War and Remembrance

Multimedia artist Terry Allen is a rangy, affable Texan who didn’t serve in Vietnam but lost many friends who did. And 13 years after the fall of Saigon, Allen is still grappling with America’s misguided excursion into Southeast Asia.

His 5-year-old series of artworks “Youth in Asia” is up to 50 pieces so far, and 12 of them are on view at L.A. Louver Gallery in Venice through July 2.

While Vietnam is the central component in “Youth in Asia,” Allen, 46, intends that the work resonate on many levels.

“I see the war as an epic metaphor for the messed-up part in people, and the work is as much about right now as it is about the war. . . . Vietnam generated a climate of betrayal that people are still struggling with. It destroyed the credibility of everything we’d been raised to believe during the ‘50s and made us easy prey for all the spoon-fed stuff that’s floating around these days. We grab a religion here, a diet there, but there’s a real vacancy to living that way.”

Though Vietnam is in vogue right now--the subject was still taboo in 1983 when Allen began “Youth in Asia”--he has mixed feelings about the current reassessment of the war, from “Platoon” to “China Beach.”

“Our consciousness about Vietnam has been raised, but we’re barreling ahead everywhere else around the world--it’s the same old hypocrisy. I sometimes think the reason I got into all this was because my two sons were facing the draft, and I wanted to say something clear to them.”

Allen says something clear and powerful in this work, which features recurring motifs of Disney characters and birds, and reverberates with a brooding sense of loss and finality. “The Disney figures represent a lie--which isn’t to say people should be cynical and have no faith in life,” Allen said. “Have faith in life but don’t have faith in fairy tales. Many people fail to see the difference between the two.

“As for the birds, I once visited this wonderful shop in Thailand where you could buy a bird and make a wish for somebody you loved, then you let the bird go. I thought that was great until I figured out that the guy probably trained the birds to fly back to their cages.”