America is a sick place and Terry Allen knows it. Big Witness (living in wishes), 1988, consists of a prostrate figure lying in a cage within a cage, trying to knock himself out with some New Age self-help tapes. The installation is underlit with red, green, and blue lights, giving the otherwise sterile structure the atmosphere of an abandoned disco in some depressed Midwestern Holiday Inn. The self-help tapes being played are embedded in the giant’s body. Smarmy Muzak accompanies even smarmier discourse. Some paternalistic, New-Age asshole drones on and on about how to obliterate any resistance or ambivalence toward the American Dream, the American Way, and the American brand of success. Not content to leave us alone in our abjection, the voice on the tape tells us to be happy and cheerful. If we are stressed-out or feel anxiety, it says, we have no one to blame but ourselves. The voice urges our integration with the “organization,” some abstract postcapitalist fold where the other sheep are happily grazing.
The installation embodies American isolationism and sterility. Vietnam, the event no one can face or forget, is the invisible background to this work. The taped messages are enough to drive anyone insane, let alone a Vietnam vet. Yet Allen demonstrates how, to greater or lesser degree, we have internalized these ghostly voices which tell us that good salesmanship is the best sign of optimum mental health. The piece could be subtitled “Rambo’s Tomb”: the final resting place of the avenging American cowboy, who returns home from Vietnam to face the limit of the once limitless horizon. Mapping the posttraumatic terrain of the American psyche is not a pretty job, but Allen pulls it off with finesse, creating an atmospheric object that is both horrible and hilarious.
Empire, 1989, is one of Allen’s most powerful new mixed-media paintings. It contains an image of a man wearing only socks and shoes, standing on a pedestal, grabbing his buttocks, and sticking his head up his ass. The painting has a lovely chalky finish; the figure’s contortions recall the work of Francis Bacon. A rough-hewn wooden box stamped with the word “Empire” acts as a three-dimensional caption to this commentary on colonialism. The Credits, 1989, is another painting dealing with headlessness, in this case locating it within the family. On a cartoonish, all-purpose Wild West scene, “Dad,” in a blue business suit, has his head in a tree, and “Mom” has her head stuck ostrichlike in the ground. Her skirt is blown up to expose thigh-high stockings and luscious bare buttocks. One of Walt Disney’s seven dwarves is projected against the mountainside, displaying a state of comic confusion. Two swastikas float against the red sky. This painting could be an allegory of a specifically American brand of denial. No one wants to see what is going on, and Disney can make everything into a big joke for the whole family. Allen has frequently made scathing use of Disney characters, even turning the innocuous, desexed Mickey Mouse into a monster. Allen’s America is horrific, lurid, and ridiculous, but it is illuminated with enough intelligence and compassion to be tragic as well.
—Catherine Liu
