dOCUMENTA has continued to be a platform to expose artists to an international audience while providing a critical forum for these works to reside. A number of L.A. Louver artists have had the privilege to be included in this dialogue including Terry Allen in dOCUMENTA 8. Taking place in 1987, dOCUMENTA 8 was curated by German Art Historian and Curator Manfred Schneckenburger and included a large-scale installation piece by Terry Allen titled, China Night, 1985.
Currently the work resides in MOCA’s permanent collection, but was also shown in the exhibition “Youth in Asia” at the Newport Harbor Art Museum, CA in 1993. It was through this exhibition that L.A. Times Art Critic, Christopher Knight described the work:
“China Night,” which is in the collection of L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art, is the show’s masterwork… A grim, run-down bar in New Mexico, sporting a broken neon sign and a tattered American flag as a window curtain, stands isolated and unable to be entered inside a fenced patch of litter-strewn desert.
The surrounding gallery, painted midnight black and sporting two neon aphorisms, puts the spectator inside a peripheral zone of the installation, but outside the fenced-off bit of landscape that is its heart. Perusing the scattered beer bottles, cigarette butts and trash, and lured by the music, your mind begins to imagine a desperate mix of playfulness and horror inside the bar.
Around back, a confirming clue will be found. A small diorama of a domestic living room is literally turned upside down, chairs and tables hanging like stalactites from the ceiling; below, a tableau of Snow White confronting the Seven Dwarfs presents an all-American face-off between the eternally virginal and the emotionally stunted.
Actual knowledge of the hidden barroom is, however, unavailable. The walled-off interior becomes a metaphoric image for the finally impenetrable mystery of another human mind or heart. Allen’s environments can make lonely isolation shockingly palpable.
-Los Angeles Times, July 17 1993
To learn more about Terry Allen and to see further examples of his work, please click here.