A peculiar fact about termite-tapeworm-fungus-moss art is that it goes always forward, eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity. – M.F.

White Elephant Art and Termite Art (1962)

By Manny Farber

Most of the feckless, listless quality of today’s art can be blamed on its drive to break out of a tradition while, irrationally, hewing to the square, boxed-in shape and gemlike inertia of an old, densely wrought European masterpiece.

Advanced painting has long been suffering from this burnt-out notion of a masterpiece-breaking away from its imprisoning conditions toward a suicidal improvisation, threatening to move nowhere and everywhere, niggling, omnivorous, ambitionless ; yet, within the same picture, paying strict obeisance to the canvas edge and, without favoritism, the precious nature of every inch of allowable space.

A classic example of this inertia is the Cézanne painting, in his indoorish works of the woods around Aix-en-Provence a few spots of tingling, jarring excitement occur where he nibbles away at what he calls his “small sensation,” the shifting of a tree trunk, the infinitesimal contests of complimentary colors in a light accent on farmhouse wall. The rest of each canvas is a clogging weight-density-structure-polish amalgam associated with self-aggrandizing masterwork. As he moves away from the unique, personal vision that interests him, his painting turns ungiving and puzzling : a matter of balancing curves for his bunched-in composition, laminating the color, working the painting to the edge.

Cézanne ironically left an exposé of his dreary finishing work in terrifyingly honest watercolors, an occasional unfinished oil (the pinkish portrait of his wife in sunny, leafed-in patio), where he foregoes everything but his spotting fascination with minute interactions.

The idea of art as an expensive hunk of well-regulated area, both logical and magical, sits heavily over the talent of every modern painter, from Motherwell to Andy Warhol. The private voice of Motherwell (the exciting drama in the meeting places between ambivalent shapes, the aromatic sensuality that comes from laying down thin sheets of cold, artfully clichéish  hedonistic color) is inevitably ruined by having to spread these small pleasures into great contained works.

Thrown back constantly on unrewarding endeavors (filling vast egglike shapes, organizing a ten-foot rectangle with its empty corners suggesting Siberian steppes in the coldest time of the year), Motherwell ends up with appalling amounts of plastering grandeur, a composition so huge and questionably painted that the delicate, electric contours seem to be crushing the shalelike matter inside. The special delight of each painting tycoon (De Kooning’s sabrelike lancing of forms ; Warhol’s minute embrace with the path of illustrator’s pen line and block-print tone, James Dine’s slog-footed brio, filling a stylized shape from stem to stern with one ungiving color) is usually squandered in pursuit of the continuity, harmony, involved in constructing a masterpiece.

The painting, sculpture, assemblage becomes a yawning production of overripe technique shrieking with preciosity, fame, ambition; far inside are tiny pillows holding up the artist’s signature, now turned into mannerism by the padding, lechery, faking required to combine today’s esthetics with the components of traditional Great Art.

Movies have always been suspiciously addicted to termite-art tendencies. Good work usually arises where the creators (Laurel and Hardy, the team of Howard Hawks and William Faulkner operating on the just half of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep) seem to have no ambitions towards gilt culture but are involved in a kind of squandering-beaverish endeavor that isn’t anywhere or for anything. A peculiar fact about termite- tapeworm-fungus-moss art is that it goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity.

The most inclusive description of the art is that, termite-like, it feels its way through walls of particularization with no sign that the artist has any object in mind other than eating away the immediate boundaries of his art, and turning these boundaries into conditions of the next achievement. Laurel and Hardy, in fact, in some of their most dyspeptic and funniest mores, like Hog Wild, contributed some fine parody of men who had read every “How to Succeed” book available; but, when it came to applying their knowledge, reverted instinctively to termite behavior.

One of the good termite performances (John Wayne’s bemused cowboy in an unreal stage town inhabited by pallid repetitious actors whose chief trait is a powdered make-up) occurs in John Ford’s The Man Shot Who Shot Liberty Valance, Better Ford films than this have been marred by a phlegmatically solemn Irish personality that goes for rounded declamatory acting, silhouetted riders along the rim of a mountain with a golden sun set behind them, and repetitions in which big bodies are scrambled together in a rhythmically curving Rosa Bonheurish composition. Wayne’s acting is infected by a kind of hoboish spirit, sitting back on its haunches doing a bitter-amused counterpoint to the pale, neutral film life around him.

In an Arizona town that is too placid, where the cactus was planted last night and nostalgically cast actors do a generalized drunkenness, cowardice, voraciousness, Wayne is the termite actor focusing only on a tiny present area, nibbling at it with engaging professionalism and a hipster sense of how to sit in a chair leaned against the wall, eye a flogging overactor (Lee Marvin). As he moves along at the pace of a tapeworm, Wayne leaves a path that is only bits of shrewd intramural acting—a craggy face filled with bitterness, jealousy, a big body that idles luxuriantly, having long grown tired with roughhouse games played by old wrangler types like John Ford.

The best examples of termite art appear in places other than films, where the spotlight of culture is nowhere in evidence, so that the craftsman can be ornery, wasteful, stubbornly self-involved, doing go-for-broke art and not caring what comes of it. The occasional newspaper column by a hard-work specialist caught up by an exciting event (Joe Alsop or Ted Lewis, during a presidential election), or a fireball technician reawakened during a pennant playoff that brings on stage his favorite villains (Dick Young) ; the TV production of The Iceman Cometh, with its great examples of slothful-buzzing acting by Myron McCormack, Jason Robards et el. ; the last few detective novels of Ross Macdonald and most of Raymond Chandler’s ant-crawling verbosity and sober fact-pointing in the letters compiled years back in a slightly noticed book that is a fine running example of popular criticism ; the TV debating of William Buckley, before he relinquished his tangential, counterattacking skill and took to flying into propeller blades of issues, like James Meredith’s Ole Miss-adventures.

In movies, non-termite art is too much in command of writers and directors to permit the omnivorous termite artist to scuttle along for more than a few scenes. Even Wayne’s cowboy job peters out in a gun duel that is overwrought with conflicting camera ankles, plays of light and dark, ritualized movement and posture. In The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, the writer (Alan Sillitoe) feels the fragments of a delinquent’s career have to be united in a conventional story. The design on which Sillitoe settles—a spokelike affair with each fragment shown as a memory experienced on practice runs—leads to repetitious scenes of a boy running. Even a gaudily individual track star—a Peter Snell—would have trouble making these practice runs worth the moviegoer’s time, though a cheap ton of pseudo-Bunny Berigan jazz trumpet is thrown on the film’s sound track to hop up the neutral dullness of these up-down-around spins through vibrant English countryside.

