Grocer with Moko Erased
Limited Edition Screenprint, 2011
Six colour screen print on Artistico Fabriano
765 x 570 mm
Signed. Edition of 100
Grocer with Moko Erase presents a typically witty and challenging response to Dick Frizzells 1992 controversial classic Grocer with Moko.
Applying the established Weston frizzell modus operandi, this work montages details appropriated from iconic NZ brands and historically significant New Zealand artworks. In Grocer with Moko Erased , a recreated (and altered) detail of Dick Frizzells “Grocer with Moko” is overlayed on a backdrop of the Vogels bread stripes.
In a dramatic subversion of the original work, the once tattooed Cheeky Charlie face has undergone an incomplete and only partially successful attempt to scratch off the moko. What is the meaning and implications of this gesture?
The idea pays homage to Robert Rauschenberg's famous and highly controversial “Erased de Kooning drawing”, and simultaneously references Duchamps “LHOOQ Rase”, in which the artist achieved a symbolic undoing of the initially provocative and controversial gesture of painting a moustache on a reproduction of the Mona Lisa, by exhibiting an un-retouched version of the image and naming it …”shaved”.