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Captain Beefheart, a rock legend, recently died. Your gallery represented him as a painter under his real name, Don van Vliet. How did you discover him?
I owe Penck for Beefheart. In East Germany, there was a lively black market for LPs, and Beefheart’s records were the most expensive of all. Penck was a huge fan of Beefheart as a musician, and revealed to me one day that Beefheart was also a painter; so I got in touch with him. He had stopped playing music because he hated the music market, and although as a painter he was totally authentic, no one really took him seriously. The most unbelievable freaks -- rock fans -- came to his exhibitions; occasionally a few pictures would be sold.
However, I was not able to position him, and so far there has been only one museum exhibition of his work, in San Francisco. I visited him a few times in California. He lived in a wooden house, and I could always find him sitting on the veranda and looking out to sea. Once I asked him what he saw. He replied: “Seals. Seals. Sometimes it looks like a seal, but it’s a surfer. And then a shark gets him.”
"Slough" Performance by Steve DiBenedtto, Steven Doughton, Mr. Alexander Wilson. Portland Institute for Contemporary Art
Doomtown Curated by Kristan Kennedy and Steven Doughton
Strange Attractors
The Post on Club 57
In 1971,Nochlin earned widespread attention for her landmark essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?,”which approached that question with incisive and nuanced analysis, demonstrating how, for centuries, institutional and societal structures had made it “impossible for women to achieve artistic excellence, or success, on the same footing as men, no matter what the potency of their so-called talent, or genius.”