A Boston exhibition this fall will reveal works by New York–based artist Robert Lazzarini that were intended to represent the country at the hotly contested US Pavilion at the current Venice Biennale. The show, as yet untitled, opens on September 30 at Boston’s MassArt Art Museum (MAAM), at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and will allow the public to see works that employ the artist’s trademark distortions to comment on American symbolism.
The current US Pavilion is one of the most talked-about in art circles in recent memory, having been arranged by a newly formed organization headed up by a Donald Trump–supporting former pet food purveyor with no art world experience. The process that led to the selection of an artist departed from the customary procedure by which art curators and institutions, not allies of the US president, pitch candidates to represent the country in what’s sometimes called the art world Olympics. The pavilion ultimately went to Alma Allen.
But, how the US State Department, which oversees the selection process, got there is the subject of some debate and mystery. According to an April report in the New York Times, the State Department had “seriously considered” a presentation of works by Lazzarini, who “wanted to fill the US Pavilion with quivering American flags and mathematically distorted sculptures of patriotic symbols like George Washington and the bald eagle” as a way “to question the role that American identity plays in today’s world.” The project was to be organized by John Ravenal, former director of the deCordova Sculpture Park in Massachusetts. Per the Times, the project fell apart when the planned institutional sponsor, the University of South Florida, pulled out, “citing a short timeline and its inability to raise the estimated $5 million to mount it.”
In the Baer Faxt in June, Ravenal offered a rival account, saying that the State Department had in fact awarded the project to him and Lazzarini. The show, titled “History Maker,” was meant to take on the State Department’s new call for proposals that would center “American values,” but in a critical way. Featuring Lazzarini’s trademark distorted imagery, the project was meant to address colonialism, imperialism, militarism, religion and the state, and isolationism. Imagery was to include a 16-foot-tall eagle (based on a Civil War–era flag finial), drooping in a way that would “imply sovereignty’s decline.”
Lazzarini would have represented a thoroughly vetted choice for the Pavilion. His works are represented in collections including those of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.; the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; and the Whitney Museum in New York. He’s had solo exhibitions at venues including the Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina; the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in Texas; and the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut. He declined to be interviewed for this article.
Robert Lazzarini.
courtesy Tom Haynes Studio
Despite risks of “looking like a mouthpiece for the current administration,” Ravenal said, “Sitting it out seemed like caving in.” Awarded the proposal September 9, Ravenal then found out that USF’s provost refused to let the school sign on as institutional partner, “issuing a misleading statement about funding and timing concerns.” Ravenal said that he and his team had committed to raising the funds, and that the school “knew the time frame from the start.” (In an email to ARTnews, USF also declined to comment on Ravenal’s account.)
In any event, Ravenal said that the State Department soon informed him that it had “found a way forward with another candidate.” That would be Mexico-based artist Alma Allen, whose contribution was widely panned. (ARTnews’s Alex Greenberger called the choice “deeply dispiriting,” while Maximilíano Durón called the US Pavilion “one of the emptiest shows at the Venice Biennale.”)
The MAAM show will feature two new works commissioned by the institution and now in production, alongside several works initially developed as part of his Venice proposal.
One commissioned piece, The Waldseemüller Map, refers to a significant example from cartographic history, from 1507, said to be the first known map to use the term “America.” It broke with tradition by rendering the Americas as a separate continent from Asia, with an ocean between. Lazzarini’s distortions, according to press materials, “increase the separation of the Americas from the rest of the world.”
The other, lectern, is based on a church pulpit. Pointing to the centrality of religion in American history, it represents the pulpit as the locus of both church and state power. “Animated by mathematical distortion, Lazzarini’s lectern alludes to longstanding tensions in this dynamic,” reads a press release of the exhibition.
Also on view will be a piece based on the US flag, its shape altered “through the introduction of compound sine waves” to “convey an uncanny impression of motion.” Based on the version that is draped over the casket or urn of deceased veterans, a choice that “underscores the special bond between the body and the American flag.”
