What if Hunter S Thompson, after blowing his brains out, instead of heading for that eternal stretch of rum-fuelled marlin fishing in the sky, had collected the curious and tormented souls of Spalding Grey, Johnny Cash, Joseph Beuys and Harry Carrey and harnessed their mutual supernatural ghoulishness into a gonzo collaboration from beyond with Garrison Keillor, George Carlin, Greg Brown and Robert Wilson?
Add a bit more Texas and you'd have something approximating Terry Allen.
Allen's book,
Dugout
, released this month by University of Texas Press, is the most recent manifestation of a continually evolving, mixed-media, true-to-life, autobiographical fiction brooding, ostensibly, on the lives of his parents and his own West Texas boyhood. The Santa Fe-based Allen is an accomplished and much celebrated songwriter and artist, despite not particularly giving a rat's ass about what's faddish or saleable in either realm.
Dugout
, as an ongoing project, typifies the artist's beat-of-his-own-drummer-style-it's a collection of images, ideas, art works and poems, but it's also a major, immersive, three-dimensional video installation and a multi-media theater performance describing his young life, his perception of the culture surrounding him and the folklore of his extended family and that of a particular moment in American history.
All of these art adventures have been presented previously in museums, galleries and theaters under the general headline of
Dugout
, but now, as a book, the sum of the parts, so to
speak, is documented in a precious, rambling hodge-podge of pictures and prose, punctuated by capable essays on the sprawling project and accompanied by an audio CD performance by Allen and his equally formidable partner, Jo Harvey Allen.
As fractured and particulate as
Dugout
sounds-is, in fact-it is magically and casually concise, poignant and economical in image, language and note. True enough it's part burlesque, part installation art, part poetic opus, part country-rock opera, part psychotic break, but in allowing and embracing all of these things, Allen has harnessed, rather than scattered, the natural pace of life, the terrible beauty and confusion of America, the sadness of broken people and the immediacy of memory, not to mention a fair amount of insight into baseball and jazz piano as great, encompassing and iconic psychological shrouds.
Allen's boyhood eyes, unconcerned with the exact truth in this stylized present-day storytelling, swell with the passing promise of prairie life and the rise of popular fears like mass murderers, Communism, polio, thalidomide and over-blown Yankees salaries as the reader's (or listener's) eyes swell in breathless sympathy.
The introduction by Dana Friis-Hansen, director of the Austin Museum of Art, thoughtfully places Allen as a historian after a fashion, in the great, global story-telling tradition and akin to folklorist J Frank Dobie, and frames the work in the challenging but amiable tone it engages an audience on. The introduction's success is mitigated somewhat by being immediately followed with the first essay, from Blaffer Gallery Director Terrie Sultan. The perhaps necessary, but somewhat clipped, formal assessment of the symbolism used by Allen doesn't echo the totality of
Dugout
and, though the essay is characterized as a prologue, it does little to ease immersion into Allen's wild and eclectic mind.
An essay by critic Dave Hickey, titled
Little House on the Tabloid Prairie
, offers the deepest understanding of Allen's work, but then Hickey may be the only man on earth with a similar understanding of the sad and savage Texas plains, boozy jazz musicians and the glitz and irreality of international art. Though Hickey's essay is overtly chummy and Baroque-ishly wordy, he rightly proclaims "…unlike most artists, who tell one story in one way to be known in one way, Terry Allen tells us something that is not quite a story in a hundred ways that may be known, partially or entirely, in as many ways as there are beholders-because, finally, we concoct the story."
The story is, like all works, in the end mostly about who the creator is and Allen is more honest than most about the myriad influences that have, in turn, created him. It is an epic Western mythology about the nature and awareness of identity and at the same time an archetypal tableaux, recognizable to anyone coming of age in the last half of the last century. The final essay by David Byrne characterizes the process of memory and revisiting childhood as an Ouroboros, the snake that eats its tail-and
Dugout
is indeed, more than anything else, something of a cyclic, spiritual handbook, koans for a knife-edged kind of cowboy Kundalini.
In this spirit, the work in its entirety is a startling accomplishment of balance. Picture a many planked see-saw sitting in a dustbowl with the precocious but soulful boy-man of Allen running full-bore toward maudlin indulgence but suddenly screeching back toward violence and then toward introspection and then kitsch, rage, uncertainty-always turning just before the precipice of too-much and, with a once-whiskied voice and a devilish grin, churning out a thoughtful and smooth flying saucer of unique and human wholeness.
