is michael kenna considered a NW artist?

I was planning to go tomorrow but you saved me a visit- it sounds awful.

We like Vancouver artists. We don't like Vancouver, it's a different country. This show, like all Biennials, is partly about power structures. It's Ok to share power with our slightly daft sister, Portland, not Ok to share with Canada.

HuskyQuaker, if my friends and I were playing basketball at a street court, and LeBron James was shooting hoops at the other end, we would ask him to play. But the privilege would be ours, not his.

King James: you understand my point perfectly. In said scenerio you are street court hucksters, LeBron is the professional.

What wonderful Vancouver artist would you compare to LeBron? And how would constant inclusion help our game here in the Northwest?

Padgett Powell
The Interrogative Mood

(the Paris Review #187 pg.153)

???

Just asking.

PS: This NWB looks pretty dumb compared to the Century 21 Show.

HuskyQuaker, glad you asked. Of course, some of the LeBron's of Vancouver are Jeff Wall, Rodney Graham, Stan Douglas, and Brian Jungen. They are on some next-level shit though, involved in the international scene far more than their own home town's. But in addition to the super heavy hitters, Raymond Boisjoly, Gareth Moore, Mark Soo, Steven Shearer, Sonny Assu, Germain Koh, Arabella Campbell, Elizabeth Zvonar, Kevin Schmidt, Tim Lee, Isabelle Pauwels, Althea Salberger, Hadley + Maxwell, Jeremy Shaw, and Jacob Gleeson all give Seattle's (and Portland's (and Tacoma's)) finest a serious run for their money. Willingness by ANY of those artists to participate in Seattle's scene would 'help our game' immensely.

James, you still haven't answered my question as to HOW constant inclusion would help our game here in the Northwest. I am not being flip. Graham had a show at the Henry recently, I have seen Wall's work at a number of venues as well. How does this do anything? "I played a pickup game with LeBron." Big deal. Kiss ass long enough and shit will start coming out of your mouth.

Husky, I think you might have misunderstood my previous post. Sure, Graham's show at the Henry 8 years ago was an important show to have, but I am not for a minute saying that artists like Graham and Wall will bring salvation to our art scene. Rather, if you will look back at the the second list of names in my last post, you will see a list of emerging and mid career artists who could contribute considerably to the way we look at and think about at art in this city and beyond. And you ask how, which is fair. As VAG curator Kathleen Ritter states, many Vancouver artists "privelege event over object, process over product, [and] interaction over contemplation" in a way that coincides with the current explorations of the whole art world. In a city with such rich craft traditions as Seattle, which favors beauty, contemplation, and personal narrative seemingly above all else, I think we could learn much from the provisionist tactics of Vancouver's artists.

Jen, With your 26 questions you're dismissing this weak exhibit. No problem. However, it deserves more attention than you gave it. Don't merely damn it with faint praise. Damn it with real, not faux criticism. If the curators don't do their job, that's no excuse for you not doing yours. Isn't this the playing out of the deceitful (fraudulent?) call for entries of 2 years ago? With few exceptions (Susan Robb's, Jack Daws' entries) this exhibit is humorless, joyless, sexless, lacking a human touch. It's nice in the reactionary sense, as the curators no doubt intended. Examples: The photographic kitsch of Susan Seubert and Michael Kenna. The inclusion of this work indicates the unconnectedness, the fleeing from reality this exhibit cultivates. This wasted wall space could have gone to 4 or 5 artists who are engaged with the world in an immediate, exciting way. Seubert and Kenna must give good studio visit. Sentimentality (oh, the smell of linseed oil, the look of old shit) distracts and perverts curators and art critics alike. It turns an otherwise healthy brain to mush and causes that most favorite of American mental activity, uncritical thinking. What is Robert Jones' work doing here? His hero Hans Hofmann died in 1966. Shouldn't Jones have moved on a bit? One suspects there is only one painter in that family. So what if someone draws with her grandmother's silver spoon? Who cares? What does that fact have to do with anything? Look at Bridget Riley's work from 40 years ago. It's smarter and wigglier. A graffti artist would have given more life to this bloodless show. Denzil Hurley, again? He's the academic painter we have to tolerate, desperately channeling modernism. Tenure posing as talent. Artists engaging the world we actually live in, honestly and directly, wouldn't have a chance to get into this exhibit. For these curators war, torture, venal bankers, pollution, monstrous inequality, economic meltdown, Republican fascists don't exist and don't matter. The CEOs of Boeing, Weyerhaeuser, the Kommandant at Fort Lewis, the chamber of commerce boosters can rest sweetly. If Picasso had tried to enter "Guernica" into this biennial it wouldn't have made it past the first round of jurying. Whom does this exhibit serve? Certainly not the city of Tacoma. The citizens won't see their world reflected back at them. Curatorship shouldn't be a peculiar form of censorship. Does this exhibit reveal curatorial malfeasance, incompetence, cowardice, or all three. Go and see but don't expect to be challenged or amazed. The Bronte Sisters

LeBron te Sisters:

"Your work doesn't come from your response to reading The New Yorker: Therefore your work sucks."

This is DUMB.

"Paint is bad. And so is Modernism."

Also DUMB.

(While I agree with you that this show is rather bad, I don't agree with your reasoning.)

In TAM's defense, they seem to be the only major art museum in the greater Seattle area which has made a strong commitment to showing large numbers of local artists.

Sounds like the Bronte Sisters are sore losers. Are the Bronte Sisters artists? Did the Bronte Sisters enter the public call for entry into the Biennial? Did the Bronte Sisters attend the opening talk where the curators openly discussed their selection process? I, too, was curious about the selected artists and thus attended the talk. It was enlightening. It's always productive to ask good questions and to think about how, if one were a curator faced with the same task, s/he would have handled the selection process. The curators didn't go out and select people they like, they culled from the herd of submissions. To be so abusive and unkind is really more about one's own assumptions and motives than about the art that is on the wall. I think Jen's questions are all worthy of consideration, but why not also give some thoughtful answers. Was this a call for that? Or just more blogsphere babble? My suspicion is that this series of questions is the latter- an open call for whiners.