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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LO: Many of the notes express serf-doubt and vulnerability. How ironic is that?

MF: That's not ironic at all. They are painful. I don't know whether other people paint the way I paint, but my mind is always operative while I'm painting. I'm thinking of a million things, and I don't have any confidence at all in what I'm painting. I don't see how a person could. If you get the sense of fear in my work, you're right on the money, because I have absolutely no confidence that anything will work out.

LO: When I look at the most recent paintings, from the past ten years or so, they're so affirmative, so full of texture and color. They remind me of those large early abstractions. It feels like you've come full circle, in a way.

MF: Most definitely. It takes me about three days to do those little things that were at the gallery. [Quint Contemporary Art]. Someone at the show asked me how long it took to paint each one, and [Hugh Davies, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego] heard the question and said, "It took him 86 years!" It's a nice crack, I like the kind of vivacity that's in those pictures, and the speed of them. It opens up a whole area for me, if I can just continue.

The retrospective "Manny Farber: About Face" was organized by Stephanie. Hanor for the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, where it debuted [Sept. 14, 2003-Jan. 6, 2004]. Accompanied by a catalogue with essays by Hanor, Robert Walsh, Robert Polite, Sheldon Nodelman and Jonathan Crary, the show traveled to the Austin Museum of Art [June 5-Aug. 24] and appears at P.S. 1, New York [Sept. 27, 2004-Jan. 16, 2005]. A show of Farber's most recent small paintings was held at Quint Contemporary Art in La Jolla, Calif. [Oct. 19-Nov. 29, 2003].

Leah Ollman is a San Diego-based critic who writes for the Los Angeles Times.

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