Venice Biennial: Martin Puryear versus Alma Allen

 

Alma Allen

The American entry in the Venice Biennale is actually interesting this year. The Trump administration gave a big middle finger to the cultural elite by choosing a Florida pet shop owner to select a former museum curator whose career was torched by political correctness. 

 Let’s face it, the contemporary art world owns the American pavilion and this is the first time it’s ever been shut out. It would’ve been a great opportunity to have it curated by someone from a cowboy art museum or a contemporary mimetic gallery like Arcadia or Forum - genres that have been categorically excluded. 

The institutional definition of art - the only one that can consistently be applied in today’s artworld, privileges arguments based on authority. To challenge that authority attacks all who share it, so it’s hardly surprising that Jason Farago, art critic for the New York Times, took it personal, and gave it a comprehensive beat down 

 Here are some excerpts:

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The honor (or former honor) of representing the United States eventually went to Alma Allen, a competent but hardly compelling sculptor of bronze and marble plaques and curlicues. …….

The 2026 U.S. Pavilion offers a twinned sensation of outrage and exhaustion. The government's selection process has debased what was once a major stage for American art. Allen, on that stage, has declined to flatter his benefactors — but neither has he shown the rest of us that the concessions were worthwhile. The 20-odd sculptures here, ranging from a gourd of Mexican onyx to a stylized bronze of a boy clutching his legs, look fine enough for a South Beach hotel lobby. They do not offend, except in their inertness. Visitors may experience a numbness - am I feeling anything? do I even care?……..

An aesthetic critique.  The artist felt nothing, so neither can the viewer. I feel humor from the photos, but maybe that comes from the photographer.  Hotel lobby sounds about right- not necessarily a cheap one.

Biomorphic, talismanic, Brancusi for beginners (and a century late for that), these sculptures present some modest technical facility but no great thought. They are abstract-ish, but have no real faith in abstraction. They require no greater interpretation than the vocabulary children use to describe clouds: This one could be a snail, that one a cat, this one a tank. "Call Me the Breeze," the show is titled. Bronze may be heavy, but this is as insubstantial as air. 

This section begins with condescension and ends with an interesting appeal for an abstract art that needs sophisticated interpretation - presumably from art critics like himself.

National or cultural history had to be accounted for in a place like this. It'd be far better for everyone if we just did away with the unhelpful 1900s inheritance of these country-by-country displays. But if we have to have them, then an artist working within nationalist walls has no other choice than to work at the nexus of form and history. 

Why can't we just enjoy things? Because the form of a work of art is always situated. It has to be meaningful both on its own terms, through scale and shape and color and line, and simultaneously meaningful within an institutional framework. Nowhere is that double demand more urgent than in a national pavilion, and several American artists, notably Ed Ruscha and Martin Puryear, have done that with distinction when they represented the U.S. Other artists, mistaking the assignment, have fallen into point-and-click celebration and moralism; the last Biden-stamped American pavilion, at which Jeffrey Gibson displayed garish totems and punching bags with didactic slogans like "We Want To Be Free," 

Yes - “why can’t we simply enjoy things?”  99 percent of all art is in private collections, and enjoyment is usually the reason given.     It’s quite proper that art “fit within the institutional framework” of whatever institution that displays it - but if that institution is public, can't all of us participate in the debate? Especiallly populist politicians who can claim to speak for a voting majority.

All of the artists invited to Venice since 2016 chose racial or ethnic identity as the theme of their works. In other words, they were "woke"

Jeffrey Gibson.  2024. American Indian 

Simone Leigh.  2022 African American Woman identity (2020 was cancelled)

Martin Puryear 2018. African American slavery and liberation

Mark Bradford. 2016. African American diaspora identity.

But any putative inner exile is hard to square with the fact that a good fraction of these silly things used to sit on the median of Park Avenue in New York, sprucing up a business thoroughfare like so much 1970s "plop art." So the apter and sadder interpretation is that these are precisely what they look like: decorative baubles, nonchalant about form and situation, offering a perfectly flattering reflection to any aesthete or authoritarian gazing at their polished surfaces. 

“Plop art” sounds pretty disgusting - but the Wikipedia entry gave the following piece by  Richard Serra as a prime example, and he won the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale in 2001. 

 

Richard Serra

In its original usage - as “plunk art” - it referred to abstract public sculpture that had no obvious meaning or connection to the surrounding urban space. Like it had been randomly plunked down there.

BTW - here’s the verbiage that Allen’s gallery attached to that Park Avenue installation:


Psychologically charged and compulsively expressive, Alma Allen’s works evoke a curiosity regarding the life of objects and the ways in which form and material can circumnavigate the utility of language. Known for his distillation of diverse organic references, the artist’s works simultaneously invite and resist classification.

BTWII : When the Times announced Allen’s selection by a “Florida pet shop owner”, they did not mention his 2025  Park Avenue installation and only showed pictures of his hand sized work with the caption:  "For much of his career, Allen made small sculptural objects before transitioning to larger-scale pieces".  The half-truth is not good journalism.

Since Farago compared Allen with Puryear, I have shown their contributions below:

Here’s what Allen brought to  the American Pavilion:

 

Here’s what Puryear had made for it  eight years earlier:

It does seem that Allen eases tension while Puryear creates it. The one belongs in a shopping mall, the other on a university campus. But is one any more American, aesthetically intense, or politically independent than the other? 

 Visually, the outstanding feature of each seems to be the surprise of unfamiliarity - and that can vanish after one viewing. At which point, you might just as well be looking at the promotional photo for a nice yellow garden hose. 

But Puryear’s titles did relate to the history of African American oppression, so it was Woke, while Allen is not.

Farago responded with all of the scorn a meritocratic elite may feel towards those beneath them.