No Axe to Grind: Manny Farber, Art and Movies
“If you have this really big plan about what your writing should be, then, basically, you’re interested in power,” said New York Times critic Roberta Smith during a 2007 panel discussion. “You cannot write more than what you believe and what you see. And if you do, if you start projecting or if you start deciding you have an agenda and think you’re supposed to conform to this agenda, you are lost as a critic and a writer.” Her verdict resonated.
Film critic and painter Manny Farber had little interest in power. He had less interest in power, in fact, than Smith herself, whose efficient criticism often veers more toward snap judgments than evocative observations. Farber certainly had opinions—his work resounded with a pernickety, personality-ridden enthusiasm—yet he geared few of his opinions toward adamant conclusion-making. Sometimes, only the most clairvoyant of readers could actually determine whether he liked the films he reviewed, but his dead-on adjectives again and again positioned movies as multifaceted, unpredictably sensorial experiences.
“One day,” Farber facetiously wrote in his 1966 essay The Subverters, “somebody is going to make a film that is the equivalent of a Pollock painting, a movie that can be truly pigeonholed for effect, certified a one person operation.” But Farber didn’t recommend that anyone hold their breath for such a “miracle” and he jabbed at other 1960s reviewers who always tried “to bring some order and shape into film history—creating a Louvre of great films and detailing the one genius responsible for each.” Film as a medium was far too complicated and subversive to fit into a genius narrative, or any narrative, for that matter.
When Farber died in late August, at age 91, the outpouring of obituaries from writers, artists and film connoisseurs was surprisingly conflicted. The obituaries invariably championed Farber’s idiosyncratic rhetorical agility—Williams Grimes of the New York Times called him “a quirky prose stylist with a barbed lance” and Richard Corliss of Time praised the way he “twisted, refined, expanded, improved, undercut, remade” language. Yet the question of where he actually fit in to the still young history of film criticism baffled his admirers. Some said he didn’t make much of a mark, that he was too unconcerned with the “public’s opinion.” Others said he was one of 20th century film’s most important figures, but that his iconoclastic, focus-on-the-minutiae approach would never pass in today’s periodicals. Still others made flimsy connections between Farber’s reviews and his paintings, suggesting that Farber’s position as an artist who wrote explained his distinct approach to criticism.
Tracing Farber’s biography reveals a series of gem-like art-writing overlaps: in the early 1930s, Farber illustrated and wrote for a school annual; ten years later, in the 1940s, he was writing for The New Republic while hanging out with abstract expressionists in New York; in 1955, he began a decade long habit of incorporating text into his paintings; in 1969, Farber described Eric Rohmer’s Ma Nuit Chez Maud as getting to “the component parts” of French professional life like no other film which may have foreshadowed 1982 painting called Rohmer’s Knee, in which autonomous little “component parts” are scattered effortlessly across the circular surface.
Despite their ready availability, none of the parallels between Farber as artist and Farber as writer explain why he was so relentlessly good at both crafts. And what could be contradictory to Farber’s renegade criticality than saying he looked at movies with a painter’s eye? Farber’s whole point was that such simple rationalizations undermine what makes movies and art in general, interesting. Yet perhaps the best way to understand what made the unaffected adeptness of Farber’s writing unusual is to look at him in relation to his peers: that strange sub-group of artists who criticize art.
In the afterward to her 1996 collection of essay, painter Mira Schor said, “artists are moved to make a case for the movements they feel they belong to, . . . because no one else will or can make the case for their own aesthetic any better.” And this is what Schor does as a writer: she makes a case for herself and she analyzes others as if stringing together her own canon via art historical references and judgments. Yet when artist/writers like Schor make their own case, they raise the stakes, sometimes to unmanageable heights.
“The artist’s words pose the ultimate challenge to his or her visual art, that of living up to the standards you yourself have set in critiquing other artists,” Schor explains. Perhaps all writers set standards, but Schor has certainly never met those she set for herself—her linguistically oriented work seems instead formalized and distilled, nowhere near as gooey and ineffable as art she set out to make.
Then there were those hotheaded 1960s artists, writing just as Farber was starting his career: minimalist mastermind Donald Judd, whose art reviews often involved straightforward statements like “this show is exceptionally good,” and conceptualist Joseph Kosuth, who took it upon himself to tell us what conceptualism was. Their work, successful in its perceived trendsetting, might have met the standards they set as writers, but something about their approach seemed stiflingly missionary-like, which may be why Farber is such a liberating figure.
In Domestic Movies, a 1985 painting by Farber, the picture plane is divided down the middle, one side an ocean blue and the other a Sunny Delight orange. It’s an aerial view of a table top, presumably, or of some other flat surface conducive to compulsive clutter. Potted plants pop up throughout, as do abandoned bowls of oatmeal, crayon boxes and other assorted objects. Everything seems to have its own narrative, yet nothing competes with anything else. Like movie trailers, each moment in the painting acts like a teaser, offering a compelling glimpse into a story you barely get to enter before being pulled into yet another story. Though irrational, the objects interact with each other in a focused way, as if completely fixated on the role they play in the moment of the painting.
In his oft-quoted essay, White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art, Farber talks about what he liked in movies: “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.” This is as far from a power conversation as a critic can get; he’s pulling things apart, not putting parts together to make a theoretically or morally convincing whole. Farber never had to worry about living up to his own standards, because his standards had nothing to do with idealism; they had to do with paying attention, fixating on what he enjoyed, and learning how to articulate what he saw so that someone else could feel the way he felt when he saw it.
>Written by d/visible contributor Catherine Wagley.
