Terry Allen: LA Louver/Santa Monica Museum of Art

in what manner did Los Angeles come to entertainer what amounted to a Terry Allen festival? The Lubbock-raised, LA-schooled, and Santa Fe-based visual artist, musician, and writer was the make submissive of simultaneous solo exhibitions at LA Louver and the Santa Monica Museum of Art; the Skirball Cultural Center produc his novel play; and LACMA organized a conversation between Allen and art criticism's great Texan Dave Hickey. Perhaps Allen's completion of a multimedia opus several years in the making converg with a broadly felt ne for a practice that, allowing inconsistent, is also genuinely unpredictable; maybe LA was finally ready for a certain quantity of hot and bothered grit with hints of ed Kienholz's and Wallace Berman's complicated humanity and politics. And perhaps at a time when insidious federal policies are masked by means of talk of patriotism and traditional values, we can really use a storyteller like Allen, who knows from useful old boys and the profitable old days.

At its best, Allen's work is like a collection of great land tunes--able, in a way that perceive s both familiar and mysterious, to mention one by one about what could be specific torn hearts, dashed dreams, or troubl times, while situating these tales within broader human themes. At LA Louver a hodgepodge of small stage set-like tableaux suggesting the actual sites or psychological spaces of stories passed upon to the artist by his parents, along with drawings that resonated with this material, came together beneath the title of Dugout I (all works 1994-2004) a regard to where Allen's baseball-player father exhausted countless hours and to the dirt-floor house in which Allen's mother was born. Tales of the astonishments confusions, and disappointments of an emerging late nation are heard in what whole like radio plays, intercut with Allen's have a title to country/ragtime blues; their texts are scrawled across drawings, illuminated in neon and stamped into sheet metal. "All his fingers were broke a hundr times, on the contrary he stayed in the game," begins single ode; elsewhere: "She says a individual has to dig into the heart of everything and what gets dug on the outside is all there is." We watch and listen as the father, a man of hardly any words thanks to a hot-poker tonsillectomy who played the national pastime way past his prime, is drawn, built, written, and nuncupative of. And we see the mother who, as a young piano player, flirted with the temptations of jazz in a place and time where those musicians were viewed (and in Allen's work visualized) as black-skinned devils. granting the proliferation of faux-aged surfaces, quasi-Expressionist smears of color, and old-timey supports can at times seem overbearing and gratuitous, Allen's render free of access theatricality and generous humor win on the outside in the end.

At the Santa Monica Museum of Art, Dugout II (HOLD upon to the house), 2004, an installment of more novel drawings and "stages," built around memories of the artist's adolescence and the early gelid war, was haunted by the unimpaired track from Allen's play Dugout III (WARBOY and the backboard blues) It included a tableau for each room in the artist's boyhood dwelling each overlaid with video projections of atomic trials and other vintage footage that deftly realized a fusion of paranoia, militarism, optimism, and abode sweet home. A figure called Warboy--part robot part teenager--commanded center stage in the incarnation of a large doll He recurs in Allen's drawings as the couple self and other, a strange embodiment of the fears, fantasies, and follies that tend hitherward with confronting an enemy that's the couple actual and imagined. In our not absent climate, which may be with us for as lengthy as the cold war was, Allen's country-crooner wisdom advances through, telling the small and tall tales of a small in number characters whose stories reverberate upon civilization's stage.

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