Tag Archives: One Day at a Time—Manny Farber and Termite Art

JORDAN CASTEEL

Jordan Casteel—two of whose paintings are part of ONE DAY AT A TIME at MOCA—will discuss the exhibition at the museum during a public tour this weekend.

And Casteel’s museum show RETURNING THE GAZE will open in Denver next month.

JORDAN CASTEEL ON ONE DAY AT A TIME—MANNY FARBER AND TERMITE ART

Sunday, January 20, at 3 pm.

MOCA Grand Avenue

250 South Grand Avenue, downtown Los Angeles.

JORDAN CASTEEL—RETURNING THE GAZE

February 2 through August 18.

Denver Art Museum

100 West 14th Avenue Parkway, Denver.

From top: Jordan Casteel, Yahya, 2014, oil on canvas, collection of Jim and Julie Taylor, image courtesy Sargent’s Daughters, New York.; Jordan Casteel, Memorial, 2017, oil on canvas, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, image courtesy the artist and MOCA; Jordan Casteel, Benyam, 2018, oil on canvas, Komal Shah & Gaurav Garg Collection, image courtesy the artist and Casey Kaplan, New York; Jordan Casteel, Glass Man Michael, 2016, oil on canvas, collection of John L. Thomson, Minneapolis, image courtesy the artist and MOCA. All images © Jordan Casteel.

HELEN MOLESWORTH READS ONE DAY AT A TIME

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“When I sat in Manny’s lecture hall [in the fall/winter quarter of 1988], I had no inkling of what a curator even did…

“And my current understanding of its operations, demanding a constant oscillation between the big picture and the details—the big picture being the institution of the museum and its central role in the creation of value, the formation of canons, and the presentation of private artistic acts for public experience; the details involving the development of intimacies with both objects and their makers, the why and how of choosing specific objects, the why and how of installing them, and what each act of adjacency in an installation might connote—was still a decade away.” — Helen Molesworth*

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This weekend, ONE DAY AT A TIME—MANNY FARBER AND TERMITE ART curator Helen Molesworth reads her titular catalogue essay in the exhibition’s gallery. Centered on Farber, the essay moves through the elusive definitions of termite art, still life, and the everyday.

HELEN MOLESWORTH READS ONE DAY AT A TIME

Sunday, January 13, at 3 pm.

MOCA Grand Avenue

250 South Grand Avenue, downtown Los Angeles.

See “Under the Volcano: Helen Molesworth in conversation with Dorothée Perret,” PARIS LA 14 (Winter 2016): 29–37.

*Helen Molesworth, “One Day at a Time,” in One Day at a Time: Manny Farber and Termite Art (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art/Munich: DelMonico Books-Prestel, 2018

BLAME THE AUDIENCE

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On the occasion of ONE DAY AT A TIME—MANNY FARBER AND TERMITE ART, MOCA presents a film series inspired by Farber’s idiosyncratic and influential teaching, organized by filmmaker, artist, and teacher Jason Simon, a former student of Farber’s.

This week Simon will introduce the series’ first installment, which features shorts by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Michael Snow, and Joyce Wielands, as well as a cinematic portrait of Farber by Chris Petit.

BLAME THE AUDIENCE

A FILM SERIES ORGANIZED BY JASON SIMON

Thursday, November 1, at 7 pm.

BLAME THE AUDIENCE #2

Thursday, December 13, at 7 pm.

MOCA Grand Avenue, 250 South Grand Avenue, downtown Los Angeles.

Top: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Marite Greiselis, and Christoph Roser in Das Kleine Chaos (1966), directed by Fassbinder.

Above: Michael Snow, Wavelength (1967).

Below: Closing titles of Das Kleine Chaos.

HELEN MOLESWORTH AND JONATHAN LETHEM IN CONVERSATION

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“I try to take the long view. I think that every epoch has had its fantastical producers. I’m really interested in Manny Farber right now. He had two classifications for art: white elephant art—this huge thing, Stella, Koons, Canova, Cabanel—and termite art: Manet, Moyra Davey.

“I try to be sanguine about that quality of what’s possible with art. I do think art used to have a fantasy that it was separate from life, and we know now that it’s not.” — Helen Molesworth, PARIS LA 14 (2016)

“[White Elephant] was a term for work that made large claims of importance and was therefore burdened with all kinds of ungraceful exposition and prescriptive social thinking, as opposed to something like film noir—which is Termite Art—stuff that just burrowed into experience and ended up saying quite a lot more about American life and which Farber believed was more mysterious and lively and compressed and radiated more meaning because it didn’t bother trying to be important…

“I loved the termite position before I was old enough to have any self-conscious thoughts about what it meant.” — Jonathan Lethem, LARB, 2016

Molesworth—curator of ONE DAY AT A TIME—MANNY FARBER AND TERMITE ART, now at MOCA—will join Lethem this week to talk about Farber and his “notion of termite art—an exploration of the problems and pleasures of the everyday—as it appears within fine art, cinema, writing, and life.”*

HELEN MOLESWORTH IN CONVERSATION WITH JONATHAN LETHEM*

Thursday, October 18, at 7 pm.

ONE DAY AT A TIME—MANNY FARBER AND TERMITE ART

Through March 11.

MOCA Grand Avenue, 250 Grand Avenue, downtown Los Angeles.

See Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber, ed. Robert Polito (New York: Library of America, 2009).

Lethem is a contributor to Termite Deluxe: Manny Farber Writings and Paintings, a forthcoming volume exploring Farber’s life and work.

Top: Manny Farber, undated photograph, courtesy Patricia Patterson.

Above: Manny Farber, Story of the Eye (detail), 1985; oil, graphite and masking tape on board. Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego.

Below: Manny Farber, Domestic Movies, 1985; oil on board. ResMed collection, San Diego.

Image credit: Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.