Masterpiece art, reminiscent of the enameled tobacco humidors and wooden lawn ponies bought at white elephant auctions decades ago, has come to dominate the overpopulated arts of TV and movies. The three sins of white elephant art (1) frame the action with an all-over pattern, (2) install every event, character, situation in a frieze of continuities, and (3) treat every inch of the screen and film as a potential area for prizeworthy creativity. Requiem for a Heavyweight is so heavily inlaid with ravishing technique that only one scene—an employment office with a nearly illiterate fighter (Anthony Quinn falling into the hands of an impossibly kind job clerk—can be acted by Quinn’s slag blanket type of expendable art, which crawls along using fair insight and a total immersion in the materials of acting.

Antonioni’s La Notte is a good example of the evils of continuity, from its opening scene of a deathly sick noble critic being visited by two dear friends The scene gets off well, but the director carries the thread of it to agonizing length, embarrassing the viewer with dialogue about art that is sophomorically one dimensional, interweaving an arty shot of a helicopter to fill the time interval, continuing with impossible-to-act effects of sadness by Moreau and Mastroianni outside the hospital, and, finally, reels later, a laughable postscript conversation by Moreau-Mastroianni detailing the critic’s “meaning” as a friend, as well as a few other very mystifying details about the poor bloke Tony Richardson’s films, beloved by art theater patrons, are surpassing examples of the sin of framing, boxing in an action with a noble idea or camera effect picked from High Art.

In Richardson’s films (A Taste of Honey, The Long Distance Runner), a natural directing touch on domesticity involving losers is the main dish (even the air in Richardson’s whitish rooms seems to be fighting the ragamuffin type who infests Richardson’s young or old characters). With his “warm” lacking for the materials of direction, a patient staying with confusion, holding to a cop’s lead-footed facelessness that doesn’t crawl over details so much as back sluggishly into them. Richardson can stage his remarkable seconds-ticking sedentary act in almost any setup-at night, in front of a glared department store window, or in a tram coach with two pairs of kid lovers settling in with surprising, hopped-up animalism.

Richardson’s ability to give a spectator the feeling of being There, with time to spend, arrives at its peak in homes, apartments, art garrets, a stable-like apartment, where he turns into an academic neighbor of Walker Evans, steering the spectator’s eyes on hidden rails, into arm patterns, worn wood, inclement feeling hovering in tiny marble eyes, occasionally even making a room appear to take shape as he introduces it to a puffy-faced detective or an expectant girl on her first search for a room of her own in a kitchen scene with kid thief and job-worn detective irritably gnawing at each other, Richardson’s talent for angular disclosures takes the scene apart without pointing or a nearly habitual underlining ; nagging through various types of bone-worn, dishrag-gray material with a fine windup of two unlikable opponents still scraping at each other in a situation that is one of the first to credibly turn the over-attempted movie act-showing hard, agonizing existence in the wettest rain and slush.

Richardson’s ability with deeply lived-in incident is, nevertheless, invariably dovetailed with his trick of settling a horse collar of gentility around the neck of a scene, giving the image a pattern that suggests practice, skill, guaranteed safe humor His highly rated stars (from Richard Burton through Tom Courtenay) fall into mock emotion and studied turns, which suggest they are caught up in the enameled sequence of a vaudeville act : Rita Tushingham’s sighting over a gun barrel at an amusement park (standard movie place for displaying types who are closer to the plow than the library card) does a broadly familiar comic arrangement of jaw muscle and eyebrow that has the gaiety and almost the size of a dinosaur bone.

Another gentility Richardson picked up from fine objêts d’art (Dubuffet, Larry Rivers, Dick Tracy’s creator) consists of setting a network of marring effects to prove his people are ill placed in life. Tom Courtenay (the last angry boy in Runner) gets carried away by this cult, belittling, elongating, turning himself into a dervish with a case of Saint Vitus dance, which localizes in his jaw muscles, eyelids. As Richardson gilds his near vagrants with sawtooth mop coiffures and a way of walking on high heels so that each heel seems a different size and both appear to be plunged through the worn flooring the traits look increasingly elegant and put on (the worst trait : angry eyes that suggest the empty orbs in “Orphan Annie” comic strips).

Most of Ms actors become crashing, unbelievable bores, though there is one nearly likable actor, a chubby Dreiserian girl friend in Long Distance Runner, who, termite-fashion almost ants into a state of grace. Package artist Richardson has other boxing-in ploys, running scenes together as Beautiful Travelogue, placing a cosmic symbol around the cross-country running event, which incidentally crushes Michael Redgrave, a headmaster in the fantastic gambol of throwing an entire Borstal community into a swivet over one track event.

The common denominator of these laborious ploys is, actually, the need of the director and writer to overfamiliarize the audience with the picture it’s watching. to blow up every situation and character like an affable inner tube with recognizable details and smarmy compassion. Actually, this overfamiliarization serves to reconcile these supposed long-time enemies-academic and Madison Avenue art.

An exemplar of white elephant art, particularly the critic-devouring virtue of filling every pore of a work with glinting, darting Style and creative Vivacity, is Francois Truffaut. Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player and Jules et Jim, two ratchets perpetual-motion machines devised by a French Rube Goldberg, leave behind the more obvious gadgetries of Requiem for a Heavyweight and even the cleaner, bladelike journalism of The 400 Blows,

Truffaut’s concealed message, given away in his Henry Miller-ish, adolescent two-reeler of kids spying on a pair of lovers (one unforgettably daring image : kids sniffling the bicycle seat just vacated by the girl in the typical fashion of voyeuristic pornographic art) is a kind of reversal of growth, in which people grow backward into childhood. Suicide becomes a game, the houses look like toy boxes-laughter, death, putting out a fire—all seem reduced to some unreal innocence of childhood myths. The real innocence of Jules et Jim is in the writing, which depends on the spectator sharing the same wide-eyed or adolescent view of the wickedness of sex that is implicit in the vicious gamesmanship going on between two men and a girl.

Truffaut’s stories (all women are villains; the schoolteacher seen through the eyes of a sniveling schoolboy ; all heroes are unbelievably innocent, unbelievably persecuted) and characters convey the sense of being attached to a rubber band, although he makes a feint at reproducing the films of the 1930’s with their linear freedom and independent veering From The 400 Blows onward, his films are bound in and embarrassed by his having made up his mind what the film is to be about. This decisiveness converts the people and incidents into flat jiggling manikins (400 Blows, Mischief Makers) in a Mickey Mouse comic book, which is animated by thumbing the pages rapidly. This approach eliminates any stress or challenge, most of all any sense of the film locating an independent shape.

