Terry Allen’s "Cross the Razor"

Almost exactly thirty years ago, on the post-equinox morning of Saturday, September 24, 1994, two dilapidated vans parked next to each other on either side of the US-Mexico border. One was in San Diego’s Border Field State Park and the other in Playas de Tijuana, each retrofitted with a ladder, a rooftop platform, a sound system, and a translator. Signs on each van encouraged public participants to climb onto the makeshift stages and express themselves freely “to/at/for the other side.” Separating the vehicles was a chain-link fence punctuated by a marble obelisk officially known as Border Monument No. 258, erected in 1851 to mark the national boundaries. One hundred and twenty years later, First Lady Pat Nixon inaugurated the surrounding site as International Friendship Park, celebrating the supposed fellowship between the United States and Mexico. (Today artist Terry Allen refers to this diminutive tower as the “ultimate irony prick.”) Along the chain-link demarcation, US soldiers were erecting, as part of President Clinton’s Operation Gatekeeper, a ten-foot-high border barrier constructed of corrugated steel sheets salvaged from Vietnam War-era landing mats, which resembled, to Allen, “big rusty razor blades—so symbolically hideous.”

In a synchronous but coincidental prick of irony, the blanched and anodyne sitcom Friends premiered on prime-time NBC two nights before Allen’s piece debuted. It was a week for delimiting friendship.

Every weekend for six consecutive weeks, a couple of mornings after Friends, the vans would meet again at the same spot. This public artwork, titled Cross the Razor / Cruzar la navaja, was Allen’s contribution to inSITE94, a collaborative exhibition involving thirty-eight US and Mexican institutions and comprising seventy-four site-specific artworks in San Diego and Tijuana. It was mounted amid the furor surrounding California’s Proposition 187, which sought to deny social services to undocumented immigrants. The installation’s popularity surprised Allen, an inveterate satirist by nature: “It was pretty interesting, the whole thing, because of the eloquence and dignity of the people, especially on the Mexican side—what they had to say about the fence and about relations between gringos and Mexicans. A lot of musicians made use of it to get up there and jam. One time there was a big mariachi band on the Mexican side and a jazz band on the US side.”

Allen, who has lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico, since 1989, was raised in midcentury Lubbock, Texas. His father, Sled, was a professional ballplayer turned wrestling and concert promoter whose events attracted white, Black, and, because of the popularity of lucha libre, Tejano audiences alike. Allen’s mother, Pauline, was a hell-raising barrelhouse piano player, allegedly expelled from college for playing with Black musicians. A songwriter, visual artist, and playwright, Allen occupies a unique position in American art, straddling the usually disparate worlds of conceptual art and country music. For over fifty years, dating back to his 1975 debut album, Juarez—the first iteration of his long-standing interdisciplinary project of the same name—Allen has dedicated himself to ignoring, and even relishing, such distinctions. His work has encompassed music, drawing, print, sculpture, large-scale installation, theater, video, radio plays, prose, and poetry. It has confounded popular perceptions of contemporary art and country music and helped to erode the mutual alienation their respective core audiences traditionally feel toward each other. At its best, his work bridges the widening divisions that define and distort American culture. “People tell me it’s country music,” he likes to quip, “and I ask, ‘Which country?’”

The poet and theorist Gloria Anzaldúa, whom Allen has quoted in his writings on the broader body of work he calls JUAREZ, all caps, has vividly described the border as “una herida abierta” (an open wound). Three decades after this photograph was taken, our national border disputes have only grown rawer and more rancorous. Allen inscribed my copy of the catalog for his 1992 exhibition a simple story (Juarez) with the words it’s all border. Which is to say, we are all living in an open wound.

“If they’re going to build a wall on the border,” Allen once joked, “they should build it high enough to keep the birds out too.” They’d have to build a higher irony prick to match it.