The fraught US Pavilion reveals what has been true for some time, if not forever: the artworld is heavily politicised, though until recently almost always in ways that have suited liberal agendas
How hard can it be to find an artist to represent Donald Trump’s America at next year’s Venice Biennale? With Trump 2.0 having declared war on DEI, woke and ‘progressive ideology’, and his administration putting pressure on institutions such as the Smithsonian to toe a more conservative cultural line, the answer has so far been: quite hard. The Venice selection was supposed to have been announced on 1 September, but there has been silence from the US State Department since, until a flurry of stories last week. With the clock ticking towards next May’s Venice opening, The Washington Post this month was first to report that New York-based artist Robert Lazzarini had been selected, only for the artist’s proposal to fall through at the last moment. Almost immediately another relatively low profile artist, the Utah-born sculptor Alma Allen, was reported to be the favoured artist. The uber-insiderish newsletter Baer Faxt circulated it first, and it was quickly picked up by Artnet and others.
Allen’s selection came as a surprise to most, since until recently he had been an uncontroversial figure in American contemporary art. Over the past decade (since his participation in the 2014 Whitney Biennial) he’s been shown and represented by established galleries such as Mendes Wood DM, Kasmin and Blum & Poe. But the surprise has been more that there could be an available artist who would ignore the US artworld’s near-universal and very vocal opposition to Trump’s presidency. It turns out that there are in fact artists who are maybe not so convinced that Trump’s return heralds America’s inevitable slide into fascism.
Speculation has been rife. In September, speaking as a guest on the Artnet podcast, New York curator Matthew Higgs mused vaguely that, since “the criteria for entry has completely changed”, he doubted that any “contemporary art institution would actually apply”. The podcast’s hosts, Kate Brown and Ben Davis, turned to proposing what kind of artist they’d prefer for the pavilion – artists whose work would, in their minds, be critical or satirical of the present moment. Cady Noland or Barbara Kruger, said Higgs. Maybe even Andres Serrano, said Davis – an artist who this summer shared a supposedly formal application for a ‘mausoleum to Trump’, rebooting his 2018–19 series of Trump memorabilia. Brown liked Serrano’s proposal, which could be “read by both the left and right in different ways”. Perhaps it should be a group show, Davis added, of artists with a sense of humour. “It would be good for the world to see a side of the United States that is self-deprecating”, he said, “and is aware of how ridiculous and foolish we look.”
What Davis and company were clearly stuck on – quite apart from their sullen disillusion with the state of America as such – is the habit of seeing art on this official scale as necessarily a platform for a big, ideally self-critical, political statement about the current and past state of the nation. It’s true, of course, that the State Department revised application criteria for Venice, in line with its nationalistic and patriotic emphasis. Proposals should promote ‘American values and policies’, it stipulated, and ‘maintain a non-political character’.
That art should promote any one value or policy is of course a dire encroachment on artists’ right to pursue whatever values they themselves espouse, just as prohibiting art from having a ‘political character’ offends any principle of freedom of expression. But it’s also the case that not all artistic expressions are treated as equally valid. The institutional artworld, in the US and elsewhere, is already heavily politicised, and such politicisation just happens, so far, to reflect the increasingly political agendas of liberal and progressive opinion-forming institutions. As The Baer Faxt Instagram account somewhat hysterically declared of Allen’s selection, ‘few artists or curators would risk ostracism from the art world for this appointment’.
Which is why Allen’s selection (if indeed it’s officially confirmed) is interesting, and complicated, because his sculptures – idiosyncratic, quirky and allusive objects, highly worked and invested in their materials and manufacture – don’t immediately present themselves as having a ‘political character’. And yet in such a political moment, it seems impossible to get away from the insistence that an artist must use their art to make a political statement – and the ‘right’ one, as decided by those who retain power in institutions that, for example, select artists for Venice in the first place.
But that contradiction points to a bigger problem afflicting the Venice Biennale and similar events, and indeed the drift towards politicising everything that’s been taking place in the institutional artworld more widely. If the Trump administration sounds mixed up about wanting a US representation at Venice that is both nonpolitical and promotional of American values, it’s because the line between overt politics in art and less explicit ‘values’ – which are no less political – isn’t easy to determine.
One shouldn’t be under illusions about who is backing Allen. While America’s mainstream arts institutions may have held their noses at the idea of applying, other actors have stepped in. Allen’s proposal, so the current story has it, has been made by the American Arts Conservancy, a nonprofit ‘dedicated to preserving, promoting and educating through the visual arts of the United States’. That this nonprofit didn’t exist until July of this year, and that a number of its mostly Floridian council members have – as Vanity Fair’s Nate Freeman reported – various ties to Trump, means that conservatives have rallied to organise an institutional vehicle to make this happen. The pavilion’s reported curator, Jeffrey Uslip, is also a member of the council. In 2016 Uslip resigned from his job as chief curator at the Contemporary Art Museum St Louis, after accusations of racial insensitivity over a solo show by Kelley Walker.
This all presents a destructive paradox for art and artists. What’s really at stake is the act of gatekeeping by established arts institutions, and their prerogative to decide what agendas – and which artists – should be privileged. Having been a relatively established part of the US art scene, an artist like Allen now faces ‘ostracism’. Maybe his work is fit to represent the United States. Maybe it’s awful work. The real question is – who gets to decide?
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