Jules et Jim, the one Truffaut that seems held down to a gliding motion, is also cartoonlike but in a decorous, suspended way. Again most of the visual effect is an illustration for the current of the sentimental narrative. Truffaut’s concentration on making his movie fluent and comprehensible flattens out all complexity and reduces his scenes to scraps of pornography—like someone quoting just the punchlines of a well-known dirty joke. So unmotivated is the leapfrogging around beds of the three-way lovers that it leads to endless bits of burlesque. Why does she suddenly pull a gun? (See “villainy of women,” above). Why does she drive her car off a bridge? (Villains need to be punished.) Etc.

Jules et Jim seems to have been shot through a scrim which has filtered out everything except Truffaut’s dry vivacity with dialogue and his diminutive stippling sensibility. Probably the high point in this love-is-time’s-fool film : a languorous afternoon in a chalet (what’s become of chalets?) with Jeanne Moreau teasing her two lovers with an endless folksong. Truffaut’s lyrics—a patter of vivacious small talk that is supposed to exhibit the writer’s sophistication, never mind about what—provides most of the scene’s friction, along with an idiot concentration on meaningless details of faces or even furniture (the degree that a rocking chair isn’t rocking becomes an impressive substitute for psychology). The point is that, divested of this meaningless vivacity, the scenes themselves are without tension, dramatic or psychological.

The boredom aroused by Truffaut—to say nothing of the irritation—come from his peculiar methods of dehydrating all the life out of his scenes (instant movies?) Thanks to his fondness for doused lighting and for the kind of long shots which hold his actors at thirty paces, especially in bad weather, it’s not only the people who are blanked out ; the scene itself threatens to evaporate off the edge of the screen. Adding to the effect of evaporation, disappearing. Truffaut’s imagery is limited to traveling (running through meadows, walking in Paris streets, etc.), setups and dialogue scenes where the voices, disembodied and like the freakish chirps in Mel Blanc’s Porky Pig cartoons, take care of the flying out effect. Truffaut’s system holds art at a distance without any actual muscularity or propulsion to peg the film down. As the spectator leans forward to grab the film, it disappears like a released kite.

Antonioni’s specialty, the effect of moving as in a chess game, becomes an autocratic kind of direction that robs an actor of his motive powers and most of his spine. A documentarist at heart and one who often suggests both Paul Klee and the cool, deftly neat, “intellectual” Fred Zinnemann in his early Act of Violence phase, Antonioni gets his odd, clarity-is-all effects from his taste for chic mannerism art that results in a screen that is glassy, has a side-sliding motion, the feeling of people plastered against stripes or divided by verticals and horizontals ; his incapacity with interpersonal relationships turns crowds into stiff waves, lovers into lonely appendages, hanging stiffly from each other, occasionally coming together like clanking sheets of metal but seldom giving the effect of being in communion.

At his best, he turns this mental creeping into an effect of modern misery, loneliness, cavernous guilt-ridden yearning It often seems that details, a gesture, an ironic wife making a circle in the air with her finger as a thought circles toward her brain, become corroded by solitariness. A pop jazz band appearing at a millionaire’s fête becomes the unintentional heart of La Notte, pulling together the inchoate center of the film—a vast endless party. Antonioni handles this combo as though it were a vile mess dumped on the lawn of a huge estate. He has his film inhale and exhale, returning for a glimpse of the   four-piece outfit playing the same unmodified kitsch music—stupidly immobile, totally detached from the party swimming around the music. The film’s most affecting shot is one of Jeanne Moreau making tentative stabs with her somber, alienated eyes and mouth, a bit of a dance step, at rapport and friendship with the musicians. Moreau’s facial mask, a signature worn by all Antonioni players, seems about to crack from so much sudden uninhibited effort.

The common quality or defect which unites apparently divergent artists like Antonioni, Truffaut, Richardson is fear, a fear of the potential life, rudeness, and outrageousness of a film. Coupled with their storage vault of self-awareness and knowledge of film history, this fear produces an incessant wakefulness. In Truffaut’s films, this wakefulness shows up as dry, fluttering inanity. In Antonioni’s films, the mica-schist appearance of the movies, their linear patterns, are hulked into obscurity by Antonioni’s own fund of sentimentalism, the need to get a mural-like thinness and interminableness out of his mean patterns.

The absurdity of La Notte and L’Avventura is that its director is an authentically interesting oddball who doesn’t recognize the fact. His talent is for small eccentric microscope studies, like Paul Klee’s, of people and things pinned in their grotesquerie to an oppressive social backdrop. Unlike Klee, who stayed small and thus almost evaded affectation, Antonioni’s aspiration is to pin the viewer to the wall and slug him with wet towels of artiness and significance At one point in La Notte, the unhappy wife, taking the director’s patented walk through a continent of scenery, stops in a rubbled section to peel a large piece of rusted tin This ikon close-up of minuscule desolation is probably the most overworked cliché in still photography, but Antonioni, to keep his stories and events moving like great novels through significant material, never stops throwing his Sunday punch. There is an interestingly acted nymphomaniac girl at wit’s end trying to rape the dish-rag hero ; this is a big event, particularly for the first five minutes of a film. Antonioni terrorized this girl and her interesting mop of straggly hair by pinning her into a typical Band-aid composition—the girl, like a tiny tormented animal, backed against a large horizontal stripe of white wall. It is a pretentiously handsome image that compromises the harrowing effect of the scene.

Whatever the professed theme in these films, the one that dominates in unspoken thought is that the film business is finished with museum art or pastiche art. The best evidence of this disenchantment is the anachronistic slackness of Jules et Jim, Billy Budd, Two Weeks in Another Town. They seem to have been dropped into the present from a past which has become useless this chasm between white-elephant reflexes and termite performances shows itself in an inertia and tight defensiveness which informs the acting of Mickey Rooney in Requiem for a Heavyweight, Julie Harris in the same film, and the spiritless survey of a deserted church in L’Avventura. Such scenes and actors seem as numb and uninspired by the emotions they are supposed to animate, as hobos trying to draw warmth from an antiquated coal stove. This chasm of inertia seems to testify that the past of heavily insured, enclosed film art has become unintelligible to contemporary performers, even including those who lived through its period of relevance.

