| In the delicately beautiful cinema of Don Van Vliet’s canvases you might encounter a deer or rooster or a face coming out of the skies. You might see a word disappear into a blur as it catches onto another word or a devil caught in the sea. Sometimes there are wolves devouring flesh and crosses that underscore the beauty of crows and shadows. Sometimes the vestiges that haunt Van Vliet’s work search for languages that are ephemeral and rhythmic like the natural world. And sometimes, they mutate into landscapes that escape. |  |
The Discoloration of Love: Don Van Vliet’s Other World – Cecilia Muhlstein
“Raven/they hold the/air like a brush/with strokes/as they go/but never grasping/for fear of/halting their passage/through the space.”
—“Raven,” Don Van Vliet
In the delicately beautiful cinema of Don Van Vliet’s canvases you might encounter a deer or rooster or a face coming out of the skies. You might see a word disappear into a blur as it catches onto another word or a devil caught in the sea. Sometimes there are wolves devouring flesh and crosses that underscore the beauty of crows and shadows. Sometimes the vestiges that haunt Van Vliet’s work search for languages that are ephemeral and rhythmic like the natural world. And sometimes, they mutate into landscapes that escape.
Van Vliet began life in California creating sculpture. Later, under the name Captain Beefheart, he began composing music that continued to work with form, tone and narratives. This newer means of artistic investigation gave Van Vliet the audacity to challenge standard conventions in music, language and visual art. It’s why Lester Bangs called Captain Beefheart “the only true Dadaist in rock” in his review of Trout Mask Replica.
The paintings on display at Anton Kern and Michael Werner were framed in simple wood frames, but were not accompanied by explanations of Van Vliet’s work—the work is meant to explain itself. The only clues in terms of meaning lie in the titles, but not always. Though many critics have described Van Vliet’s visual art as abstract or even expressionist, others see him as outside any particular movement or as a part of one that has yet to be defined.
Animals and people are key subjects in many of the pieces. Random sized proportions dominate the compositions. While people seem to be smaller or faintly distant, animals like deer appear much larger than people in Sixteen Chrome and Ming Move. In the piece Feather Times a Feather, the images of roosters and various birds escalate into a circular dream while breaking down a world of mythic proportions. The two pieces Cross Poked a Shadow of a Crow, No 1 and No 2 utilize the shadows of crows in a freestyle tempo around stationary crosses. Another painting, Whalebone Farmhouse, depicts people of all proportions and sizes moving to music. In the hauntingly beautiful Crepe and Black Lamps, made out of crepe paper, faint faces appear while a figure in blue gestures a menacing hand.
The beige canvases that Van Vliet uses also simulate his many years of living in the Mojave Desert. The beige acts as the sand color of the desert and creates an effective background. Since Van Vliet uses muted colors to detain his subjects, the occasional red or yellow is startling. In Fur on the Trellis and Just up into the Air, the exposed canvas is critical to the piece’s composition. The figure of a wolfish animal devouring its prey with bits of red oil paint dripping from its mouth like blood is the only area of the canvas painted, yet the effect of color and composition is successful. The artist understands that the everyday is itself an encounter and threat of impending death.
After my visit to the galleries, I kept thinking back to the artist’s drawings. Van Vliet’s play with texts is a part of his exploration into how the viewer encounters the world. The difficulty, and desire, to assign meaning. These images of collapsed hearts, random lines and words that lose shape and blur into the paper are another beautiful aspect of his work. Haunting for their sparseness and restraint, the works appear like his poems. Out of a chaotic world comes silence.
The world for Van Vliet is a mythological and violent place in which hope can be found in the understanding of this knowledge. The paintings and drawings on view at Anton Kern Gallery and Michael Werner provide an excellent selection of Don Van Vliet’s singular vision and ongoing influence today.
