Funded in part by a grant from the City of West Hollywood through WeHo Arts, MAK Center presents a group exhibition curated by Michael Ned Holte, who recently co-curated the Hammer Museum’s Made in L.A. biennial. The exhibition at the Schindler House takes its title from the film Routine Pleasures (1986), by the director Jean-Pierre Gorin. The film delineates two parallel tracks—one, a gradual infiltration of the Model Railroaders Club, a group of “train people” who met every Tuesday night in a hangar near San Diego, and two, a consideration of the still life paintings and writing of artist and film critic Manny Farber—and the often unexpected intersection of these tracks.
The film embodies Farber’s notion of “termite art,” which the critic first identified in his significant essay “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art” (1962) as an approach to creative production that “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.” In the essay Farber opposed the termite—which is also to say the humdrum, the minor, the micro, the routine—to the white elephant of masterpiece art that is all too obvious in its totalizing strategies, too eager to please.
The exhibition Routine Pleasures takes the film and its termite tracks as a starting point for further ingestion and elaboration. In addition to Gorin’s concerns (particularly: method and work, the materialist nature of artistic imagination, friendship, the endless obsessive pursuit of details), the exhibition seeks to extend additional tracks outward horizontally in order to connect a diverse selection of contemporary work in painting, video, furniture, etching, photography, ceramics, and performance—with each revealing evidence of a termite tendency that is every bit as “eager, industrious, [and] unkempt” today, a half century after Farber indentified it.
Exhibition runs May 25 - August 14, 2016. Free admission for opening reception and programs, regular open hours: $7 general / $6 students & seniors. More info at www.weho.org/arts or www.makcenter.org.
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CONTACT: Michael Che, Economic Development & Cultural Affairs Coordinator
323-848-6377, Mche@weho.org