Citizen Kane, in 1941, antedated by several years a crucial change in films from the old flowing naturalistic story, bringing in an iceberg film of hidden meanings. Now the revolution wrought by the exciting but hammy Orson Welles film, reaching its zenith in the 1950’s, has run its course and been superseded by a new film technique that turns up like an ugly shrub even in the midst of films that are preponderantly old gems. Oddly enough the film that starts the breaking away is a middle-1950’s films, that seems on the surface to be as traditional as Greed, Kurosawa’s Ikiru is a giveaway landmark, suggesting a new self-centering approach It sums up much of what a termite art aims at buglike immersion in a small area without point or aim, and, over all, concentration on nailing down one moment without glamorizing it, but forgetting this accomplishment as soon as it has been passed ; the feeling that all is expendable, that it can be chopped up and flung down in a different arrangement without ruin.

White Elephant Art Vs. Termite Art — Manny Farber

By John Bailey, ASC

Before you can begin to discuss Manny Farber’s film criticism, you have to ask yourself one question—why did he hate so many movies? The answer to this is no slam-dunk. It’s a question he must have asked himself with some regularity.

Nobody ever wrote about film the way Manny Farber did; and the way he wrote has influenced as many critics of the culture at large as it has those of film: Greil Marcus, Luc Sante, Dave Hickey, Jonathan Rosenblum, Kent Jones, have all drunk deep from his well. It is even difficult to imagine what kind of song Pauline Kael or Andrew Sarris might have warbled if there had been no Manny Farber tuning his literary “A” to lead their chorus.

A new edition of virtually all of his film reviews has just been published by our own Editions des Pleiades, “The Library of America.” With a lengthy but essential introduction for a first-time Farber reader, editor Robert Polito provides a capsule biography of the critic as he leads us into and through the thicket of Farber’s prose. Trying to find the elusive writer himself is like trying to draw a bead on a fast-moving target that keeps changing its color.

Manny Farber was born on February 20, 1917, in Douglas, Arizona. His family home on Eighth Street was a mere five-block sprint from the Mexican border. Douglas was close to the town of Bisbee, site of a major copper mine, with famed Bisbee Blue turquoise, highly sought by Navaho artists, a prized by-product. Farber joked that the town founders placed Douglas downhill from Bisbee at the distance that a loaded copper ore car could roll before stopping. And like many Westerners from towns like this, Farber went to the Big Apple to make a name for himself. And like “Hoppy” Ray from Picher, Oklahoma, another mining town, Manny fell in love with movies as a boy—the same kind of movies as “Hoppy”—the low budget cowboy pictures and serials.

Farber muscled himself into a job as film critic for The New Republic in 1942 after a brief stint there as art critic; he replaced the legendary Otis Ferguson who was killed by a torpedo attack on his tanker. He moved on to Time magazine in 1949 (though he disavows his work there as, in then Time style, he was published without by-line and was heavily edited). He was fired from Time after a few months and then wrote for The Nation from 1949-1954, and The New Leader from 1957–59. He wrote for men’s magazine, Cavalierin 1966, and for Artforum and Film Comment during a crucial period of a changing ethos in American film during the mid and late 60s.

The differing missions of this eclectic group of periodicals reflected Farber’s evolving writing style, as well as a more general aesthetic change in his film criticism. And it is “criticism” that Farber penned, not weekly film reviews. His pieces often discussed several films at once; his pen swung back and forth, firing aesthetic buckshot in multiple directions. A film’s plot, which constitutes most so-called reviews, was usually of minor importance to him.

In fact, he often assumed you had already seen the film under discussion. His reviews, like his paintings, have no entry point or center. In painting terms, you could say his writing and his art are both in an “overall” style. This erratic approach occasionally led him into “think pieces” which dealt with a more focused theme. This wider perspective became even wider when he focused on high-end film and art magazines such as Film Comment and Artforum. Not only did the writing become more theoretical, Farber began also to move away from the “B” movie films and directors he had so loved as an upstart critic.

His writing shifted from the mid 60s on, toward more independent/auteur filmmakers—even more so after he left New York City, ceased being a writing film critic, and moved with his soon-to-be-wife and long-time writing partner, Patricia Patterson, to begin teaching painting and film in 1970 at the University of California at San Diego. Yes, painting. While his film classes would hold 300 students in rapturous attention at his encyclopedic knowledge of cinema, Farber’s real love had become the teaching of painting and the ongoing development of his own vision. His painting classes usually were restricted to fewer than a dozen students.

Painting was a life-long love for Farber and his film criticism is riddled with pellets of painting references and ideas. One of his most important essays, “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art,” from late 1962, begins with a several page discussion of Cezanne, Motherwell, DeKooning, and Warhol before hunkering down to a critical evisceration of Tony Richardson, François Truffaut, and Michelangelo Antonioni, with a quick jab into Orson Welles, one of his favorite targets going back to Citizen Kane.

The “termite” films that Farber praised are the bare bones action films of directors like Sam Fuller, Anthony Mann, Howard Hawks, Allan Dwan, Budd Boetticher and even Val Lewton, at a time when they were pretty much ignored by mainstream critics. He also favored Laurel and Hardy and Mack Sennett over Chaplin. The “white elephant” films that he so disdained are not necessarily the bloated costume period melodramas based on weighty “literary” antecedents, but films by now revered directors such as Zinneman, Huston, Hitchcock, and Wilder. In a piece from December 1952, called “Blame the Audience,” he pounces on what he calls “mostly smartly tooled art works of the times,” such as Sunset Boulevard.

It becomes clear that American films of middlebrow culture, with aspirations toward humanistic sentiment, reek for him of insincerity, pretension and condescension to the intended audience. This disposition only intensifies as an even more formalized cinema from New Wave Europe breaks on American shores. Even from the time of Citizen Kane, when he abuses both Welles and cinematographer Gregg Toland for “arty” lighting and compositions, Farber sees filmmakers who explore and exploit the techniques of filmmaking itself as being especially worthy of contempt—those who “treat every inch of the screen and film as a potential area for prize worthy creativity.” Here is how he dissects François Truffaut, that most-beloved of directors:

An example of white elephant art, particularly the critic-devouring virtue of filling every pore of a work with glinting, darting Style and creative Vivacity, is François Truffaut. Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player and Julès and Jim, two ratchety perpetual-motion machines devised by a French Rube Goldberg, leave behind the more obvious gadgetries of Requiem for a Heavyweight [another film he hated] and even the cleaner, blade-like journalism of The 400 Blows [to which he gave a semi-pass].

(My own simple parenthesis here is—why does he see self-conscious cinema style as “critic- devouring”? Is he so personally put-upon by Monsieur Truffaut and his exuberant, celluloid-intoxicated ilk? In true Farber-esque contradiction, he all but slobbered over early Godard, the most self-referential director of the New Wave.)

