ART : Vietnam and a Betrayal of Childhood : The images of growing up in America crash into the horrors of war in Terry Allen’s ‘Youth in Asia’

In late May of this year, Terry Allen and I sat with the local lunch crowd in a restaurant called Jimmy’s Tiny’s. According to the artist, this was the last eatery in town where one might eat a steak, smoke a cigarette, drink a glass of bourbon and admire the plastic flowers without fear of the “style police,” and, not surprisingly, we were doing exactly that.

We were also discussing “Youth in Asia,” Allen’s passionate, multimedia re-envisioning of the Vietnam War and its aftermath. A large touring exhibition of works from this project, organized by the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, N.C., is scheduled to open at the Newport Harbor Art Museum Saturday and run through Sept. 12. Allen was trying rather urgently to conjure up for me the enervating cultural atmosphere out of which the project had grown.

“This is the climate I’m talking about,” he was saying. “Back in 1970, I was sitting in a cafe with my cousin. The waitress came up and put a bowl of peas on the table. These are just green peas, right, but my cousin suddenly disappears--I mean, he just literally dove under the table and wouldn’t come up. I didn’t have any choice but to crawl down there after him. ‘I don’t wanna look at any dead eyes!’ he said. ‘I don’t want to see any more dead eyes!’ he kept saying, and I just sat down there with him, trying to coax him back into the world and gesturing like mad for the waitress to get those damned peas away from us.

“That’s what ‘Youth in Asia’ is about--that kind of residue and those kinds of experiences. In one sense, they’re incredibly intriguing and horrifying events--specific traumas, you know--but at the same time, they’re really just stories about the consequences of betrayal--about a culture that betrays its children. You don’t have to be a veteran of some war to understand that.

“That’s where all the Disney images come from, from that idea of betrayal. I grew up in West Texas so I was always stunned by the whole Disney thing--by the lie of it--the bogus innocence of those fairy tales and those ‘true-life’ adventure stories, where everything was cuddly, no matter how vicious.

“I remember one summer Disney released a film about the bears in Yellowstone Park; and, all that summer, kids were jumping out of cars in Yellowstone and running up to bears. They were getting mauled and murdered right and left, and those that survived, I guess, grew up to be betrayed again, mauled and murdered by that silly war.”

Earlier that morning, when I wandered into Allen’s studio on the outskirt of town, I had found his attention otherwise engaged. Dressed in jeans, boots and a black Western shirt, he was perched on a stool and hunched aggressively forward over a low table strewn with typed pages. Resembling nothing so much as an eagle looming over its prey, he was furiously revising the final scenes of “Chippy,” a script based on the diary of a West Texas hooker during the Great Depression. It is a collaboration with his wife, Jo Harvey Allen, with musical contributions from Joe Ely and Butch Hancock.

When he noticed me, Allen muttered that “Chippy” was on a tight deadline and kept scribbling. In fact, this home-grown “Traviata” was only a few days and many miles away from its opening performance on June 3 in Philadelphia at the American Music Theater Festival.

Then the telephone rang. Allen snatched it up and proceeded to answer a series of technical questions about installing “Voices in the Wilderness,” his equally imminent exhibition at L.A. Louver Gallery in Venice (which is on view through July 17). Before the receiver hit the cradle, he was refocused on “Chippy.” Since my own deadline was weeks away, I lit a cigarette and strolled around the studio. There was a sketch for a Santa Fe-style bumper sticker pinned to one wall. It said: JUST SAY NO TO RUGS. The bright studio space itself was filled with large, scale-model, theatrical maquettes on saw-horse tables.

Without looking up, Allen explained that these were proposed sets for “Juarez”--his first full-blown musical drama. The production is based on an apocalyptic road-narrative that, since the late ‘60s, in various incarnations, has run like a leitmotif through Allen’s work. “David (Byrne) is going to direct it,” Allen said. “It opens the season at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in Oct. 1994.”

It occurred to me then that if we had been fortunate enough to be living in a “renaissance,” Terry Allen would certainly qualify as a “renaissance man”--or, more likely, as a “renaissance person.” Things being what they are, however, he is probably the art world’s leading exponent of the “Post-Modern Operatic”--the Master of Impure Spectacle--renowned for his effortless command and outrageous combination of disparate genres and media, according to the task at hand.

Over the length of his 25-year career, Allen, 50, has produced paintings, songs, sculpture, scenery, poems, drawings, performances, collages, dramas and narratives--singly and in combination--at an amazingly consistent level of excellence. He has slipped as easily through the fiefdoms of art, music, theater and literature as he has moved up and down the social ladder of American culture. His work has been seen at the prestigious German art extravaganza “Documenta” and on the much-lamented TV pop-show “Shindig”; his endeavors have been reviewed with equal enthusiasm in the pages of Easy Rider and of Artforum--each according to the task at hand.

