Although I knew he was also a painter, the Manny Farber I first encountered in back issues of Film Culture and in collected writings like Negative Space (1971) was a brilliant, spirited, clear-eyed, iconoclastic, no-nonsense film critic. Essays like "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art" (1962) were lean, mean, superbly on target and amazingly prescient, celebrating B-films and maverick, marginal auteurs long before they became de rigueur among cineastes. He was an early champion of Howard Hawks, Preston Sturges, Val Lewton and Don Siegel, and penned some of the first American appreciations of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Marguerite Duras, Werner Herzog, Chantal Akerman and other 70s European avantgardists.

"Splotches" (2005)

My relationship to LeWitt's work is a bit unusual. When I was coming up I detested him, along w/ the other Late Minimalists -- or so was he contextually positioned & critically aspected. At that time, the work seemed yet another desperate attempt by one of that flock to reify a movement which had become completely moribund. However as time went by & LeWitt's work developed I found my view changing. -- & do we privilege work which we came to appreciate over time after having responded negatively initially? Perhaps we do, & perhaps we should, as such work has in a sense fought for our appreciaton.