There is no one quite as anti-intellectual in America as a certain kind of intellectual. It is as if he sees certain tropes of taste and intelligence as being his own private provenance. Or maybe, it’s because he comes from a place like Douglas, Arizona and never feels like a press-fit in the art-ghettos of New York City. Once secure with a sinecure in the art capital of the world, is it necessary to flay what fellow-critic Dwight MacDonald called “Mid-cult” just because you now move in more rarefied circles? Lest you get the wrong idea here—even though I find many of Farber’s aesthetic circuits loaded with dialectic disconnects, it is partly this very mix that makes him so compulsively readable—that and the fact that he wrote with a vigor, rhythm and an informed perspective that no one else in film can touch. And his broad-based, richly informed allusiveness was like catnip to the next generation of film critics such as Kael and Sarris. Kael embraced Farber’s termite burrowing into the film image, the shot itself as ground zero exegesis; Sarris cast his net wider, creating circles of a “Pantheon” that starred many of the termite directors that Farber already had been praising for two decades.

Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber is the most compulsively readable and well-written book of film criticism you are likely to ever encounter. Yet, I can’t help but say simply, that much of what he says is pure invective; cheap shots at anyone who dares to inflate the cinematic balloon with “meaning.” Farber champions the small “a”,” not the big ‘A.” Here is a link to a book you can open at almost any page and find exciting, albeit contrarian, writing:

Amazon.com Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farberlink

An earlier collection, “Negative Space” is also available; it contains much of a lengthy interview that Farber and Patterson gave to Richard Thompson in 1977:

Amazon.com Negative Space: Manny Farber On The Movies link

Even as he seeks to kneecap many prestigious directors, Farber was one of the first to call attention and give belated credit to animators like Tex Avery and Chuck Jones. His own cultural lodestones in all the arts were broad and popular based; it infused his writing style. He was as likely to quote Yogi Berra as Euripides. Coming from a small Western town and having to define his own cultural biases, he felt freer than most who were born into and educated within a fixed cultural constellation. It permeated his demotic and irreverent writing style. Robert Polito addresses this in his introduction. His opening sentence quotes Farber:

One of the most obvious facts about criticism is obvious… . It’s based on language and words. The desire is always to pursue: what does the word mean, or the sentence, or the paragraph, and where does it lead? As you follow language out, it becomes more and more webbed, complex.

This complexity is one of image, metaphor and allusion; it is always couched in accessible language. Farber never caved into the professional obfuscators of the “cinematic critical studies” fog that surrounded him. It does seem that such a hardscrabble writer would have no truck with the semiologists. But just as his writing style shifted as it appeared in more professional art and film magazines, his own self-awareness as a critic evolved in tandem. He has said that he used to write and talk about four or five films at once and in his teaching, he would bounce back and forth between several films. After some years teaching at UCSD, he laments that he can now get lost with his students inside a single film for hours.

The 1977 interview he did with Richard Thompson is the closest I have found to a critical “Confession,” an open revelation of his critical “stance.” He talks about sports, painting, and his own back-story. According to Thompson, Farber and his wife, Patricia Patterson, reviewed, edited, and re-wrote over months, what had started as a simple audio interview. It is a lengthy piece, but it is so readable; Farber gives insight about how his focus as a teacher, well after he had stopped writing, shifted toward more demanding and insular directors such as Straub and Snow, Akerman and Duras, while still hovering around art house darlings like Herzog and Fassbinder. He no longer had any imperative to reach a general, if educated, audience. He may have been content largely talking to himself, the prerogative of anyone of his considerable intellect. Here is the interview:

Screening the Past article link

There is a deliberate dialectic in his later writings, more essay-like than review pieces. When he talks about scenes and shots you can feel him tugging at the edges of the frame to see if it will open up and spill out more information, or if it will snap back with the taut conviction of the true “auteur.”

My own read is that as he discovered himself more and more in his paintings, he compulsively sought out the detailed “termite burrowings” hidden deeper inside complex films. The carefully considered qualities of detail that he strove for in painting also inhabit his approach to film analysis.

Like fellow painter Philip Guston, Farber began ever so briefly as a figurative artist, then embraced abstraction and sometimes hung out with the Cedar Tavern A-E boys in the 50s, but returned to figurative painting in the late 60s. Farber found a way to cohere his love of film and of painting in work he called the “auteur series.” He used collage (montage) elements that evoked the thematic landscape of his favorite directors. Other highly “constructed” canvasses came out of his work in carpentry and included unlikely elements such as re-bar secured to the wooden “canvas.” Atypically, he worked on his paintings, as they lay flat on a table.

Here is a video describing one of his paintings, “Untitled: New Blue.” You can scan the intimate detail and close construction of his painting’s landscape. This work is in the collection of Paul Schrader; the BBC commissioned the film, which is directed by Schrader. While he has the deepest regard for Farber and his work, Schrader was influenced more by Kael in his own critical writings:

Untitled: New Blue link

It is way beyond the scope of what I can do here to discuss Farber’s painting, but a glimpse into it as well as a strong sense of the man himself is in Jonathan Rosenbaum’s article from 1993, which he updated as an “obit” tribute after the critic/painter’s death at his home in Leucadia, California, on August 17, 2008. He was 91.

Rosenbaum had an on and off close relationship with Farber, almost as father/son, after Rosenbaum came to UCSD in March, 1997, at Farber’s invitation to serve as a teaching replacement. This insightful essay is full of details of Farber’s idiosyncratic personality, as well as an appraisal as to why, despite his often-maverick writing style, he is America’s greatest film critic.

www.jonathanrosenbaum.com link

Rosenblum concludes his essay with a story about a trip he made with Farber to Los Angeles when Farber was scheduled to give a lecture about painting at an art school. Farber discovered his socks didn’t match; he also had developed a bad case of stage fright in the parking lot before the event, and the much younger Rosenblum had to talk him down.

Of such seeming minor moments do the most imposing and irascible among us reveal the masks we create, when all we really want is to be understood.

Manny Farber and Termite Art

By Liz Brown

An exhibition celebrates the artist as insect.

One Day at a Time: Manny Farber and Termite Art, installation view. Image courtesy Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Photo: Zak Kelley.

One Day at a Time: Manny Farber and Termite Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 250 South Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, through March 11, 2019

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A hunk of pale cheese, silver herring on a pewter plate, a glass of ale. In the early seventeenth century, back when the Dutch East India Company was barely a start-up, monochromatic portraits of simple, quotidian fare, popularized by painters like Pieter Claesz, were called ontbijtjes, or breakfast pieces. A few decades later, the world’s first megacorporation had come to dominate global trade and Claesz, like other artists, moved on from modest still lifes to sumptuous banquets pieces—banketjes—the better to flaunt the new consumerist society’s colonial spoils with glistening red lobsters, blue-and-white porcelain, exotic spices, and, more often than not, a freshly peeled lemon imported from the Mediterranean, its expensive flesh exposed and gleaming.

