Truckload of Art - The Life and Work of Terry Allen—An Authorized Biography

Drawing on hundreds of interviews with Allen himself, his family members (including actor and poet Jo Harvey Allen, his wife and artistic partner of more than sixty years), and his many notable friends, colleagues, and collaborators (from musicians like David Byrne and Kurt Vile to artists such as Bruce Nauman and Kiki Smith); full access to the artist's home, studio, and voluminous journals and archives; and over twenty years of collaboration and friendship with Allen, author Brendan Greaves limns a revealing portrait, as deeply researched as it is intimate, as provocative as it is poetic, of a singularly multivalent storyteller of the American West.

Truckload of Art exhaustively traces Allen's extraordinary life from his childhood in post-war Lubbock, Texas, spent ringside and side stage as the only child of a professional ballplayer turned concert and wrestling promoter father and a barrelhouse piano player mother, to his revelatory years as a wide-eyed art student and fledgling musician in incendiary 1960s Los Angeles, and through subsequent decades of troubles and triumphs doggedly pursuing an uncompromising artistic practice distinct from, and often contrary to, prevailing currents. With humour and critical acumen, Greaves deftly recounts how the artist built a career and cult following based on multiyear and multimedia bodies of richly narrative, interconnected art and theatrical works-including JUAREZ (ongoing since 1968), YOUTH IN ASIA (1982-1992), and DUGOUT (1993-2005)-and pioneering albums like Juarez (1975) and Lubbock (on everything) (1979), hailed as, respectively, among the most significant statements in the history of conceptual art and country music.

Allen's adventures in art and music, from the mid-1960s through his recent renaissance, Greaves asserts, offer a fascinating alternate, or parallel, history of American artistry. It is a history in which established geographies and genre barriers do not hold-in which a song can also be a sculpture, and a play can spring forth from drawings-in which an unlikely confluence of Californian conceptualism and Texan country-rock challenges our preconceptions about the limits and borders of expressive culture, the longevity and productivity of artist marriages and creative partnerships, and what one artist can accomplish in one lifetime. Like Allen's life work, Greaves's deep-dive critical biography joins music, visual art, and theatre-braiding histories both personal and cultural-in the service of exploring the strange terrain of memory, of conjuring indelible stories, horrific and hilarious alike, out of the howling West Texas wind.

A propos de l'auteur

Terry Allen is a songwriter, visual and recording artist, and playwright. He’s released more than a dozen studio albums since his 1975 debut, Juarez, and his wide-ranging artwork resides in collections around the world, including the Met, MoMA, and LACMA. Raised in Lubbock, Texas, since 1989 he has resided in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with his wife and collaborator, the performer and poet Jo Harvey Allen. 
 
Brendan Greaves is founder and owner of the record label Paradise of Bachelors and has collaborated on numerous projects with Terry Allen, including Pedal Steal + Four Corners, for which he earned a Grammy nomination for Best Album Notes. A folklorist, essayist, and lapsed art worker, he studied at Harvard and UNC, and lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, with his wife, Samantha, and son, Asa.
 

Résumé

*A New York Times Best Art Book of 2024*

The definitive, authorized, and first-ever biography of Terry Allen, the internationally acclaimed visual artist and iconoclastic songwriter who occupies an utterly unique position straddling the disparate, and usually distant, worlds of conceptual art and country music.   
“People tell me it’s country music,” Terry Allen has joked, “and I ask, ‘Which country?’” For nearly sixty years, Allen’s inimitable art has explored the borderlands of memory, crossing boundaries between disciplines and audiences by conjuring indelible stories out of the howling West Texas wind.
 
In Truckload of Art, author Brendan Greaves exhaustively traces the influences that shaped Allen’s extraordinary life, from his childhood in Lubbock, Texas, spent ringside and sidestage at the wrestling matches and concerts his father promoted, to his formative art-school years in incendiary 1960s Los Angeles, and through subsequent decades doggedly pursuing his uncompromising artistic vision. With humor and critical acumen, Greaves deftly recounts how Allen built a career and cult following with pioneering independent records like Lubbock (on everything) (1979)—widely considered an archetype of alternative country—and multiyear, multimedia bodies of richly narrative, interconnected art and theatrical works, including JUAREZ (ongoing since 1968), hailed as among the most significant statements in the history of American vernacular music and conceptual art.
 
Drawing on hundreds of revealing interviews with Allen himself, his family members, and his many notable friends, colleagues, and collaborators—from musicians like David Byrne and Kurt Vile to artists such as Bruce Nauman and Kiki Smith—and informed by unprecedented access to the artist’s home, studio, journals, and archives, Greaves offers a poetic, deeply personal portrait of arguably the most singularly multivalent storyteller of the American West.
 

Préface

Truckload of Art is the definitive, authorized, and first-ever biography of Terry Allen, the internationally acclaimed visual artist and iconoclastic songwriter who occupies an utterly unique position straddling the disparate, and usually distant, worlds of conceptual art and country music.

Détails du produit

• Auteurs: Brendan Greaves
• Edition: Little, Brown and Company
• Langues: Anglais
• Format d'édition: Livre Relié
• Sortie: 19.03.2024
• EAN: 9780306924545
• ISBN: 978-0-306-92454-5
• Pages: 560
• Dimensions: 162 mm x 232 mm x 48 mm
• Poids: 840 g
• Illustrations: 16-page b&w insert + 16-page 4-C insert
• Catégories: Sciences humaines, art, musique > Art > Théâtre, ballet; Country and Western, MUSIC / Genres & Styles / Country & Bluegrass, Individual artists, art monographs, Bluegrass, ART / Individual Artists / Artists' Books, Traditional and folk music