Art and graft
The Southwestern maverick has been widely misunderstood for 60 years. At last: a reckoning, says Grayson Haver Currin.
Diggin’ the ribs: Terry Allen (right) and Lloyd Maines, Stubb’s Bar-B-Q, Lubbock, April 1979.
Milton Adams courtesy of Joe and Sharon Ely
Truckload Of Art: The Life And Work Of Terry Allen
★★★★
Brendan Greaves
HACHETTE. £26
INSEPTEMBER 1971, Terry Allen was a 28-year-old father of two str uggling to maintain the tenuous footholds he’d gained in Los Angeles’ interconnected visual arts and music communities. A native of north Texas’s endless horizons, Allen’s esoteric countr y tunes and hypertextual and of t-ribald early drawings had earned him many prominent fans, friends, and exhibitions, but recognition frequently doesn’t pay. The young Allen family str uggled. So they decamped to Fresno, the San Joaquin Valley city at the edge of the Sierra Nevada so unglamorous some residents now say “Fres-yes” in its pre-emptive defence. For six years, Allen taught art at the state school there, str uggling for promotions and joining a clutch of like-minded professors promoting the artistic vanguard despite administrative protestations. It was a slog, exacerbated by crippling cluster headaches.