Three centuries later, Manny Farber was picking lemons from his own tree and painting them in his home in Southern California. Born in 1917 in Arizona, Farber worked as a painter and a carpenter before taking a job in 1942 as film critic for the New Republic. In 1970, with, painter Patricia Patterson, his girlfriend at the time and later wife, Farber moved to California to teach at UC San Diego and devoted himself to his students and art. He passed away in 2008 at ninety-one. The still life, including Farber’s exuberant contributions to the genre, is one of the central elements in One Day at a Time: Manny Farber and Termite Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles’s group exhibition inspired by the late artist, writer, and teacher.

Manny Farber, Domestic Movies, 1985. Oil on board, 96 × 96 inches. Image courtesy ResMed collection.

Farber was, in J. Hoberman’s words, “more connoisseur than critic.” He possessed a pithy, impassioned prose style and a sportswriter’s ability to translate bodies in motion into words and images. Instead of recapping offensive plays or basketball formations, he dilated on Cézanne’s brushwork, John Wayne’s gait, and William F. Buckley’s debating technique. For Farber, the experience of culture was a spatial and kinetic one. In the essay “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art,” written in 1962, he invoked an insect’s single-minded, industrious drive as he excoriated art that shrieks with “preciosity, fame, ambition” and extolled that which entails “buglike immersion in a small area without point or aim, and, over all, concentration on nailing down one moment without glamorizing it.”

One Day at a Time: Manny Farber and Termite Art, installation view. Image courtesy Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Photo: Zak Kelley.

Assembling more than thirty artists, including Vija Celmins, Chris Marker, Rodney McMillian, and Becky Suss, curator Helen Molesworth has taken up Farber’s call to arthropod action with an exhibition of over one hundred works of painting, sculpture, photography, film, video, and sound from the 1950s to the present. It begins with a large room devoted to Farber’s work. These include painted aerial perspectives of the artist’s desktop littered with notebook paper, typewriter erasers, index cards, a box of Red Hots, as well as more elaborate tableaux—diptychs, four-panel pieces, a tondo—in which the still life multiplies and swarms Farber’s fields of lush saturated color with flowerpots, strips of film leader, plates of shellfish, scraps of paper, matchbox cars, books, and fruit. These are portraits of things but also of a man who took pleasure in his work and life.

One Day at a Time: Manny Farber and Termite Art, installation view. Image courtesy Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Photo: Zak Kelley.

From there, the show expands not in any chronological or otherwise linear fashion but coral-like, branching and associative, into explorations of dailiness, work, and the passage of time. In Fischli and Weiss’s Suddenly this Overview (1981–), a series of hand-sculpted clay objects and vignettes, the results are playfully mundane and absurd: a plate of potatoes, dog bowls, two people outside an office building with the caption “Smoking Break.” In Presentation Sisters (2005), Tacita Dean’s 16mm film, which follows a group of nuns going about domestic tasks and devotions in Cork, Ireland, the effect is subdued and meditative—an untroubled echo of another film committed to the minute observation of daily life, and one of Farber’s favorites, Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles(1975) by Chantal Akerman.

One Day at a Time: Manny Farber and Termite Art, installation view. Image courtesy Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Photo: Zak Kelley.

Recurring themes and motifs emerge, such as the presence of household pets, delight in the natural world, and lemons. Some linkages among the works are obvious: the flowers that litter Farber’s paintings, Jordan Casteel’s painting of a funeral wreath in a trash can (Memorial, 2017), and the flamboyant floral arrangements that Maurice Harris delivers weekly to the museum. Others aren’t as overt but no less resonant, like Dike Blair’s oil painting (Untitled, 2017) of white hydrangeas blooming in the dark next to musician Quintron’s photograph of new-fallen snow on his analog synthesizer, Weather Warlock (2011), nature and machine in unexpected harmony. In some cases, a termite-like intensity manifests in the simple act of mark-making, from the vibrant slashes of color in Joan Brown’s Woman Waiting in a Theatre Lobby (1975) to the muted, repeating dabs of paint in Jennifer Guidi’s near-abstract landscapes. Throughout the galleries Farber’s ecstatic still lifes appear like Easter eggs or friendly faces at a cocktail party. A good one, though it has a melancholic strain.

One Day at a Time: Manny Farber and Termite Art, installation view. Image courtesy Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Photo: Zak Kelley.

Midway through the show, Moyra Davey’s Empties (2017), elegiac photos of spent liquor bottles in still emptier rooms, testify to nights passed. On the opposite wall Wolfgang Tillmans’s large-scale photograph of his own cluttered desk (studio still life, c. 2014)—computer monitors, a green beer bottle, a tape dispenser, and cigarettes packs emblazoned with “SMOKING KILLS”—appears like an answer song to Farber’s earlier paintings. At one end of the gallery wait Blair’s mesmerizing photorealist gouaches, hauntings of mundane spaces and objects—a lone martini, a molded plastic chair in an airport, an ashtray, the rounded edge of an airplane window—images of life slowed down enough that you can feel it passing.

One Day at a Time: Manny Farber and Termite Art, installation view. Image courtesy Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Photo: Zak Kelley.

For the first time that I recall, a room of art made me want a cigarette. Smoking kills. It also carves time into tiny ceremonies. The things you notice holding a cigarette: the sound of traffic, the shadow of a bird in flight. I left the museum, grateful I hadn’t once felt the urge to document or broadcast anything, that Instagram, that relentless still-life machine, had never entered my mind.

One Day at a Time: Manny Farber and Termite Art, installation view. Image courtesy Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Photo: Zak Kelley.

When I came back a few weeks later I was thinking again about smoke. I’d bought an air purifier earlier that day on Amazon, the Dutch East India Company of our time, for my parents who live in Chico. About ten miles east, the town of Paradise was gone, incinerated by the Camp Fire. The air quality index had reached 438 and would eventually max out the 0–500 scale. Days later smoke from the West Coast drifted all the way to New York City. 

The still life’s other name is nature morte, because, of course, the flip side to all those gorgeous paintings of food and stuff is the creeping reminder that none of it will last, not even the Dutch East India Company, whose corporate charter expired in 1799.

One Day at a Time: Manny Farber and Termite Art, installation view. Image courtesy Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Photo: Zak Kelley.

Alongside the joys of daily life, there’s an awareness, especially in the exhibition’s later galleries, of how the present keeps hardening into the past. In The Selected Gifts, 1974–2015 (2015–16), Roni Horn photographs presents she’s received from friends against stark white grounds, the camera converting personal ephemera—books, a pair of Flintstones figurines, a stereoscopic photo of the moon—into artifact.

