Art Talk
Terry Allen at L.A. Louver
Hunter Drohojowska-Philp says the survey of work from 60s until now shows the connections between his art, his music and his life.
By Hunter Drohojowska-Philp • • 3m ListenIf you had come from Lubbock, Texas to Los Angeles in 1962, as did artist Terry Allen, you’d come to believe that anything was possible. You could be an artist, or a songwriter or a musician. Allen became all of the above.
The Cowboy's Dreams of Home Turn to Chili-Up-The-Desert, 1969. mixed media on paper. 38 1/4 x 31 1/4 x 1 3/8 in. (97.2 x 79.4 x 3.5 cm). © Terry Allen. Courtesy of L.A. Louver, Venice, CA.
For his 1968 series Cowboy and the Stranger, he attached a packaged reel to reel recording of a song to the back of each framed drawing. He called them “paper listening movies.”
Juarez is a complex narrative about two couples and a border town told in songs and in drawings.
Stat Eline (Juarez), 1971. mixed media on paper and plexiglass. 30 1/4 x 40 1/2 in. (76.8 x 102.9 cm). © Terry Allen. Courtesy of L.A. Louver, Venice, CA.
Juarez is a piece very much of our times but Allen’s politics are always rooted in the personal.
Missing Footsteps , 1988. mixed media. 22 1/2 x 23 1/2 x 5 1/2 in. (57.2 x 59.7 x 14 cm). © Terry Allen. Courtesy of L.A. Louver, Venice, CA.
The Vietnam War affected so many of his family and friends that he spent a decade on the project Youth in Asia, which not only sounds like the word euthansia but encompasses the death toll on Allen’s generation. He wrote his texts in type fonts on sheets of lead, a material but malleable and deadly. Some of the drawings have objects and talismans attached to them, smaller versions of the installations that he was evolving.
Ghost Ship (2010), which is not in the Venice location but can be seen by appointment at L.A. Louver’s warehouse location on Jefferson Blvd.
Ancient ("Dugout" Stage 1) , 2000-01. mixed media assemblage. 97 x 96 x 78 1/4 in. (246.4 x 243.8 x 198.8 cm). © Terry Allen. Courtesy of L.A. Louver, Venice, CA.
Incomprehensibly, there has never been a museum retrospective devoted to the work of Terry Allen. While this show is not a substitute, it is a wonderful opportunity to immerse yourself in the alternative universe of his thinking and creating.