Suddenly, Allen slammed down his pencil and spun off the stool. “Let’s get outta here,” he said. It was noon. On the dot. By 12:15 we were ensconced in a booth at Jimmy’s Tiny’s repudiating “Santa Fe style.” When I switched on the tape recorder, I could actually see Allen refocusing his attention. He straightened his back and leaned forward, lifting his shoulders into that aggressive eagle-posture again, addressing himself to “Youth in Asia.”

Throughout the 1980s, Allen had pursued this historical reconstruction with the same rigorous discipline that he had demonstrated that morning working on “Chippy.” Today, “Youth in Asia,” in its full extent, consists of nearly 300 pieces: a cornucopia of images, objects and collages supported by two books of poetry, three catalogues, a couple of unpublished plays, an album of songs, a radio play and four large installations with accompanying soundtracks.

Allen began talking about “Youth in Asia” without being asked. The whole project, he explained, amounted to an extended meditation on the personal consequences of geography and memory--on the blended overlay of migration and political history--with human beings ripsawed in the friction. It began, he thought, back in the 1970s, with a piece called “War Story,” which had been inspired by an article about military experiments with animals during World War II.

“One of their ideas was to put explosive charges in bats,” Allen said, “then, somehow, they wanted to hook in with their natural radar and send these exploding bats into enemy territory. They were never actually able to, of course, but in the process of developing them, the Army lost quite a few barns.”

The final piece in the series was called “Sneaker.” It was completed in 1991 and based on a newspaper clipping about a guy in Arizona who had completely fabricated a history of traumatic action in Vietnam, thus eliciting 20 years of tender loving care from his family and community. “So the war appropriates nature to begin with, and the series concludes with some guy appropriating the war. That’s pretty interesting, I guess, but I’m more concerned with the conditions under which this kind of craziness becomes possible.

“It’s like the story about my cousin and the peas. I probably sucked 10 pieces out of that incident--only two of which actually deal with the event, with the specifics of it. The rest grew out of that atmosphere--that nasty climate. That’s what history forgets, and what you try to re-remember. And try to get right. Obviously, I wasn’t in the damned war and, to be honest, while it was going on, I never even thought about it much. But I lived in this country at that time and I was infected with the atmosphere--we all were. I didn’t even notice it, though, until Stanley McPhearson got killed.

“I mean, Stanley was just a guy from New Mexico, a friend of mine from high school. He was in my wedding, and I can guarantee you that all Stanley wanted to do in life was run fast and be a forest ranger. He did get to run on the track team at Texas Western in El Paso for a couple of years, but Stanley never got to be a forest ranger like he wanted to--to take care of Bambi and Thumper. And when he died, that made me angry, but not at Lyndon Johnson. I was angry at Walt Disney for giving Stanley that stupid dream! So, when I saw those guys singing the Mickey Mouse Club song in ‘Full Metal Jacket,’ I knew what it was about. During the war there was even a bar in Saigon called Disneyland East--named, I suspect, less out of affection than ironic anger.

“My cousin was over there, too, of course, and before he shipped out for his first tour in 1965, he spent the night with us in L.A. I remember him being scared white, when I took him down to San Pedro. He was wounded and decorated, and then in the gap between his first and second tour, his wife and child were killed in a car wreck. Atmosphere.

“Then he went back to Vietnam, was wounded again, came back again, and while he was waiting to embark for his third tour, he stayed with Jo Harvey and me in Berkeley. He didn’t want to go. He asked us to hook him up with the ‘underground railroad,’ and we did. But he went anyway. Then we saw him in Lubbock at Christmastime, and he was completely crazy and really ready to desert, so we let him out on the highway outside Santa Rosa, N.M. He just walked into the mountains and stayed up there for two months, deserted. They caught him when he came down to go to a grocery store.

“They put him in prison for a little while until he was discharged. It wasn’t a dishonorable--it was called a ‘general’ discharge, but it affected his ability to get a job, or get back into school. So that’s a story that’s still going on. My cousin lives in Seattle now. He disappears occasionally to live in the woods, but it’s kinda funny: When it’s relatives, you really don’t associate the color pictures on TV with the specific things that are happening to people in your life. I mean, during this whole period, my cousin was getting crazier by the minute, and the whole time, we thought it was just him getting crazy.”

While Allen was talking, I began to get a picture of the world he was describing. It was two worlds, really. There was this lower world of real geography, of private lives and families, of two nations crisscrossed with invisible networks of personal catastrophe and secret torment. And then, floating above it, there was this colorful, exciting image world, full of tracers and explosions--this “theater of war” that seemingly had no connection with the undramatic, inarticulate ache and regret that was proliferating below it, poisoning the atmosphere. The problem was: You couldn’t see either of these worlds reflected in the other. You needed, somehow, to connect them up. You needed a bridge. Terry Allen’s bridge came in 1982, in the form of a letter from German filmmaker Wolf-Eckart Buhler.

