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: That's absolutely true. We have that in common. And I want the viewer to relate to the paintings as biographical. Someone wrote me a note and asked me what I meant by writing "passive is the ticket" [in the 1984 painting of the same name]. Did I believe in passivity? It didn't occur to her that I was making a joke. A lot of those notes are ironic. I do a lot of joking in my choice of words in an article, and I do a lot of it in painting. I'm having fun, and I want to keep you there--in the painting. I want you to read them diaristically, and they do mean something to me as biography, or diary, but I want to keep you there a certain length of time. They're there as a time-step mostly. I like to amuse people, but I'm compositionally minded. I'm interested in the way the work looks in terms of composition and tonality. It means a lot to me to sit you down in a particular direction. It has a lot to do with my academic training, with both [Dow and Schaeffer].

LO: Tell me more about movement within the paintings, how you structure the work using stalks and stems and rebar so that our eye travels a path.

MF: That is extremely important. I get at them mostly from walking. You might read Pete that way, too. Usually in a painting or a photograph, you take in the whole thing at once, then you move on. In mine, you live with them more, and I want you to. The distances are important, and the time it takes for the eye to get from one end to the other is important. It takes a lot of time to paint those things, and I don't think you can read them unless you stay with them a long time. There's a kind of fury involved: I'm going to paint every carrot in this bunch, and I'm going to paint it well. The paths, that's a super-important element. I want to make that passage in time.

LO: When you first started, the most explicit use of those paths was with the train tracks.

MF: Yeah, and they do exactly what I wanted them to do. It always irritated me doing those big abstractions that I could never get inside the paintings, because they were color fields, they were process oriented. You do the process, you could never do the detailing. So the toy paintings gave me the pleasure of doing something I hadn't allowed myself to do, and I thought I was pretty good at it, mimicking things and detailing things.

LO: In your writing as well, your language dealt a lot with pursuit and following paths. Your language had the same sense of motion as the paintings.

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