Migrating Forms and the Search for Meaning by Nick Pinkerton
Straddling the museum installation and movie-movie worlds—a dynamic epitomized by a screening of painter Ed Ruscha’s 16mm works. Migrating Forms’ 10-day lineup is fairly crammed with “a broad spectrum of contemporary film and video projects,” including the annual “Tube Time!,” a team showdown of outré online found footage. [Jaime] Davidovich—whose Anthology show places Dada, ’50s TV experimentalists like Ernie Kovacs, and YouTube along the same continuum—might approve.
The best of MF is Petition, a tattered, vital documentary by Zhao Liang, another of the ballsy new Chinese image-smugglers who’ve cropped up to bear witness to the transformation of their country. Zhao reveals the 21st-century equivalent to the purgatorial Chancery Courts of Dickens’s Bleak House… (read more)