During a Visit to the Biennale, the Good, the Bad, and the Bungled

The State Department delivers a dud for America 250.

G reetings from the Biennale and dreamy, miraculous Venice, La Serenissima — and this time, they’re not kidding. This beauty, built on millions of petrified wood trunks, isn’t tourist-free exactly but as close to it as I’ve ever seen except in January. I think news of Europe’s heat wave kept people away through the weekend I visited. Hardy har har on them. It’s extraordinarily cool and dry for Venice in late August, 70 degrees and low humidity. It’s warmer in Vermont.

I’m here, of course, for the Biennale, first stop the American pavilion. The 61st edition of the world’s ultimate contemporary art show is in Castello, the easternmost district in the city and the quietest, at the Arsenale, the Giardini — Venice’s public garden — and spots around town. It’s been the arts Olympics since 1895, here and there a war suspending it until further notice. This cycle, 99 countries sent official art exhibitions to Venice from May 9 to November 22.

The exposition has two components. First, there’s an anchor thematic exhibition in the big hall in the Giardini, this year called In Minor Keys. The theme is “the joy of authentic art drawn from everyday life.” Last time it was migration, the more illegal, the better. Before that was contemporary Surrealism as a disguise for a show where 85 percent of the artists were women. This year, best to think quiet seething masquerading as joy. It’s bad, stagnant, and assaultive at the same time. That’s a feat. Then there are national pavilions that are supposed to express the theme of In Minor Keys, though most don’t.

Alas, Call Me the Breeze, the American pavilion’s exhibition, is a bit of a dud and a snooze, I’m sad to say, and, sadder still, a missed opportunity. The State Department’s education and culture department, the selection’s overseer, bungled the job. The pavilion is devoted to the work of Alma Allen (b. 1970), an American sculptor based, oddly, in Mexico. He makes biomorphic sculpture from small fetish figures to one-tonners looking like cartoon figures in three dimensions. The work at the Biennale, most of it from the last couple of years, is human scale — the American pavilion isn’t big — and is in bronze, quartzite, marble, travertine, onyx, walnut, and brilliant white marble quarried in the Elk Mountains in Colorado, all wonderful materials.

This is probably the tenth Biennale I’ve seen. For Simone Leigh’s and Jeffrey Gibson’s shows, the American pavilion, a small, innocuous Palladian building from 1930, was tarted up to look like Tarzan’s king-of-the-jungle reeded hut (for Leigh) and a massive Navajo blanket (for Gibson). Their two pavilions, from transportation of art, design, programming, parades, and the artist’s fees and staffing, cost millions.

Poor Allen, a last-minute pick, got an unadorned forecourt — the front yard — and the raw pavilion, a baby Monticello, for many reasons. He’s got common sense, reserved taste, for starters. That’s good. The pavilion’s not in Vegas. His project also got started very late, too late for a big fundraising drive. You see, the American pavilion represents the U.S., the artists inside it are picked by the State Department, and the art is supposed to advance American interests, but the Feds toss only $375,000 in the pot. A chunk of that goes to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, the American museum in Venice, to facilitate the U.S. exhibit since the Biennale itself is run by Italians. Allen is an outsider, and then there’s Trump.

For Gibson, Leigh, Martin Puryear, Mark Bradford, and Sarah Sze — the past five pavilion artists — their heavy-hitter New York dealers and the art-foundation biggies did the big lift. For Allen, that wasn’t going to happen. His dealers, he says, dropped him as soon as he was selected since he’s the product of Trump’s criteria: DEI begone, no trans ideology, no dissing the country. The State Department might think this leaves nothing but quality as a criterion, but quality has a range, too.

The forecourt, I read on the introductory wall panel, “presents an asterism of sculptures that suggest the perils faced by an unshorned sheep when courageous enough to stray from the flock.” There’s a bronze sheep, his wool thick and bedraggled and, technique-wise, one of the best things in the show. The other shapes, the ones suggested as perils, are more like Dorothy’s Scarecrow, squat bronze figures that seem to step from Harlequin’s family tree as well as a six-foot-tall green quartzite beaker and a variegated marble egg.

No deep, dark forest to be had. The single tree is a recently planted elm, barely roof height. The unshorn sheep stands on a patterned brick surface. How scary is all that? The scene is steps from a columned porch. The pavilion is not dressed as Frankenstein’s castle. It is much as its staid architects, Delano & Aldrich, left it. They also designed unwild and uncrazy places like the Knickerbocker Club, Yale’s divinity school, and the post office in Glen Cove. And “asterism” isn’t the right word for what I think the curator is saying — the sculptures are a deliberated group rather than arbitrarily placed — though it sounds highfalutin and art-jargony.

The look is quiet and puny rather than poignant. Inside, there are four galleries and a rotunda. I read in the American pavilion’s press statement that Allen’s work looks “ancient, contemporary, elemental, and deeply human,” and I think that’s the goal, but the ten-foot-tall wall-mounted bronze chaps? It’s deeply human to worship cowboys, but what’s contemporary about this work is how hokey it looks. A visitor told me they looked like shiny metallic disco pants from the ’70s. A travertine form — it looks like it’s striving to be a mushroom cloud — is an earthy red but pink and petite enough to be pretty rather than totemic, much less atomic. What it looks like is modest. One thing to remember: The press photos I got from the American pavilion show art that’s far more fetching on film than in the flesh. Their camera has a Pinocchio poltergeist inside it.

Allen is a digital artist, using a robotic arm to transition his small, handcrafted maquettes into big forms. He then finishes them by hand. Some look resolved, like a polished, big, white marble oval with irregular bumps that make it look like a donut. I thought it was ceramic when I first saw it. The marble for the egg in the forecourt is beautiful — black and white and veined — and I initially thought about Star Wars robots repurposed as stone amoebas now that the franchise has finally run out of gas. Allen is good at picking lovely stone and jazzing it up with names like Persian travertine and Guatemalan green quartzite, but that only goes so far.