“Buhler wanted me to come to Thailand and do the music for this documentary film he was making called ‘Amerasia.’ I agreed to do it and started reading about the war again and worrying about it. Then, I got over to Thailand, and things got very strange. I found myself dealing with two things at once--or three, really.

“To begin with, I was playing keyboards with this Thai band and that was really great. But I was also involved with the German film crew who were supposedly documenting the lives of expatriate Americans living in Indochina. Unfortunately, the Germans had this classic Marxist attitude. They just assumed that all these guys were going to be ugly Americans--that they were gonna be scum--that they were gonna be drunks--that they were gonna be dope dealers. Then they got over to Thailand, and it wasn’t that simple.

“The bulk of those guys, the majority of them--and there were at least 10,000 in Indochina at the time--had married Vietnamese or Thai women. Some of them had initially gone back to the States and returned because they didn’t like what they found. The rest never left, either because they preferred Asia or because they were afraid to take their families back. Most of them had settled in Thailand, and they had pretty much blended themselves into the culture, knew the language, had jobs and all that.

“There were these bands of cowboys, of course, living out by the abandoned bases with their slave Thai wives--drinking and doping and reliving the war--but they were a real minority. So, basically, the Germans’ premise (which they had brought with them) fell apart in the middle of the filming--and the film shows it--and I ended up feeling more at home with the Thai musicians than with the Germans or the Americans.

“It was eerie. That band, you know, got to feeling like the band I play with in Lubbock. The personalities of bands, I guess, are pretty much the same. Bass players are control freaks--even in Thailand--and lead-guitar players like to take long solos, whatever scale they’re playing in. Also, these guys couldn’t speak a word of English, and I, naturally, couldn’t speak any Thai, so we just played music and rolled around the jungle in their van, smoking cigarettes and listening to Eric Clapton tapes--which I suddenly realized was a perfect inversion of my own experience during the Vietnam War, a mirror image of all of the back and forth I was doing in my old pickup between L.A. and Lubbock, driving through the desert listening to rock ‘n’ roll and monitoring the jungle war on the radio.

“That, basically, was my Vietnam War experience--the American Southwest overlaid with rock ‘n’ roll and news from Southeast Asia. And, even then, it was hard to ignore the weird parallel and paradox of those two places--of the faces that you saw, of the craziness you felt in those strange little burnt-out places along the highway. American Indians who had come across the land-bridge from Asia thousands of years ago were being sent back to fight the descendants of their ancestors, then bringing old memories back with them. Buddhists and Hopis. Laos and Taos, you know. All these weird parallels and incredible collisions made a kind of sad sense for me--sorta symbolized the brutality and confusion that war was about and has never stopped being about.”

As we walked out into the blue, New Mexico afternoon, I found myself looking at Allen a little funny. When someone you’ve known for 20 years turns out to be deeper and shrewder than you have previously suspected, it’s a little disconcerting, but while Allen was talking, I finally glimpsed some part of the true complexity of his vision--of what he is showing us in the extravagant collages of text and imagery that compose “Youth in Asia,” with the borrowed narrative and jailhouse drawing, with the Chinese calligraphy floating in the atmosphere around Ship Rock, with the Mexican retablos and the Vietnamese Tinkerbell, with Buddha and the Seven Dwarfs, with the Jimi Hendrix lyrics and the inverted French-colonial aristocrats, with the quotes from the 18th-Century French painter Jean-Baptiste Greuze and the passages of appropriated Impressionist paint handling.

Allen is not simply concerned with the residue of the Vietnam War washing onto the subsequent peace, but with the residue of Chinese and French culture in Indochina as well, and the residue of Asian and Spanish culture in the American Southwest. There are deep and global tides flowing against one another in “Youth in Asia”--perpetual backwashes and overlays of Occidental and Oriental influence in both locations that we see deployed in Allen’s work like the layers of liqueur in a dessert drink.

And, finally, beneath this layered confusion and turmoil, we catch a glimpse of what, in Terry Allen’s vision, we seem to have lost, irrevocably, in Vietnam: the possibility of a Pacific world, and of a more pacific world, as well, in which the hegemony of European values might be mitigated and modulated into a more humane culture. And so, as he and I walked back to his truck, I couldn’t help but think of Simone Weil, who, upon hearing that Hitler’s troops were marching into Paris, remarked to a friend: “This is a great day for Indochina”--neatly explicating, in that single wry comment, the covert, Eurocentric food chain of imperialism. It seemed to me a quintessentially Terry Allen sort of remark.