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: Even in sixth grade, you were reading criticism. Did you also write any criticism when you were younger?

MF: The only writing I had done was for the high school annual. I was doing the sports part of the annual when I was a freshman in high school.

LO: That's a big leap, from the high school annual to the New Republic. Did you do any other writing in between?

MF: No, I didn't. My wife [Janet Terrace] was much more literate. No, I was much more literate than she was, actually, but she'd done more actual writing than I had. She had more training.

LO: Did she help you?

MF: She would read the stuff I wrote. She was writing, trying to be a writer. I would write the column each week, 600 words, and she would oversee it.

The people we ran with were veterans of criticism, or the kind of writing you read in the back of highbrow magazines. As soon as we hit New York after Washington, we immediately became involved with writers like Isaac Rosenfeld, David Bazelon, Saul Bellow, who were in a similar life situation to our own. They were trying to make their way into literature.

LO: You wrote about a lot of different mediums: jazz, art, movies.

MF: I even wrote about dishware, simply as a kind of inside joke. What we got at the Schaeffer school was a way of looking at anything as an example of good design or legitimate consideration.

LO: It seems a very heady time to have been in the center of both the art and literary worlds.

MF: Yeah. It was a rich period for doing any kind of highbrow criticism. "Highbrow" is the wrong word. I throw that word out. What I mean by highbrow is a kind of lively approach to writing, to seeing, to looking at the world around you.

LO: With your writing career fury established, and your paintings getting attention, too, you left New York in 1970 to come to UC San Diego. What brought you to California to teach full-time at that point?

MF: Ivan Karp wasn't going to show as--us being Patricia and myself--in his gallery, but he'd agreed to sponsor a studio exhibition, and that went over quite well. Well, I got drank during the opening, and I was feeling very convivial and happy with the people who were there and the work itself. This fellow who was visiting downtown wanted to trade his space in San Diego for an equally good painter's space or sculptor's space in New York, and did we know of anyone like that? I said, sure, we'll do it. It was perfectly understandable, because we were making very little money.

It was only supposed to be a semester, half a year. That was in our minds, and in the minds of the art department here. They didn't expect us to be here that long. I guess you could say I got intoxicated with teaching movies. It seems odd, but it's true. I hadn't had any formal education in movies when I was working on The New Republic and The Nation. What knowledge I had came from running to the Museum of Modern Art and seeing what movie they were showing that afternoon. Teaching about movies was a perfect way to educate not only the audience of students, but also myself. We were making these courses, Patricia and I. They were ways of making ourselves sophisticated in terms of movie history.