The Mar-a-Lago Pavilion

When he was announced as the US representative to the Venice Biennale, I first had to confirm that Alma Allen and I are not related. So I called my genealogy-fluent cousin in Heber, Utah, where Allen’s large, Mormon family was purportedly from, and she did the legwork, and asked around, and no. I hadn’t thought of Allen or his work for a while, though I liked it in the early 2000s, when it was small, finely crafted elemental objets on the design blogs of shops in Silver Lake or whatever. Taking the US Pavilion gig now, in the utterly corrupt and degraded selection process, and signing onto the racist, exclusionist dogmas of this administration in doing so, is a complete abrogation of artistic integrity and human decency. It’s un-American in the most principled sense, but also the kind of craven, delulu white guy move that seems to characterize this moment. Allen and curator Jeffrey Uslip really hit the bullshit bull’s eye with a pavilionful of generic, goldtone lobby art. I’d been…