Artforum reviews Ernst Fischer: 18%

Artforum's Lara Attalah reviews Ernst Fischer's "18%" exhibition now being held at CUE.

"While Hito Steyerl defends the poor image, Ernst Fischer explores the other end of the spectrum, namely, what happens when you overwhelm a photograph with information?..."

See the full article here.

Heidelberg Project Director to speak at Creative Time Summit

Jenenne Whitfield, Director of the Heidelberg Project, will speak at the Making a Place panel at the Creative Time Summit. The panel will address place-making, a term which has swept grant- making organizations as well as city governments hoping to use the arts to make cities more “vibrant.” What are productive models to consider when thinking about the making of place through culture? What are its limitations? 

ArtLab interviews Carmen Papalia

 ArtLab, a blog focused on the intersection of art and science, featured an interview with Carmen Papalia, as a part of the Conversations with Artists series. 

Manhattan Sideways features CUE!

Manhattan Sideways explores the treasures of the side streets and documents each and every place. 

"From all of the galleries that we have explored through Manhattan Sideways, we have gathered that making it as a visual artist in NYC is no small feat. No matter how you define success, it is incredibly difficult to gain the exposure, capital, and community necessary to survive in this city and continue to create without the right connections. Enter CUE Art Foundation, a visual arts center dedicated to building the careers and resources of emerging young artists. CUE offers exhibitions, housing, and educational programs for aspiring creative professionals; in turn, they have gallery shows and educational programs for the public. CUE has worked with painters, sculptors, high school students, and writers alike for over a decade now. Overall, CUE Art Foundation provides many vital and necessary, though scarcely available, services to underrepresented artist communities and the public."

Hyperallergic reviews Goddess Clap Back

WHAT IS HIP HOP FEMINISM?
  by Jillian Steinhower

Short answer: it’s awesome. And it’s currently on view at Cue Art Foundation.

Curated by Katie Cercone, the exhibition Goddess Clap Back: Hip-Hop Feminism in Art brings together various artists who, in their work, subvert the tropes of mainstream hip-hop: the unabashed consumerism and celebrity worship, the heteronormativity, the machismo bordering on misogyny. This is hip-hop, queered. The ideas and visuals given form by these artists are not only refreshing — they’re necessary.

That all may sound heady or self-serious or depressing, but some of the best work in the show — including pieces by Kalup Linzy and Rashaad Newsome — has a light touch. One of my favorite finds in this vein was Michelle Marie Charles, who makes videos that would probably be as at home on a website like College Humor (if the humor were more diverse) as they are in a gallery. The two I saw — “Explicit and Deleted” (2012) and “Naturally Nandie” (2013) — are both spoofs, the former of your average hip-hop song and video, the latter of hair tutorial videos.

I’ll admit, a spoof of a hip-hop video filled with women dancing around doesn’t sound all that new; yet given that we live in a day and age when these things are considered acceptable — clever and funny, even! — let’s not underestimate our need for such work. Plus, the greatness of “Explicit and Deleted” (above) isn’t only in the video: it’s in the combination of images and words. Here’s the first line of the chorus: “Girl, I love you so / for all your emotional attributes such as your titties.” Add to that the fact that nearly everyone in the video is cross-dressing; Charles’s crazed face as the leading man surrounded by boobs and booties; the interjection of a 25-second incisive social commentary; and the purposefully low production values, and it all adds up to a pitch-perfect satire.

“Naturally Nandie” is similarly successful, though I suspect fewer people will be familiar with its original subject matter. Charles plays a woman offering a tutorial on how style your hair in an up-do, but about halfway through, things get weird: she starts talking about “interactive” hairstyles and placing war action figures on her head. “I’m gonna add this guy who looks a little bit like Jesus — he looks a little bit like what Jesus would look like if he had weapons,” she says comfortably. Is she improvising or working from a carefully written script? Either way, Naturally Nandie soldiers on unfazed.

