Captain Beowulf & Carp Mask Replica

$99 for hand painted replicas of original art work. Painter, designer and illustrator Cal Schenkel has been offering reproductions of his iconic album cover of Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica. Both absurd and surreal, the imagery of Trout Mask leaves no-one indifferent. Schenkel is testament to the importance in the music industry to have a creative visual collaborator who can express the artist’s vision and intent.

Captain Beefheart, Trout Mask Replica

Schenkel visited a fish-monger and departed with a large carp  head. He hollowed out the interior to create a mask which was ”worn” by Beefheart for the photo shoot. Yoko Ono recently exhibited her art installation ” Odyssey of a Cockroach”( The Cockroach Point of View), but Schenkel at the time was unselfconsciously far more profound to this existential study of humankind from the face of a rotting, stinky fish head; some mutation of a human being from the netherworld, festering in the sewers of Paris,a living gotesquerie who is both strange, alien and uncomfortably familiar.

Although the carp, in Asian culture is a symbol of strength, worldly aspiration and advancement, it is also a severe menace to other aquatic species in North American lakes and rivers. They reproduce at an astounding rate, are huge ( 4 feet and 100 lbs) and have ravenous appetites that can collectively devour and digest almost all fish from any body of water in short order. These Chinese carp are like a metaphor for the more avaricious strains of American capitalism, gobbling up the food source and leaving emptiness in its wake, in addition to being extremely ugly, even by fish standards.

 The Trout Mask Replica is also a representation of the anglo-saxon legend  of Beowulf immortalized in John Gardner’s novel Grendel. Captain Beefheart ( Don Van Vliet ) is the poet Boewulf who has slain Grendel, a descendent of Cain. Grendel had been killing and cannibalizing, motivated by greed and revenge.He is satanic, a symbol of the anti-christ and Nietzschean in philosophy. He is a bi-pedal form ,not entirely humanoid with skin and scales and horny growth.  Captain Beefheat mortally wounded Grendel by ripping his arm off , then finding Grendel’s corpse, he removes the head which he keeps as a trophy. Certainly as surreal as the music of Beefheart.

In the alternative scenario, Captain Beefheart is trying to trap and ensnare Grendel by  concealing his identity behind the mask of a dead carp…Grendel represents the meaningless of modern society. It it with ironic and unfeeling regret that Grendel pointlessly consumes and appropriates between acts of gratuitous violence. He is aimless, bored and untiring in his pursuit of the banality of evil. He is a broken rotten feeling of self-hate. He is mankind, or the evilness of mankind that can be explained, but never justified. Captain Beefheart slays Grendel to restore mankind’s hope and exculpate its guilt.