terry alen at dwight hackett

Publication: Journal Santa Fe Section; Date: Feb 25, 2011; Section: Galleries; Page: S8

TRAILS OF INSPIRATION Terry Allen’s grand works of art probe, perturb possibilities Art Issues

MALIN WILSONPOWELL

For the Journal

Terry Allen moved to Santa Fe after teaching at California State University in Fresno from 1971-1978. Trying toimagine Allen in an academic institution is like trying to image Keith Richards teaching songwriting at a musicschool. When Allen was recently asked how he liked teaching –– at the Sunday afternoon book discussionfollowing his recent gallery opening –– the artist said he’d rather roll around naked on an asphalt highway.

Allen is a maker, a doer, a man of immense vitality who sniffs out trails of inspiration anywhere and everywhere,from Mexican border bars to Southeast Asia’s population of Vietnam Vets to decadent French poet AntoninArtaud. As the artist’s friend of 50 years, Dave Hickey writes, “… sometimes I think of Allen’s career as anocturnal mail truck dropping off a few bales of bad news at every stop in the landscape.”

For most of the great international artists like Allen –– who make their homes here –– Santa Fe is a place towork undisturbed in the studio, producing work that the bigger art world supports, commissions and collects.Throughout his lengthy and prodigious career, Allen’s modus operandi has been to ricochet through a largetheme for about 10 years. Like floating icebergs, these grand works-inprogress are partially visible along theway, as installations of drawings, sculptures, neon, watercolors, photographs, video and audio, along with songs,CDs, screenplays, radio plays, and musical theater with his wife, Jo Harvey. All these different modalities havedifferent velocities and reach different audiences. Mostly, they probe, perturb and proliferate possibilities. Noneof them provide answers. Hickey notes of Allen’s long-running engagements, “There are no happy endings. Thereare no endings.”

For Santa Feans, both 2010 and 2011 (so far) have been graced by Allen’s musical and visual art, including arecent concert and this current exhibition. In 2010, a major solo multimedia installation at SITE Santa Fe inconjunction with a riveting musical theater piece at the Lensic featured Allen’s “GHOST SHIP RODEZ.” It is part ofan on-going “GHOST SHIP” series, first commissioned in 2005 by Les Substances International Creative ResearchLaboratory in Lyon, France, and, yes, the Texas-French Alliance in Houston.

Allen’s corpus of contingent music and multimedia art always throbs with necessity. It is as if he is compelled tofind an unguarded back door into uncharted, labyrinthine spheres of activity, where he’ll use every meanspossible to manage the paradoxes he encounters. As Allen tells it, his presumption that he can work in any arenaand in any medium was anointed during his student years at Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles (1962-1966).Although not an official instructor at the school, the inestimable visionary artist Man Ray would stop by and talkto students. This famous Parisian (born Emmanuel Radnitzky in South Philadelphia in 1890) was an exemplar ofperpetual reinvention who declared that whatever an artist occupied himself with was art –– whether it wassurfing, writing, reading, singing, cinema, etc., etc.

The works currently on view at Dwight Hackett projects are 2003-2004 excerpts from “DUGOUT II: Hold on tothe House” and “VOIDVILLE,” Allen’s series immediately following the greater “DUGOUT, Parts I, II, and III.” InAllen’s 2010 eponymous monograph from the University of Texas, he says of “VOIDVILLE,” “As usual, when Ifinish a large body of work, I’m relieved and happy that it’s over, then tailspin into a deep depression because it’sgone. Trying to avoid the latter, I began reading, of all things, Samuel Beckett plays. Though often bleak, I also

TRAILS OF INSPIRATION http://epaper.abqjournal.com/Repository/getFiles.asp?Style=Ol...

1 of 5 5/3/11 5:14 PM

think his work can be very funny. During this same period, the Abu Ghraib torture broke in the news.“VOIDVILLE” was a response to both Beckett and the nightmare going on in Iraq.”

The front gallery smacks you with “VOIDVILLE” works. The vertical “In Slave, Out Slave: Hood; God’s Image,”(2004) stacks threatening, wacky and madly inventive images on top of one another, capturing the “no exit”insanity and absurd strategy of our deadly treachery in Abu Ghraib. The largescale tableaux “Snap, Voidville,”also from 2004, reverberates with a noisy, nosy buffoonish figure whose tightly closed eyes may suggest he isblind to consequences of his actions, or perhaps, it makes him a more focused and lethal actor in this nightmare.

On the long wall of Hackett’s large interior gallery hangs a gripping 11-part sequence titled “Kings of the WildFrontier” from “DUGOUT II,” Allen’s narrative saga of his parents’ life in Lubbock. His father, Slide, was a retiredprofessional baseball player who owned a bar/dance hall, where his mother, Pauline, played barrelhouse jazzpiano. Allen’s “kings” are jammed together and reading left to right are “Go Charlie Go; Warboy Puppet; Kid withthe Thalidomide Eyes; Little Puppet Thing: Crazy Caril; Warboy; Joe 2; Warboy I; Harry Ass and Sadsack; FlipperPuppet with Ghost Limbs; Audie Murphy to Pinocchio and Back.” His six drawings of human heads alternatingwith five puppets bring to mind a foundational 1801 essay “On the Marionette Theater” by the most importantNorth German dramatist of the Romantic era, Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811). Kleist asserts marionettes have amore expressive range than humans imprisoned in self-consciousness. For such puppets to move us, “thepuppeteer himself must dance” like Allen, who seems to create –– i.e., to dance ––with an intense darkness,humor and intelligence from his very core.

Another of the many gems in Allen’s monograph is Hickey’s observation: “The writer suspected the artist justdidn’t know the strength of his own strength, that he had no real measure of the sheer vitality of his work, of itsdevastating effect on the pastel souls and mini-libidos that populated the art world.”

If you go

WHAT: TERRY ALLEN WHERE: DWIGHT HACKETT projects, 2879 All Trades Road

WHEN: Through March 12.

COST: Free

CONTACT: 505-474-4043 or info@ dwighthackett.com

Monograph: Terry Allen, Texts by Dave Hickey, Essays by Marcia Tucker & Michael Ventura. (University of TexasPress, 2010), 312 pp., 335 color and b&w images.


2 of 5 5/3/11 5:14 PM

COURTESY DWIGHT HACKETT PROJECTS

ABOVE: An installation view at Dwight Hackett Projects shows Terry Allen’s 11-part pastel on paper sequencetitled “Kings of the Wild Frontier.”


3 of 5 5/3/11 5:14 PM


4 of 5 5/3/11 5:14 PM

RIGHT: “In Slave, Out Slave, Hood God’s Image” is a 2004 pastel on paper sequence from Terry Allen’s“VOIDVILLE” series.


5 of 5 5/3/11 5:14 PM

terry alen at dwight hackett

Documents

allens musical

multimedia art

allens career

visual art

toimagine allen

journal terry allen

hickey notes of allens

chouinard art institute