Robert Lazzarini exhibition shows scuttled Venice Biennale proposal

MassArt Exhibition Debuts Scuttled Venice Biennale Proposal

The primary attraction of Robert Lazzarini’s “Metes and Bounds” show at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design’s MassArt Art Museum in Boston consists of three works from a failed proposal for this year’s U.S. pavilion at the Venice Biennale, an event that aligned with America’s 250th anniversary. According to the wall text, Lazzarini’s sculptures use familiar and ceremonial symbols of American identity—including a police barricade, a rotary telephone, an American flag used for the coffins of fallen service members, and a 17th-century lectern—to demonstrate how power in the United States becomes material.

Lazzarini’s nine artworks on display, curated by John Ravenal, are twisted and convoluted, warped into impossible forms that defy perception. By using the same materials as the original reference objects, each piece is reduced to a pure form, either sundered askew or melted, which removes any possibility of function. The positioning of these distorted objects referring to midcentury and colonial America as subversive, combined with the exhibition’s link to the Biennale, implies a perspective on the United States as an enforcer of a defunct postwar global order.

State Department awards pavilion to new artists after sponsor pulls out

Ravenal and Lazzarini did not realize that by naming their proposal “History Maker,” it would eventually make history itself. While their contract was never finalized, the two were among the top contenders for the pavilion commission, an opportunity previously viewed as a career-defining honor. A confusing and politicized process unfolded against the clock of a government shutdown. Their proposal collapsed after the exhibition sponsor, the University of South Florida, withdrew.

The State Department chose to award the pavilion to curator Jeffrey Uslip and Alma Allen through the newly established nonprofit American Art Conservancy. And “History Maker” earned its place in history as the pavilion that was yanked. This “is not the U.S. pavilion show; it’s not ‘History Maker,’” Ravenal said in an interview about “Metes and Bounds,” noting that the term refers to a land surveying system that was used to parcel colonial settlements. However, the first three pieces that visitors encounter are from the proposed pavilion.

Museum commissions woodcuts and wooden variation from scrapped proposal

A conversation between Ravenal and the museum’s director, Lisa Tung, served as the inspiration for the invitation to mount the show. “A studio visit led to conversations about presenting works from the project alongside Robert’s earlier work,” Tung said. To bring the project to life, the museum commissioned two works from the discarded proposal: a wooden version of a 17th-century lectern typical of colonial meeting houses and a set of 12 swirling woodcuts based on the 12 sheets of the 1507 Waldseemüller map (recognized as the first map to label and depict “America” as a separate landmass). A fabric sculpture of a liquefied American flag hanging from a wall would have been one of four presented in Venice.

Other pieces are from Lazzarini’s studio. They fall into roughly two categories of distortion: molten and forced perspective. Within the molten category, a New York City police barricade twists and stretches into cartoonish noodles, creating a dialogue with the lectern. On a nearby wall, two melty street signs read “Dead End” and “Private Property. No Trespassing,” both riddled with bullet holes. The rear of the gallery features objects modified by forced perspective. There is a rotary phone based on the Bell Systems-manufactured Western Electric 500-series; a gray metal safe with its door blown off; and a wooden institutional chair that might suggest the presence of an authority figure.

Artists exhibit sculptures lit aggressively with fluorescent lights

Lazzarini said that the sculptures, set against white walls and lit aggressively with fluorescent lights, possess optical-illusion-adjacent qualities that are nearly migraine-inducing, taking the object out of register and holding it there, unresolved. Lazzarini, 61, received his bachelor’s in fine arts from the School of Visual Arts. His work has appeared in the 2002 Whitney Biennial as well as group museum exhibitions at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum and MoMA PS1. Ravenal, 67, is a former director of the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Mass., and has been an independent curator since 2020. In 2003, Ravenal previously curated a solo exhibition of Lazzarini’s work at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

Ravenal said that compared to the pavilion proposal, the vision for “Metes and Bounds” focuses more on the abstracted authoritarian condition underlying society, which manifests even in basic everyday objects. But the show seems stuck in an incandescent memory of the past. In America’s semiquincentennial year, the metanarrative for everything from geopolitics to culture and economics is perhaps the delusion and distortion supporting increasingly authoritarian conditions. Using the exaggeration of everyday object distortions as a conceit for the modern surveillance state fails to address the shifts in U.S. power—driven by artificial intelligence and tech companies, for example—that are altering values. Additionally, there is a risk that the threat of violence and nostalgia channeled by these works will reinforce the very authoritarianism they intend to critique.

Questions About the Exhibition and Scuttled Pavilion

Future Plans for History Maker Pieces

Currently, Ravenal and Lazzarini are developing plans to produce “History Maker” in pieces until the entire work can be shown somewhere.