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 to imagine Allen in an academic institution is like trying to image Keith Richards teaching songwriting at a music school. When Allen was recently asked how he liked teaching –– at the Sunday afternoon book discussion following 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 Antonin Artaud. As the artist’s friend of 50 years, Dave Hickey writes, “… sometimes I think of Allen’s career as a nocturnal 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 to work 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 large theme for about 10 years. Like floating icebergs, these grand works-inprogress are partially visible along the way, 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 have different velocities and reach different audiences. Mostly, they probe, perturb and proliferate possibilities. None of them provide answers. Hickey notes of Allen’s long-running engagements, “There are no happy endings. There are no endings.” For Santa Feans, both 2010 and 2011 (so far) have been graced by Allen’s musical and visual art, including a recent concert and this current exhibition. In 2010, a major solo multimedia installation at SITE Santa Fe in conjunction with a riveting musical theater piece at the Lensic featured Allen’s “GHOST SHIP RODEZ.” It is part of an on-going “GHOST SHIP” series, first commissioned in 2005 by Les Substances International Creative Research Laboratory 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 to find an unguarded back door into uncharted, labyrinthine spheres of activity, where he’ll use every means possible to manage the paradoxes he encounters. As Allen tells it, his presumption that he can work in any arena and 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 talk to students. This famous Parisian (born Emmanuel Radnitzky in South Philadelphia in 1890) was an exemplar of perpetual reinvention who declared that whatever an artist occupied himself with was art –– whether it was surfing, writing, reading, singing, cinema, etc., etc. The works currently on view at Dwight Hackett projects are 2003-2004 excerpts from “DUGOUT II: Hold on to the House” and “VOIDVILLE,” Allen’s series immediately following the greater “DUGOUT, Parts I, II, and III.” In Allen’s 2010 eponymous monograph from the University of Texas, he says of “VOIDVILLE,” “As usual, when I finish a large body of work, I’m relieved and happy that it’s over, then tailspin into a deep depression because it’s gone. 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