ART REVIEW : Allen Hunts for New Direction

In 1983 artist Terry Allen immersed himself in a hugely demanding ongoing artwork titled “Youth in Asia,” which explored the aftermath of the Vietnam War. This unrelentingly dark theme proved a fertile one for Allen--he produced several magnificent works as part of this series--but now eight years on he’s emerging from the other side of the tunnel. Allen’s current exhibition at L.A. Louver Gallery in Venice includes one of the final works from “Youth in Asia,” along with several new pieces that suggest where he may be may be headed next. (Allen never really “completes” a series; rather, his various bodies of work tend to absorb into one another and evolve into new forms.)

Centering on eight bronze sculptures, the show can be viewed as a further elaboration of the permanent public sculpture Allen recently completed at Citicorp Plaza in downtown Los Angeles. A life-size statue of a businessman whose head is buried in the stone of the Citicorp skyscraper, Allen’s “Corporate Head” marked the first time he had worked in bronze and he clearly liked the experience--bronze is the dominant material here. The show also finds him reprising the motif of the corporate businessman--an anonymous, suited Everyman turns up in several pieces.

The corporate businessman has come to have a rather negative profile and Allen does nothing to change that--he is presented here as a creature of hypocrisy and greed (having spent nine years investigating the Vietnam War, Allen has few illusions about the activities of U.S. corporations at home and abroad). We see businessmen with heads split in two, with shoes plunged in their mouths, with the crossed-fingers of the liar.

Three works deal with America’s national pastime, which Allen interprets as a collective ritual of consumerism and violence. (Allen’s father was a professional baseball player, so one imagines the game has special significance for him.) Common to all this work is a disorienting streak of Surrealism and a bitter black humor. You may laugh when you first see these visual one-liners, but one soon realizes that this is intensely political work and that it’s very angry.

The strongest piece in the show is “Positions in the Desert,” a color lithograph done in collaboration with Douglas Kent Hall. Loosely based on “Juarez,” a multimedia theater piece Allen originally conceived in the early ‘70s, the piece combines photographs (of road kills, a squalid mobile home) with a chaotic jumble of written text.

Ideas, advice, inspirational verse and quotations (from Gertrude Stein, Malcolm Lowry and Allen Ginsberg, among others) are casually scribbled in the margins around the images; this exhaustively worked piece achieves an emotional density characteristic of Allen’s work when it’s really on. Allen always tackles the big issues--death, betrayal, conscience, mercy, the healing powers of love--and this piece seems to offer its two cents’ worth on all of them.

This show is very easy to like--it’s heartfelt, irreverent, intensely American--however, one comes away from it with the sense that Allen is presently searching for his next great theme. He hasn’t found it yet, but this work shows him to be moving in a good direction.

L.A. Louver Gallery: 77 Market St., Venice; to June 22. (213) 822-4955. Closed Sundays and Mondays.