Provenance: Private Collection, USA

ABOUT THE WORK

The American dollar has been essayed by many artists, from Andy Warhol’s stenciled dollar sign to Hans Peter-Feldman installation of 100,000 pieces of one-dollar bills papered on the walls of the Guggenheim Museum. In the work of Manuel Ocampo, the dollar becomes a staging ground for satire as the artist radically defaces the legal tender, transforming the central figure, once occupied by George Washington, into the anti-Christ himself, bearing the mark of the devil on his forehead. “Dollar” becomes “dough,” the street language for money. “Cocaine” is emblazoned twice on a seal, as if to underscore how the bill is used to snort the white powder or, more accurately, facilitate the global transaction of drugs. At the surface, the work is a sharp commentary on the world’s superpower, especially when set against Ocampo’s other works that investigate the lasting effects of colonialism. It might also point to the Biblical passage that pertains to how the love of money as being the root of all evil. Or quite possibly, the work is a conflation of these two points: of how money propagates the evil force of imperialism that wears the mask of capitalism.