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Now widely known for his elaborate installation pieces, theater collaborations and country music-inspired songs of the art world, Terry Allen is what the New Yorker magazine calls “an American original” who brings his audiences to “a scenic place: a gonzo, pop-philosophic, white-trash-populated overlook on culture.”¹

Allen’s collage sensibility, which today sees him bringing together ornamental sculptures of the Seven Dwarfs and the Virgin Mary, also informed some of his earliest work. The examples included here, never before exhibited, distill ideas presented in more complex works.

Memory House, 1973, started with a found photograph of, apparently, a murder scene. Allen himself points out that, though the picture could be a police forensic document, it could just as easily be “a still from some anonymous hollowood low budget blockbuster.” The addition of a series of times—scraps of torn paper, like clues found at the scene—and the specificity of a particular, circled time of day reclaim the photograph’s evidentiary allusions, but no moral, no point, no meaning crops up: we are left with a surfeit of evidence allowing no interpretation but that we might find in our own memory.

Heaven and Earth, 1967, is a unique book made as part of a series the artist called “A Novel a Day.” A simple conceptual sketch, the work contrasts an ephemeral, philosophical construct (“heaven”—not “sky” or “air”) with the concrete (“earth”). As with Memory House, the reliability of the photograph is invoked, this time through the use of snapshot album photo corners (nearly all discussions of snapshots start with the phrase, “This is…”). All that is proven in the end, though, is that bits of photographic images cut from magazines are no substitute either for the mundane or for vast abstractions.

1. “Goings on about Town,” New Yorker (25 December 1989): 21. ↩︎