Josiah McElheny, End of a Love Affair, 2014. Handblown and polished glass, douglas fir, speakers, amplifier, industrial audio player, electric wiring, cut and polished blue sheet glass, brass control knobs, felt, hardware, 55 × 43 × 23 inches. Image courtesy the artist and Corbett vs. Dempsey.

As with friendship, so with romance. Near an exit sign stands Josiah McElheny’s still life brought to life. End of a Love Affair (2014) consists of seven blue glass bottles—more empties—inside a cabinet made of wood and more blue glass. A piece of furniture, with two brass knobs, wired for sound, possibly functional, it appears familiar and not. And then a song begins, a jazz number with a lilting bossa nova beat, and it’s telling you goodbye.

Liz Brown is currently at work on Twilight Man: The Strange Life and Times of Harrison Post, to be published by Viking. Her writing has appeared in Bookforum, frieze, London Review of Books, Los Angeles Times, New York Times Book Review, and elsewhere.

Termite Art and the Modern Museum

What is the place of work that dances around, or deplores, the spectacle side of today’s moneyed art world?

By Alex Abramovich

Douglas, Arizona, was once a smelter town, processing copper mined nearby in Bisbee, Courtland, and Nacozari de García. The painter and critic Manny Farber, who was born in 1917 and died a little more than a decade ago, grew up there, eight blocks from the Mexican border, and his life was marked by an abiding interest in borders and burrowing things: centipedes, tapeworms, termites. In 1962, he published “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art,” in Film Culture. “A peculiar fact about termite-tapeworm-fungus-moss art is that it goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity,” he wrote.

White-elephant art, on the other hand, was “masterpiece art, reminiscent of the enameled tobacco humidors and wooden lawn ponies bought at white elephant auctions decades ago.” Ever suspicious of grand gestures, message films, and stuff that smacked of “giltculture,” Farber championed small, stolen moments and improvised gestures, which he tended to find in collective productions that left lots of room for surprise. He valued craftsmen like Anthony Mann over auteurs like Truffaut or Antonioni, although he reserved the right to change his mind, and did so often. Hard as he was to nail down, he liked most the artists and filmmakers who were “involved in a kind of squandering-beaverish endeavor that isn’t anywhere or for anything.” Farber never came out and said so, but this opposition seems linked to left-wing debates from the nineteen-thirties, and Farber’s disdain for the left-leaning artists who had Barton Finked their way to Hollywood when the call came. Working as a carpenter, on and off, for much of his life, he took care not to rely on his art or his writing for money. The job gave him the freedom to rail against those who did.

Carpentry also gave Farber the freedom to follow his personal interests, from Abstract Expressionist works to representational paintings; from appreciations of tough-guy American filmmakers (Samuel Fuller, Raoul Walsh) to celebrations of Europeans (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Chantal Akerman); from New York to the University of California San Diego, where, in the seventies, he helped assemble a top-notch department of visual arts. One of Farber’s first hires, Jean-Pierre Gorin, had been Jean-Luc Godard’s partner in the Dziga Vertov Group of leftist filmmakers. Gorin and Farber became close, and Gorin made a feature-length film called “Routine Pleasures,” from 1986, that cuts between Farber’s studio and a team of train buffs, in Del Mar, California, who are building a landscape for their model railroad to move through—which just might be the ultimate termite endeavor.

Projected onto a gallery wall, “Routine Pleasures,” is one of the first things you see in “One Day at a Time: Manny Farber and Termite Art,” an exhibit running at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, until March 11th. Should you choose to sit for a while, there are five chairs to pick from, all made by the artist and architect Roy McMakin, a former student of Farber’s who salvaged two wooden chairs from a thrift shop and made these immaculate copies by hand. The original chairs have been hung on a wall perpendicular from the projection—an inversion that might be too easy, or too on the nose. Still, McMakin’s affection for his former teacher comes through.

By all accounts, Farber was a powerhouse teacher. In the classroom, he’d screen films backward or without sound, freeze the frame, ask his students to see what they were seeing in purely pictorial terms. In a catalogue essay that accompanies the show, Helen Molesworth, who sat in on Farber’s lectures in the eighties, describes his screening of Martin Scorsese’s “Mean Streets.” “He showed the opening scene several times—once straight through, once without sound, and once while he spoke,” she writes. She goes on, “When Farber talked, he talked about how Robert De Niro moved like a dancer, and asked us to watch carefully as De Niro moved his body through the streets, to see how the character seemed to inhabit his physical frame, how a low hum of criminality was embodied in those lilting footsteps—the compactness of his hips over his knees­—all this, just before he put a cherry bomb in a mailbox on a street corner in downtown New York and scampered away, his entire body looking like a shit-eating grin.”

This is lovely, and also a little bit sly, because Molesworth—who assembled “One Day at a Time,” then lost her job as moca’s curator before it went up, but saw the show through, nonetheless—has set off a few cherry bombs of her own. At moca, she feuded with the museum’s director, Philippe Vergne, over a survey, from 2017, of the work of the American minimalist Carl Andre. (In 1985, Andre was charged with the murder of his wife, the Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta. Acquitted in 1988, he was shunned by the art world for years, until a retrospective at Dia, in 2014, where Vergne was then the director.) At around the same time, Molesworth declined to work on a solo show by Mark Grotjahn, a blue-chip Los Angeles artist who sits on moca’s board. Grotjahn was also supposed to be the honoree at moca’s 2018 fund-raising gala; in January of last year, he declined, citing a lack of diversity. (The three previous honorees—Jeff Koons, Ed Ruscha, and John Baldessari—had also been straight white men.) But Grotjahn’s change of heart came too late, as save-the-date cards had already gone out. The gala was cancelled in February. moca was in turmoil. Molesworth was fired in March. Two months later, in May, Vergne announced his resignation.

It didn’t go unnoticed in the art world that, within four months, at the height of the #MeToo moment, four women who had stood at the helm of major cultural institutions—Laura Raicovich, at the Queens Museum; Maria Inés Rodríguez, at the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Bordeaux; Beatrix Ruf, at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum; and Molesworth—all lost their jobs. Molesworth, who had come to moca after serving as the chief curator at the I.C.A., in Boston, and the Wexner Center, in Columbus, Ohio, had spent her career questioning her place inside the museum. “The Western institution I have dedicated my life to, with its familiar humanist offerings of knowledge and patrimony in the name of empathy and education, is one of the greatest holdouts of the colonial enterprise,” she wrote, last year, in Artforum. “I don’t think there’s any way for moca to not be a white space,” she said in a lecture at U.C.L.A., just before the dustup with Grotjahn. “The DNA is too deep. We don’t have anyone of color on our board.” In her three years at moca, Molesworth curated ambitious, important shows by artists of diverse backgrounds: the first retrospective of Kerry James Marshall’s work, a major retrospective of works by Anna Maria Maiolino. She was better with interesting, out-of-the-way artists than she was with the big names, with the board, and with potential donors—and that brings us back to Farber, the straight white male who has been enlisted, in this case, to serve as Molesworth’s Trojan horse in a show that raises the same questions that she has raised in public.

