out (matron!). But the cheeky scamp decided to go ahead anyway.

The resulting effort, which is on show at the Lazarides Gallery in London, has not gone down well in Bush quarters (matron!). A spokesman for Republicans Abroad International declared that it will cause “outrage” back in the US of A.

Bush Between the Legs

The Bush Library in America commissioned Jonathan Yeo (British portraitist, very establishment, surprisingly impish face) to do George Junior, then backed out.

In umbrage, Yeo then did the portrait anyway, fashioning the face of the Potus from a collage of porn mags.

It's really not that explicit, or else it isn't until I work out how to zoom in on my computer, and if I were going to go to that kind of trouble, I might as well look at actual porn.

A spokesman for the Republican party said: "This picture is very distasteful. Why would anyone want to make a picture of our President from pornographic material?" You could probably file that under, "Well, if you have to ask ..."

There's a comment underneath it on the Sun website that says:

"OK so the creator of this insult has a sick mind and is a porn junkie, has the image been checked for child porn images?" It says it all, doesn't it?

You can understand why Yeo got the commission in the first place; he doesn't seem to have an agenda, politically, so he'd have no problem portraying Bush, or Rupert Murdoch (a recent sitter), or anyone else of questionable ethical standing.

I think his portraits flatter and are a bit schlocky - everyone's always shiny and statesmanlike. And just because it's made of porn, the Bush portrait is no exception to this (it's a lot more human and flattering than a straight photo printed in this issue of New Statesman, for instance).

As art, I think it's undermined by the schoolboy undertone - it is just like shouting "fuck" in assembly. It has no meaning, besides the meaning other people's outrage brings to it.

So it can be very funny, but it's still puerile. As satire, it's undermined by the fact that a) it's not very tailored, is it?

History won't remember Bush as the president who hated porn, or loved porn, or crusaded against porn only to appreciate it all the more feverishly in private; it would be more meaningful to have made a collage out of severed body parts.

And b) what, exactly, is he objecting to about Bush? Not the man himself, whom he accepted a commission to paint.

No, the fact that they pulled his commission! It's about as satirical as a plumber stuffing a rat down your drain after you didn't pay him (this has never happened. I always pay plumbers).