Filmmakers’ Arts
Manny Farber, the immeasurably influential film critic—“the liveliest, smartest, most original film critic this country has ever produced,” according to Susan Sontag—was also a painter. Several of his paintings, many of them referencing the filmmakers he championed, are currently on view alongside more than a hundred works by around thirty artists through March 11 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. The exhibition is one of several at the moment spotlighting artists whose work moves freely between the worlds of art and cinema.
The title of the MOCA show, One Day at a Time: Manny Farber and Termite Art, is inspired by one of Farber’s most widely read essays, “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art,” originally published by Adolfas and Jonas Mekas in Film Culture in 1962. Writing in the Village Voice in 1981, J. Hoberman called the piece “the snappiest jeremiad I’ve ever read. Its target is films that are inflated, over-wrought, precious, ‘tied to the realm of celebrity and affluence’—white elephant stuff”—against which Farber “raises the red flag of termite art, a mysterious form that flourishes in dark corners where ‘the spotlight of culture is nowhere in evidence.’ Farber’s termites include journalists, pulp writers, B-movie directors, and comic-strip artists.”
In a 1975 piece on Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Farber argued that the German filmmaker was one of the “true inheritors of early Warhol, the Warhol of Chelsea Girls and My Hustler.” Tomorrow, the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh will present the new digital transfer of The Chelsea Girls (1966) that New York’s Museum of Modern Art premiered in May. Warhol, wrote Farber, “proclaims the wondrousness of monotony, banality, machine-made art, expedience, and an easy mobility from one medium to another. He’s a great mover towards facetiousness and flexibility: it’s not that he doesn’t work like a bearcat at his dozen professions, but that he tries to imprint a not-that-taxing air into each new painting-print-film-interview.” Andy Warhol—From A to B and Back Again, a survey of what Blake Gopnik, writing for the New York Times, calls the “full cross-section of his epochal creations,” will open at the Whitney in New York on Monday. Through March 2019, this first major retrospective in the U.S. since 1989 will also feature screenings of 16 mm prints of thirty-five films that Warhol shot in the 1960s.
