IT IS NOT DIFFICULT to like Cildo Meireles’s work. It is, as he has said he wishes it to be, “instantly seductive”—intelligent as well as sensual, playful yet unsettling. And thanks to an excellent installation, this exhibition of the Brazilian artist’s work (organized by Guy Brett and Vicente Todolí) even managed to breathe life into Tate Modern’s often forlorn galleries, suddenly infusing them with a new, pulsating energy. A remarkable example of Meireles’s mathematics of seduction is the dramatically lit Mission/Missions (How to Build Cathedrals), 1987, which consists of two thousand

André Thomkins must have been one of those on whom nothing is lost. The origin of the technique he used to make his “Lackskins,” which he began in the mid-1950s, can be ascribed to chance or to observation as you please: While painting a crib for his child, he noticed that the enamel he’d washed off his brush formed a thin, cohesive skin on top of the water; he liked the look of it, and realized that if he could slide a sheet of paper under the floating paint and then lift it, he’d be able to skim off and preserve the colorful shape.

Thomkins, a Swiss artist who lived much of his life in Germany,

In Anne Collier’s photograph Folded Madonna Poster (Steven Meisel), 2007, for example, the image-as-historical-artifact conveys both nostalgia and a fascination with

Claire Hooper’s Nach Spandau (To Spandau), 2008, is a video to watch alone. It follows the nearly empty U7 subway line in Berlin, station after station, in a fifty-three-minute series of short sequences on HDV. Each shot sooner or later lingers for a few seconds on some brief, motionless image, usually concentrating on the architectural details of each station; the overall result is an alternating pattern of wall-size moving images followed by often beautiful moments of stillness. Nach Spandau becomes a claustrophobic road movie that provokes a hypnotic curiosity about each next frame in its