I learned that Allen’s sculptures decorated New York’s Park Avenue a while ago. That seems right. They’re good things for transition spaces, meant to be seen in glimpses by pedestrians and passengers. There’s a 15-foot-tall bronze obelisk in the rotunda, modestly swirling. What can I say? It’s modest.

Alma Allen isn’t a bad artist. The work’s not trite and, praise the Lord, it’s there not to atone or to reckon and not first and foremost because Allen is black or gay or a woman or oppressed. He’s not political at all. His work is art for art’s sake. That’s good and, I think, one of the goals prescribed by the State Department in calling for proposals. I’m so sick of art made to measure whatever the New York Times touts, whether oppression, racism, hot weather, and, overall, how much Trump is to be hated. Thus the art’s a prop, an illustration, a one-dimensional, inflexible concept and not an autonomous, sensual, fluid object.

Allen is originally from Utah, where he grew up in a big Mormon family, and he is a self-taught artist, which I think is great since a talented, ambitious, curious artist doesn’t often need an art school credential. It’s good for networking, but high-end art schools share many of the same problems as other disciplines in the humanities and worse. He’s more or less an abstract artist, which is fine. His materials are handsome. And as much as the show unfolds with a thud, the art is better than most of what I’m seeing at this dreg-of-a-Biennale, with a proliferation of art worse than dogs playing poker, worse than Duchamp’s toilet, and worse than senile de Kooning. 

Allen is an outsider, too, which is fine, with a low profile in the art market and the worlds of critics and academics. He worked in New York only once and said the experience was brutalizing. I hear ya. He moved close to Joshua Tree near Palm Springs, Calif., built his own house, and sold his own work, though he had two New York dealers. Their parting of ways after Allen’s Biennale selection was a news item. For the last few years, he’s lived and worked near Mexico City. Some of his work looks like squat Maya cult figures and Maya biomorphic drinking vessels or lamps — another way of saying they’re derivative.

It’s not good when an art lover walks by something and thinks a bit of “Rocky Mountain Miro,” Carroll Dunham’s penis prints in three dimensions, Barry X Ball — who also uses scanners but does it better — and Earth Art, art that’s too shiny and too predictable, and a good idea not fully baked. I thought of each of these and more. There’s no wow, no magic, no kismet, and I wanted to like it. The immense swath of Biennale critics and camp followers want it to fail. They feel at this point that they once owned the American pavilion and that it’s been taken from them since Allen checks none of their boxes. You’d think they’d show some grace to a working-class stiff who’s made a career from abstraction, but they’re about as gracious and subtle as a boring machine excavating a tunnel. Allen’s project isn’t a failure. It just doesn’t succeed. His work is too timid to hold a high-voltage exhibition.

And it’s no secret to say Allen was picked, and abruptly, after the State Department’s first choice, Robert Lazzarini, and his institutional sponsor, the University of South Florida, folded because they wouldn’t commit to raising the money to pay for a pavilion show. Allen’s sponsor, a new group called the American Arts Conservancy, agreed to pay the piper. The National Endowment for the Arts is usually involved in the selection, but most of its staff quit. I don’t know much about the American Arts Conservancy. Of course, it’s a Trot target. They’ve done an exhibition now on view at the Organization of American States’ art space in Washington. It opened last month. I’ll see that show if I get to the Swamp before it — the exhibition, not, alas, the Swamp — closes. I read that there was a poetry reading at the pavilion last month, the only programming as far as I can tell.

Jeffrey Uslip is the curator of the Allen show. I don’t know him, but his Hurvin Anderson exhibition a few years ago in Toronto was wonderful and a revelation. He curated the Malta pavilion at the 2022 Biennale. Yes, wee Malta gets a pavilion, and it’s often very good. Its show in 2022 centered on Caravaggio’s depiction of light and molten, dripping steel. For all I know he salvaged the 2026 American pavilion from the realm of fiasco.

My sense, and I’m an outsider, is that arts programs under Trump, which still get billions directly and indirectly, are now run, by and large, by people who know very little about the visual arts and, worse, think it’s all easy, like the crowd who looked at Pollock in the late ’40s and said, “A monkey can do that.” Jackson Pollock might be not quite the best marker since he’s overrated and, yes, once in a hundred tries a monkey would come close and drip well. Of course, it’s not at all easy, and art time isn’t Trump time. Think geological or biblical time. And not any old artist unpolluted by DEI will do.

I think whenever — or if ever — the powers that be saw that they were over their heads, they should have enlisted the National Gallery or even the snakes at the Smithsonian. They’re experienced and, with exacting supervision, know how to deliver. Whatever its fatal flaws, the Smithsonian can and does do good shows when pushed. I think the Trump people might have thought they’d get screwed. So, we have mediocre art representing the country for America 250. I’ve seen dozens, hundreds, of better things at the Armory Show, the Art Dealers Association of America show, AIPAD, and the Winter Show.

The Americans have gotten stuck ever since the mid-’80s on single-artist shows. These create a personality cult, place all the eggs in one basket, and have, in the past, privileged artists with high-power New York representation, excluding those without it. Allen is a good theoretical step in that his work doesn’t reek of oppression politics — it’s not a scam, anti-art, or anti-human — though ultimately he wasn’t the best choice. I’d suggest a group show of work by artists under 30 or outsider artists or a no-flat-art show — spotlight on sculpture — or art between the oceans, by artists from states that touch neither the Atlantic nor the Pacific. We learn and grow. The 2028 Biennale will be here before we know it.