CatharineClarkGallery

Part of the site specific installation What Would Be Left? (Catharine Clark Gallery, 2015) which features a video documentary of Jo Harvey Allen’s one-woman play, Hally Lou (1983), as well as archival paraphernalia, prints, poetry, and other materials from the original performance of the work.

 

The 54-minute digitally reformatted documentary video of Hally Lou was taken during the play’s first performance in 1983, on the back of a flatbed truck in Aspen, Colorado.  Hally Lou was written and performed by Jo Harvey Allen with background music by Terry Allen.  This informally taped document was filmed by Chris Felver for the artist’s documentation files.  

 

Hally Lou formally premiered in 1983 as part of a six season series of performances called “Explorations,” curated by Julie Lazar of The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.  Allen went on to perform characters like these in films such as True Stories (1986) and Fried Green Tomatoes (1991).

 

Before the film’s inclusion in the curator Annette Leddy’s program for K-PST.org, “Photorealist Portraits: Monologues from the 1970s and 1980s,” it was never before publicly broadcast.  Annette Leddy’s program, currently viewable online, features work from several 1980s artists who created pieces that were part sociological and part psychological inquiry, sometimes based on interviews with citizens of the American heartland.  The results were portraits about women and men inhabiting an America that many in the art world knew only superficially.  Occupying a zone between avant-garde performance art and popular genres, these artists appeared in diverse venues – public spaces, commercial spaces, museums, theaters, radio, television, and film.  The program presents several dramatic monologue works from the 1980s, especially those that developed in conjunction with the feminist project of recuperating female narratives of the disadvantaged or culturally retrograde.  Jo Harvey Allen’s Hally Lou, the story of a female revivalist preacher, was the first work to be featured in this series.

Allen’s work has direct roots in the 1960s performance world.  Her first teacher and mentor was Yvonne Rainer, who in 1971 was a visiting artist at the State University in Fresno, where Allen was then living.  Influenced in part by Rainer’s This is the story of a woman who…., Allen began developing her monologues about waitresses, which she initially performed in truck stops and diners. These portraits eventually became the extended monologue Counter Angel, which she performed at the New Museum in New York in 1982.

Part of the site specific installation What Would Be Left? (Catharine Clark Gallery, 2015) which features a video documentary of Jo Harvey Allen’s one-woman play, Hally Lou (1983), as well as archival paraphernalia, prints, poetry, and other materials from the original performance of the work. 

 

This 54-minute digitally reformatted documentary video of Hally Lou was taken during the play’s first performance in 1983, on the bed of a flatbed truck in Aspen, Colorado.  Hally Lou was written and performed by Jo Harvey Allen with background music by Terry Allen.  This informally taped document was filmed by Chris Felver for the artist’s documentation files.   

 

Hally Lou formally premiered in 1983 as part of a six season series of performances called “Explorations,” curated by Julie Lazar of The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.  Allen went on to perform characters like these in films such as True Stories (1986) and Fried Green Tomatoes (1991).

 

Before the film’s inclusion in the curator Annette Leddy’s program for K-PST.org, “Photorealist Portraits: Monologues from the 1970s and 1980s,” it was never before publicly broadcast.  Annette Leddy’s program, currently viewable online, features work from several 1980s artists who created pieces that were part sociological and part psychological inquiry, sometimes based on interviews with citizens of the American heartland.  The results were portraits about women and men inhabiting an America that many in the art world knew only superficially.  Occupying a zone between avant-garde performance art and popular genres, these artists appeared in diverse venues – public spaces, commercial spaces, museums, theaters, radio, television, and film.  The program presents several dramatic monologue works from the 1980s, especially those that developed in conjunction with the feminist project of recuperating female narratives of the disadvantaged or culturally retrograde.  The first work in the series was Jo Harvey Allen’s Hally Lou, the story of a female revivalist preacher.

 

Allen’s work has direct roots in the 1960s performance world.  Her first teacher and mentor was Yvonne Rainer, who in 1971 was a visiting artist at the State University in Fresno, where Allen was then living. Influenced in part by Rainer’s This is the story of a woman who…., Allen began developing her monologues about waitresses, which she initially performed in truck stops and diners. These portraits eventually became the extended monologue Counter Angel, which she performed at the New Museum in New York in 1982.