Farber on Farber: in his more than 50 years as a film critic and painter, Manny Farber has brought an essentially autobiographical sensibility to bear on a wide range of visual idioms, from process-driven abstractions to rebuslike figurative studies. Here, he tells the story straight
Art in America, Oct, 2004 by Leah Ollman

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MF: Yeah, which was very odd, and very daring and very stupid on my part, because it cost me an enormous amount of time and effort. But it got me a lot of moves, in terms of art. Again, if you look around at all of this work, it's very, structural, in a sort of obvious way. The element of compartmentalizing in squares comes directly from carpentry. I've told this to biographers, and I can never get the kind of attention about construction and what it means to me and what I gained from it or what I lost. it always meets with a kind of boredom.

LO: You've said that you weren't very good at carpentry.

MF: No, I certainly wasn't, from the beginning to the end. In fact, to this moment, I can't fix anything.

LO: Talking about carpentry and the importance of structure in your work reminds me of how, as a kid, you spent summers in Southern California and saw movies being made. That gave you another structural reference point.

MF: It was very important. We basically lived at the movie theaters in Venice and Santa Monica as well as in Douglas. You'd see studios working on movies, with people like Fairbanks or Chaplin or Keaton. They were very acrobatic movies. Keaton was always leaping around and doing tricks with structure. Sherlock Jr. is filled with these intricate moves. He starts as a projectionist at a theater and works ills way into the movie, and in the movie he moves around in these leaps.

LO: When you moved to New York in the early '40s, you became part of the painting crowd and got to know Pollock and Motherwell, among others.

MF: That was the beginning of Abstract Expressionism. I befriended a lot of people through my jobs as a movie critic and an art critic. I picked up the congenial element of befriending important people from my father, way back. I picked up the importance of being number one from my brothers, from my competition with them. It's an interesting connection, because it goes right through my life in terms of the people I associate with. I don't associate with third-stringers or scrubs. I associate with people who will get me something and who are leading, like Pollock or Mary McCarthy or Saul Bellow. I don't befriend second-raters or third-raters.

LO: That sounds very strategic and ambitious.

MF: Yeah, it's all of that. It gets me points and loses me points all along the route.

LO: How does it lose you points?

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