This article is by Jessica Rutherford and is taken from the book Don
Van Vliet - Stand Up To Be Discontinued. It introduces his exhibition of the
same name in Brighton, England of 1994.
30 years ago Don van Vliet and his friend Frank Zappa wrote a film script and
accompanying sound-track with the title Captain Beefheart Meets the Grunt People.
Although aspects of the sound-track were recorded the film never materialised
but the name and persona of Captain Beefheart was adopted by Don Van Vliet to
launch an extraordinarily fertile and innovative assault on popular music preconceptions
of the ‘6os and ‘70s. When the rest of the musical world were harmonising about
love and peace, the records Safe as Milk, Trout Mask Replica, and Lick My Decals
Off Baby provided a complete departure from all previous notions of musical coherence
and acceptability through the fusion of three distinct elements: the vocal and
rhythmic style of urban blues practitioners such as Howlin' Wolf and Jimmy Read;
free form jazz of such as Coleman Hawkins and Cecil Taylor in which the traditional
popular precept of there being only one lead instrument at any one time is radically
subverted; and finally the astonishingly febrile imagination, personality and
vocal presence of Don Van Vliet. These three records stand as landmarks of psychedelic
extremism and, in retrospect can be seen as musical counterpoints to the American
abstract expressionist tradition of the previous generation. Charles Olsen's declaration
of his poetry as being an 'open field of energy' and the mark-making techniques
of such as Pollock and Krasner to create a total expanse of image integrally incorporating
extremes of texture all have resonances in Van Vliet's ability to unite discordant
musical, literary and visionary elements to create a unsettling whole.
Contractual and production complications caused Van V1iet's musical career
to stutter somewhat in the ‘70s, and although he eventually re-emerged in the
early '80s to startle a new post-punk generation with the bleak minimalism of
the records Doc at The Radar Station and Ice Cream for Crow, he had by then already
settled on fine art as being the most suitable way of directly articulating his
unique vision and interpreting his interior landscape. The preoccupations remain
the same but the means of expression are more absolutely personal and hence more
satisfactory as a creative vehicle. Those approaching Van Vliet's work for the
first time may well be puzzled and struggle to make sense of what seem an inchoate
set of colour splashes, frenzied brushmarks and scratches freely applied and occasional
soft washes. The struggle becomes less arduous when his art is assessed in relation
to his profound sense of place and natural environment, his intuitive and highly
emotional creative spirit and, above all, to his playfulness and delight in free
association and absurdist wordplay. Van Vliet has often claimed that two of his
favourite painters are van Gogh and Franz Kline and Van Vliet's use of colour,
distortion and intense brush and textural variations to impart a vivid and primordial
emotional force certainly has parallels in the work of these two very different
predecessors. For many years Van Vliet lived in the Mohave Desert before moving
more recently to the Northern Californian coast and his palette, with its heavy
greens, blues and ochres, is entirely reminiscent of the landscape he inhabits
and his concerns for that environment, while his strong use of thick washes of
black and white serve to delineate his own interior sensibilities. Finally, in
much of his work, there is a puckish sense of humour at play driven by his fondness
for word association and absurdity. In earlier works such as Cats Got His Tail
(1985) the humour is blatant but more recent works such as Circles Don't Fly They
Float, 1990) show a more satisfactory unification of his various creative processes,
the picture making manifest and tangible the thought that prompted the title which
in itself is a line from a poem made into a song.
This exhibition celebrates the development of a singular and uncompromising
contributor to the post-war artistic spirit and has been co-ordinated for Brighton
Museum & Art Gallery by David Breuer in collaboration with the Michael Werner
Gallery of Cologne and New York. Exhibitions Officer: Nicola Coleby. Assistant
Exhibitions Officer: Louise Tythacott.
- Jessica Rutherford, Head of Museums and Director
of the Royal Pavilion, Brighton