Volume 52, Number 7 · April 28, 2005
A World of His Own
By Sanford Schwartz
Manny Farber: About Face
Catalog of the 2004 exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, 164 pp., $29.95
Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies
by Manny Farber
DaCapo, 412 pp., $15.95 (paper)
It is one of the many contradictions that swirl around Manny Farber that for those who have read him over the years, or seen his paintings, or heard him talk, he is a mesmerizingly one-of- a-kind, even heroic figure, yet his work is in part an assault on the idea of the isolated, charismatic hero. In a career as a movie critic that lasted over three decades, he refreshingly, humorously, weirdly, and perceptively cut against nearly all our usual expectations of movies, asking us not to take seriously directors with highly personal styles, not to connect deeply with the allure of movie stars, above all not to think of movies as 'art.' And in his painting, which for long was abstract and which has been representational since the 1970s, he devised a kind of picture, equally a still life and a view down onto a flat plane, whose very point is that we see a world of little entities, whether toy-size people or candy wrappers, carrots or postcards, which trail off in every direction, creating a terrain of sheer randomness.
Review, 4083 words
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