Anita Steckel, “The Grosz-est Bush: ‘Goodbye and Good Riddance’”

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Photograph: Courtesy The Artist And Mitchell Algus Gallery

Anyone counting down the days until the next inauguration will appreciate Anita Steckel’s caricatured portrayals of the current administration in her paper and canvas collage pieces; they tap into the sort of visceral emotions so obviously missing in, say, the 2004 debates between John Kerry and President Bush.

Billed as a “collaboration” between Steckel and the Berlin Dadaist Georg Grosz (1893–1959), “The Grosz-est Bush: ‘Goodbye and Good Riddance’_” draws parallels between the political climate of the Weimar era and our own. An outspoken feminist, Steckel borrows a page from the Republican campaign handbook in playing on primal fears.

Using photocopies of Grosz’s works combined with current newspaper cutouts, she creates such exquisite corpses as Hitler masturbating to the ample backside of a lingerie-clad woman bearing the head of our fearless leader. The most effective pieces construct an even more literal narrative: Swim if you can and if you are too weak, sink depicts a Bush family portrait, complete with Condoleeza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld. W takes center stage, hoarding dollar bills while surrounded by flag-covered coffins, as the issues he’s neglected (HEALTH CARE, POVERTY, NEW ORLEANS) are written in the shadow of a starving orphan begging Bush for money. Grosz’s bare-bones style contributes to the simplicity and blatancy of the message, while Steckel’s background drawings of women rendered in looping arabesque lines add a curiously personal touch that somehow doesn’t seem out of place.

In an age when institutional memory is grievously short-lived, we would do well to heed such artists as Steckel, who’s been around long enough to have witnessed several cycles of conservatism affecting both politics and art.