Allen spends a lot of time thinking about Machine, situating it within the larger sociopolitical-economic context, picking out its shows, tracing its path, analyzing how it functions. But who is he, really? Allen is so much about the project that I wonder what he would be without it. Shortly after the dome show, I visit him away from the gallery, at his home. To truly understand the art, is it necessary to understand the artist? That boundary, it seems, is forever in flux. Allen’s father, who is an old-school chemistry professor, told me once that he used to worry about what his son’s chosen vocation would be, but that eventually he realized that what Mark was trying to do was to take Art (capital “A”) — the type of precious, exalted work archived and preserved in museums — and turn it into art (lowercase “a”), art for everybody and made by everybody.
Loquacious as he is about the project, Allen is unexpectedly reticent about the rest of his life. Since the inception of Machine, he has crashed at three different friends’ apartments all over Silver Lake, and finally landed in the extra room at artist Kelly Sears’ place.
Allen, a broomstick and a sewing machine — coincidence?
Holly Vesecky putting together Mach Infinity, a floral planetarium.
Related Content
More About
Sears’ quaint brick building rests on an oddly shaped plot of land, a Frankensteinian cobbling together of gourmet-coffee shops and houses subdivided into rental units, five minutes from the gallery. By now, the flower dome has been disassembled, its orchids and asters dried up and carted away, its cardboard outer shell given to a homeless woman to be repurposed as weatherproofing for her own dome. Soon, a different artist will be coming in to do a piece involving credit cards. Each time someone’s card is swiped through a device, the magnetic-stripe data gets translated into melody.
That month, for the first time ever, Machine paid for its own rent (due in large part to the unexpected popularity of a Web-design class and the Pneumatic Cash Machine). The gallery, Allen says, as we sit down on Kelly’s sofa, is really like the inside of his brain. The project organizes his world. We try to imagine what it would be like without Machine. And then suddenly there it is, a momentary vulnerability. It is like telling someone that their child is ugly or stupid.
A photo of a kitten is taped to the door of his room in front of us. Whether by accident or by design, he has left the door slightly ajar. “It’s not interesting,” he demurs, when I peer in through the rift into the darkness. “It’s just where I sleep. It’s not part of who I am.” A mattress on the floor. A rumple of blankets. A lamp. A chair. Evidence of a life more ordinary. As he speaks, ideas expand and contract. The whole becomes more than the sum of its parts.