There are twenty-three late paintings by Farber, all of them still-lifes made between 1975 and 2000. They include works from his oil-on-paper “Stationery” series, in which everyday objects (erasers, scissors, paper clips, bottles of liquid paper) skitter toward the edges of the frame; works from the “Auteur” series, which make glancing references to films by Altman and Fassbinder while zooming in on the bric-a-brac (candy bars, notebooks) that film critics fiddle with in screening rooms. Farber painted on tables, and you see his pictorial plane from above, at an angle that’s tilted slightly. In the absence of fixed-point perspective, your eye moves freely across the canvas. The results are demotic, de-centered, democratic—and also cartoonish and just shy of kitsch. They’re not to everyone’s taste, though Farber, a proud man, was sure of their value. Asked about the relationship between his painting and film criticism, Farber said, “The brutal fact is that they’re exactly the same thing.” You see some of that here: like his arguments, the paintings are full of jostling, circling, scuffling things. Taken together, they give the feeling that Farber described when he held Kurosawa’s “Ikiru” up as a perfect example of termite art—a sense of “buglike immersion in a small area without point or aim, and, over all, concentration of nailing down one moment without glamorizing it, but forgetting this accomplishment as soon as it has been passed; the feeling that all is expendable, that it can be chopped up and flung down in a different arrangement without ruin.”

Farber is a Trojan horse in another way, too, because Molesworth has used him to sneak a number of termite-like artists into the show: Nancy Shaver, who collects textiles and objects that are as likely to end up in her antique shop in Hudson, New York, as they are in galleries; Beverly Buchanan, who built bumpity, shrunken-down shotgun shacks, cook shacks, and sharecropper cabins out of wood and foam core; Dike Blair, whose mournful gouaches of ashtrays, alarm clocks, and empty airport armchairs read like an essay on negative space. There are flashier works, including Josiah McElheny’s “An End to Modernity,” from 2005, a super-sized, nickel-plated, aluminum attempt to depict the known universe, which looks like a Lobmeyr light fixture, with the galaxies rendered in hand-blown glass and electric lights doubling as quasars. It’s enormous and glitzy, which makes it a bit of a stretch for the show; but, despite its size, the sculpture’s chandelier-like qualities make it feel indoorsy and intimate. Becky Suss’s “Bathroom,” from 2016, a meticulous re-creation, in oil, of the bathroom that her grandparents shared on Long Island, is more intimate still. Catherine Opie’s photographs of Elizabeth Taylor’s curtains, closet, and kitchen—taken in 2010 and 2011, the year that Taylor died—are elegiac and stately, and deeply revealing of Taylor’s interior life. There are two beautiful domestic paintings by Patricia Patterson, Farber’s partner and eventual wife, who moved with him to California, co-wrote his later essays, and lived with him, happily, until his death. In all, there are thirty-four artists, plus Jason Simon, who programmed a series (films by Danny Lyon, Michael Snow, Joyce Wieland, and others) to go with the show.

Molesworth has said that, out of all of the exhibitions that she’s organized, this is her most personal. It’s powerful, too, in a quiet, cumulative way, because the domestic sphere that she’s focussed on here is so close to the heart. But there’s more to it than that. In Molesworth’s hands, which we feel as heavily as those of the artists she’s gathered, the show becomes an argument cast in the form of a question: What is the proper place for minor-key, handmade, pictorial works that ignore, dance around, or deplore the spectacle side of today’s garish, moneyed art world? Or, how can today’s museums be more than mechanisms that validate prices set by the galleries and auction houses?

During her “heady college days,” Molesworth writes in her catalog essay, “I, like so many others, developed a crush on the twentieth century’s call for art to broker an arrangement with life. . . . Now, I find my attraction to the everyday to be a form of defense against what I perceive to be the near total eclipse of criticism by the market values of art as an asset class, the demand for museums to produce blockbuster shows, and the apotheosis of profit as the primary marker of cultural value that I see embodied in the frictionless finish fetish of Jeff Koons, the narcissistic grandiosity of Damien Hirst, or the production of charm without affect by Takashi Murakami.”

These strong words play out in striking and unexpected ways as you walk through the galleries. Charles Ray’s “Tractor,” from 2005, is a life-size, aluminum reconstruction of a broken-down tractor that Ray came across in California’s San Fernando Valley. Ray towed the thing to his studio, took it apart, and had ten of his assistants sculpt each part in clay. He made molds and cast them, and the results are startling. Some of the parts look machine-tooled. Others have clearly been sculpted by hand, retaining the mark of their individual, anonymous makers. Still, the machine comes together. It works. Is this sculpture, which looks like a super-sized Monopoly token, really an example of termite art? Is it an example of the Fordist, assembly-line practices that Molesworth abhors when it comes to someone like Jeff Koons—a perfect piece of white-elephant art? The answers seem to be yes, and that tractor’s still stuck in my mind, a few months after I first walked through the show. It seems to embody the pitfalls and contradictions that come with critiquing the institution from within, and also the ways that an object can cut through critique and simply broadcast its thingness.

“By the way,” Gorin says, in an exchange with Molesworth about Manny Farber that’s included in the catalog, “he said he hated ‘White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art.’ I think he hated it in part because people tried to tether him to it. He knew the article was fundamentally flawed, and what’s flawed about it is the ‘versus.’ ” Molesworth agrees. “Of course!” she writes. “The essay is structurally flawed by a false antinomy, an either/or scenario doomed to generate opinions rather than dialogue. Anyway, who wants to have an argument that only has two sides?” More than any debt they owe to Farber, that kind of willingness to wander, beaver-like, into the thickets, in search of nothing in particular—or nothing at all—is what the best artists here have in common. It’s not the stuff of which art-world blockbusters are made at the moment, and that probably goes some way toward explaining why Molesworth’s tenure at moca couldn’t last. And yet this tricky, important farewell show suggests the ways that museums must change, and are changing already. No one, not Farber or anyone else, said it was going to be easy.

Alex Abramovich is the author of “Bullies: A Friendship.