Manny Farber's Termite Art

JAMES WOLCOTT

Mixed Media

As a movie critic, Manny Farber always packed his pieces with rock salt. The spray of his densely packed sentences left a wide pockmark. Kissing off the early work of Elia Kazan and Sidney Lumet, for example, Farber wrote, "Though the screen is loaded with small realities—flickering hands, shadows, grunts, squirms, spinal sag, lip-clenching, an old brassiere in a bum's suitcase. . .the New York films seemed to shriek for one ordinary casual action, realistically performed, such as Bogart's succinct repairs on the overpopulated tank in Sahara." Bom near the Mexican border in Douglas, Arizona, in 1917, Farber reviewed movies in the forties and fifties for The New Republic, The Nation, and The New Leader, branching off into more impressionistic forays for Artforum in the sixties. (A selection of his reviews appeared in hardcover under the title Negative Space. The paperback reprint was called simply Movies.) He built his cult reputation on the championing of tobacco-spit American directors who earned their calluses like honest ranch hands— Howard Hawks, Anthony Mann, Raoul Walsh, Sam Fuller, Don Siegel, and William Wellman.

"For instance, Wellman's lean, elliptical talents for creating brassy cheapsters and making gloved references to death, patriotism, masturbation, suggest that he uses private runways to the truth, while more famous directors take a slow, embalming surface route.'' The surface route Farber called "white-elephant art," the private runways he heralded as "termite art."

Slangy and butch, Farber's style wasn't new to movie criticism. His predecessor at The New Republic, Otis Ferguson, could also bulge his biceps and spin wisecracks on a dime. What was new was Farber's action-painter zest and impasto layering of language. For Farber was not only a B-movie nut but an art critic and an artist who chummed with painters in the downtown bustle of postwar Manhattan. In 1945, he wrote an electrically sympathetic riff on Jackson Pollock: "The paint is jabbed on, splattered, painted in lava-like thicknesses and textures, scrabbled, made to look like smoke, bleeding, fire, and painted in great sweeping continuous lines." It's this charged-up visual kineticism that gives Farber's criticism its special cast. Sometimes he watercolors a movie in a single sentence. On other occasions he lays on the strokes until he has a full sitting portrait. Nothing could be fuller than his portrait of the Andy Warhol superstar Brigid Polk.

When Brigid Polk, hippopotamus of sin, sprawls in a bathtub in white bra and blue jeans, and talks to someone just outside camera range about the drug-curing scene in different hospitals, the image is free, for itself, and wide open: the spectator, as well as the actor, can almost vegetalize inside the frame. Everything is stopped as the movie engulfs itself in a fuck-off atmosphere. With giggling hysteria, fag expressions, the most pathetic bravado voice, she explodes the screen outward by giant abandon and cravenness. The camera milks the paleness of her slack flesh, a cheap cotton brassiere cuts into the doughy torso, the image is the most underrated phenomenon in films: a blast of raw stuff.

T 've used the past tense to describe A Farber's film criticism because he's done piddling-few reviews since the mid-seventies (and those required the service of a co-author—his wife, Patricia Patterson). Always a slow crawler when it came to deadlines, Farber seems to have used up his momentum and hit a complete stop. But if he is no longer adding a sleek black finish to his favorite gangster films, he's keeping expansively busy assembling his own movie-saturated big-wall artworks. When I was in Los Angeles recently, the Museum of Contemporary Art held a major exhibition of Manny Farber's paintings and cutouts, and the result was pretty mind-zapping. True to his termite loyalties, Farber hasn't attempted to create masterpieces by slaving over "an expensive hunk of well-regulated area," but has emptied out his pockets and his memory and littered the field with his fidgety, collectible whims. Tobacco tins, candy-bar wrappers, unsharpened pencils, pillow-book illustrations of Japanese lovers at play, chess-piece arrangements of Liquid Paper bottles, self-admonishing memos ("Go for tricks," "Get it finished," "Keep blaming everyone"), vased flowers and pitted fruit—Farber arranges all of these items as if he were sorting out his favorite toys on an angled plane. He's hovering in a helium balloon above a lifetime's accumulation of precious clutter.

It's no surprise that many of Farber's paintings are named after movies, but it is surprising how he extricates bits of lore from the sweep and violence of those films and plants them like toy trees on a model-railroad set. Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch was described by Farber in Negative Space as "a virile ribbon image, often an aerial view, of border life in 1914 Texas," and his paintings based on Peckinpah's Westerns are aerial views in which the ribbon images (train tracks, red ants, mammoth trucks rounding a curve) have been snipped and pasted askew. Railroad tracks also wind and run like hedges through Farber's pictorial tributes to Anthony Mann, Howard Hawks, Claire's Knee, Laurel and Hardy, and Honeymoon Killers (this last collage is a virtual badlands of cheesy philandering).

Not all of Farber's movie paintings are hospitable to locomotives. His McCabe and Mrs. Miller features a broken bar of Hershey's chocolate, and The Films of R. W. Fassbinder so trims the fat from Fassbinder's blobby corpus that what's left is a pair of toilets, a telephone cord and receiver stretched across an empty bed, a giant beer bottle, and a magazine spread on Hanna Schygulla. What Farber has done in his movie paintings is release the superconcentrated images of his critical writing with a dice-rolling dare. His random effects soon take on their own loose, jazzy rhythm. His paintings have a goofy syncopation.

Large in scale, the paintings have a no-big-deal air about them; they mess around in their own diversions the way that Henry Miller's watercolors did. Farber, who once accused Michelangelo Antonioni of wanting "to pin the viewer to the wall and slug him with wet towels of artiness and significance,'' keeps his own stuff dry and crinklylight. His details don't flog but tickle. For me, Manny Farber always adhered too rigidly to a macho code of honor to be a truly great movie critic—like Otis Ferguson, he seemed to shrink from anything he feared was too uncool or sissy. His responsiveness, that is, was intense but narrow. The paintings, however, have a reaching, acquiring, fiddling spirit. They're American homemade.

It's a pity that Manny Farber's paintings aren't better-known (especially on the East Coast), but if they were he might be in danger of becoming a white elephant himself, jewel-encrusted with acclaim. Termites have to find their own subterranean eating lanes. Farber: "The best examples of termite art appear. . .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 scale of Farber's recent work suggests that he's found a major feeding route. He paints lovely pears.