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In Werner Herzog’s enigmatic 1977 film Stroszek, the recently deinstitutionalised Bruno S, his prostitute girlfriend and eccentric elderly neighbour flee West Berlin in search of a better life in the United States. Their American dream slowly unravels and the film concludes with Bruno’s suicide in a fairground. Pursued by the police following a dismal attempt at armed robbery, Bruno rigs his truck, feeds a stack of coins into an arcade machine and mounts a ski-lift with his shotgun. The policeman radios in the film’s final line: ‘We’ve got a truck on fire, can’t find the switch to turn the ski-lift off, and can’t stop the dancing chicken. Send an electrician.’ Herzog apparently thought the chicken was a great metaphor, though he was unsure for what.
Travelling through the United States with his family in a station wagon in 1978, Dick Frizzell took the scenic route up from Florida to New York. As a result he happened upon the town of Cherokee in the Smoky Mountain National Park in North Carolina. It seemed familiar — he had seen Stroszek at the Auckland Film Festival the year before — and indeed it was: the dancing chicken was still there, still dancing.
The trip provided Frizzell with a wealth of imagery. The paintings in his 1980 exhibition Illustrations of America featured the stuff of tourist snapshots — the Grand Canyon, food at a diner, a ride on the subway, a visit to an Indian reservation, and of course the dancing chicken. With their glossy enamel surfaces and thick coloured borders, the paintings look like photographic slides. It was more than just imagery, though, that Frizzell gained from his American odyssey. Meeting artists such as Neil Jenney and Robert Moskowitz, and seeing their work in the landmark exhibition New image painting at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, validated his own direction. It was a time when a new brand of figuration was being welcomed into painting; earnestness was giving way to irony, and the lines between abstraction and representation were blurring. Jenney’s advice to Frizzell was not delivered in such theoretical terms, however. ‘Your country and culture need you, so haul your ass back home and get busy doing what artists are meant to do.’1
William McAloon
This essay appears in Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2009)
1. Cited in Allan Smith, ‘Chronology’, in Dick Frizzell: Portrait of a serious artiste, exhibition catalogue, GP Publications, Wellington, 1997, unpaginated.