Goddess Clap Back: Hip-Hop Feminism in Art continues through August 10 at Cue Art Foundation (137 West 25th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan).

Brooklyn Rail reviews Dennis Congdon: Curated by Stanley Whitney

 by William Corwin

Dennis Congdon’s palette of soothing pastel tones in oil, flashe, enamel, and lightly abraded surfaces may lay claim to the fresco aesthetic of Latium, but his subject matter inhabits the coffee houses and bars (and psychoanalytic offices) of late 19th century Vienna and Paris. The conceit of the Forum Romanum as a regulating geometry of jumbled ruins, architectural conglomerates spanning centuries, and crumbling statuary belies the real focus of Congdon’s paintings, which is the accumulation and appropriation of mostly classical and classically inspired objects as stand-ins for a very modern psychic sensibility. The piles and mounds in these large canvases drip with implication, forming tidy connections between sex, art, desire, and studio practice, and presenting for our consideration the eternal problem of drawing inspiration from the past—or in fact, drawing inspiration at all.

The paintings seem less about direct meaning than about the art of navigating meaning within a visual practice. Congdon simultaneously pokes fun at and glorifies the double-edged sword of implication and reference.  On the one hand, there is the brilliance and subtlety of saying what you mean with a disparate host of symbols, which at times pretend innocence and at others remain absurdly obvious.  On the other hand, there is the wasted fertility of engaging with powerful symbols for decorative purposes—inadvertently festooning purity with sex and other gross miscalculations. “Ignis Fatuus” (2013) is a dusky sylvan vignette reveling in the eternal battle of the sexes—in this case played out between Mother Earth and architecture—or, as the performer Timothy “Speed” Levitch would call it, “the history of all phallic emotion.”  Mother Earth has won: a stack of broken and emasculated ridged column shafts are piled at the foreground, while all around seethe tendrils and labial plant forms.  Nature has defeated the sculptor’s greatest emblem of support and strength, and while the penetrative object is no more, shadowy crevices and semi-hidden pathways and entrances abound.  In fact, a pair of palm fronds to the extreme right of the picture plane entwine to form a very literal vagina.

This is all done with a great deal of humor and Bacchic cheer.  In “Visuvi” (2013) Congdon’s method of stenciling—a perverse variation of fresco cartooning—combined with his energetic color choice of ochres, beiges, pistachios, and reds lend the landscape the character of a Wile E. Coyote vs. The Road Runner escapade.  Here the sacrifice is ready: canvases are piled high on the top of the volcano, most prominently a painting of a Cubist goddess emerging from the volcano itself. This is a stack of at least a hundred canvases, possibly the entire contents of a studio, or a life’s work.  Some are abstract, some just started, and all positioned precariously on the blowhole of one of the world’s most notorious still-active volcanoes, in full view of Naples Bay.  That this volcano also helped preserve a treasure trove of classical art, at tremendous cost of human life, does not go unnoticed.  Is the artist here wringing his hand, or supplicating the angry goddess?

Perhaps “Midden” (2013) comes after Vesuvius has blown its top.  The painting has a strong Götterdämmerung feel; faces and hands emerge from the detritus, but amidst the rubble a fern grows up around an overturned Corinthian capital.  A colossal woman’s face stares skyward while a pair of disembodied hands clasp in close proximity to her chin, perhaps a coincident prayer.  Again a single painting dominates the scene.  A version of the grieving Agamemnon, handing off Iphigenia to the sacrifice, lies askew amongst the junk strewn in this field of destruction.  It is hard to tell if there’s any connection between him and the young woman’s head.  Was the destruction we see in “Midden” even a natural calamity, or is it just the obscuring view of history itself?  Congdon’s gentle touch, his almost dusty colors, and his precise but unintimidating stenciled lines smooth over the pitfalls and abysses of history, lending an explanatory continuity that only the artist or the historian can invent.