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

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?

MF: Well, it stiffens the work I do in painting and makes it seem more methodical than it should be, or could be. The extemporaneous element in the first Abstract Expressionists--they all had it, but I didn't. From the methodical beginning of my early schooling, I should have known better, there was no way that I could become an extemporaneous artist. It's a detriment, not having that extemporaneous element.

LO: Working in carpentry and construction often put you in physically dangerous positions. You've said that you didn't mind it. Do you feel there's enough risk-taking in your painting?

MF: I've never thought that there was enough risk-taking.

LO: The shift from those early abstractions to the figurative work that you've done since then seems radical, like a huge risk.

MF: The first thing that comes to mind is the marriage thing, Patricia. She's a very crucial figure in my making the jumps that you're asking about. We moved into this ratty space over an electric store downtown [in Manhattan]. It brought us into contact with a lot of movie-makers who were living in that area, too, like Michael Snow. That's a crucial moment, because I was doing these goddammned big versions of Feg Murray's sports cartooning still, and Patricia oriented me toward the spatial, the large spatial work, away from that figurative stuff. She liked the spatial work, and I liked it, and a lot of the people around us, the important people, also liked it.