Chinnie Ding

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  picks March 09, 2011

  Pat Steir

  Nature resounds throughout Pat Steir’s four-plus decades of painting, whether in likeness (a pour of paint imaging a waterfall) or as principle (the pour’s own willful, wayward paths, lured by gravity). It is amply visible, too, in this searching suite of recent “Winter Paintings”—abstractions of about eleven by eleven feet halved into two tall panels of color. Their diaphanous sheen, which appears to veil vistas or sheath rock faces, marks a shift away from Steir’s signature patinas (bleaching cascades, stardusty splatter) and toward late Rothko’s wintry horizons. Vertical vitality makes the

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  picks February 10, 2011

  Christian Marclay

  It’s an unerring chronometer, a fanciful index, a long-form loop, a cinephile’s trivia game. But above all, Christian Marclay’s The Clock, 2010, is an absorbing spell, rippling between plenitude and exactitude, born of virtuosic editing. Sampling thousands of films (and several TV dramas), the twenty-four-hour collage marks each of the day’s 1,440 minutes with at least one shot announcing that minute, synchronized with local time. If the concept seems merely that—a neat Borgesian idea, given to archive fever—the experience proves both focusing and oceanic. Original audio has been equalized to

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  picks January 13, 2011

  Feng Mengbo

  Every schoolchild in China learns about the Long March of 1934–35, the Red Army’s sacrificial trek of retreat from the Nationalists that secured Mao’s power and became the CCP’s birth saga. Its stark tales of solidarity through adversity—losing comrades to frost or enemy fire, boiling leather and roots for food—show how far the nation has come. A video-game version might seem mere facetious political parody. Yet the bright 8- and 16-bit adventures blinking onto two eighty-by-twenty-foot screens in Feng Mengbo’s Long March: Restart, 2008, feel both buoyant and poignant, as we follow a plucky Red

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  picks December 12, 2010

  “The Image in Question: War – Media – Art”

  Exploring representations of war through re-mediations of the image, the photographs, animations, short films, and digital pictures in this exhibition ever decline documentarism. Curated by Antje Ehmann and Harun Farocki, the show is especially interested in animation—from its gaming and instructional uses to its curious ability to divulge the unconscious of an image. In Peggy Ahwesh’s She Puppet, 2001, edited footage from a Lara Croft video game discovers our heroine pausing, breathing, or floating among fish—in lifelike, lyrical wobble—worlds-weary, between throes of vaulting and dying. If