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. They got much larger when we moved here. I don't know why I hate the word abstract for those pictures. I never understood why they were called abstract. To build a house, you have to do rite structure and you have to produce elements that provide the structure. In the end, you have a house.

LO: Are you saving that there's nothing abstract about paintings that are created by processes as concrete as those involved in building a house?

MF: Yes.

LO: After a few years here, you made a big shift in your work, from the large so-called abstract paintings to the series depicting stationery and candy.

MF: When we first got here, I continued to make those abstract layouts, and they kept getting bigger, which was understandable, because we had so much more space to make them in here, our studio space. To break away from repeating ourselves, we figured out a way of bringing them off the wall and of changing the shapes so they had more variety. That made the dealer in New York [Ivan Karp] crazy, because he couldn't sell these things if they were made like sailboats. But it became a bore. When I shifted into representational painting, I could use all the sources of drawing and design. It was just an open field for me. I'd made 200 of those goddamned big things. They were done in a certain period; there was sort of an au courant factor. Everyone else was involved in allover painting and Color Field painting. The reason I moved off of it was partly because I was just repeating myself. To make pygmy work was a relief.

LO: It seems like an audacious shift. Were there others around you working in a similar way, with personal subjects, on a small scale? There was a lot of Conceptual and Minimalist work going on at the time, and here you were painting--

MF: Toy trains.

LO: Toy trains, stationery items and candy.

MF: I don't know why. Again, I was in a field where other people had already staked their claims. There's the obvious one, Wayne Thiebaud, and there were a lot of figures in New York doing representational work. Oldenburg was making those huge sculptures related to objects. So I was again following the leaders.

LO: The things you chose to paint are all pretty common things.

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