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: It seems like an audacious shift. Were there others around you working in a similar way, with personal subjects, on a small scale? There was a lot of Conceptual and Minimalist work going on at the time, and here you were painting--

MF: Toy trains.

LO: Toy trains, stationery items and candy.

MF: I don't know why. Again, I was in a field where other people had already staked their claims. There's the obvious one, Wayne Thiebaud, and there were a lot of figures in New York doing representational work. Oldenburg was making those huge sculptures related to objects. So I was again following the leaders.

LO: The things you chose to paint are all pretty common things.

MF: But they were all close to what I was living, close to the way we were making a living. They were connected to the writing, the work in movie criticism. I think Patricia was the first one to suggest to me, why don't you paint things that have to do with your critical career? It was sort of unusual.

LO: Why don't you like having your work discussed in relation to Pop art?

MF: I resent the use of the word Pop in any kind of art. It's either good art or bad art. It doesn't seem to me a logical word. I can understand why Thiebaud paints bakery goods, but I don't see that he's doing anything different than Chardin, who was also doing things related to bakery goods. Where do you put the fence between high and low, or Pop and serious? Where does Chardin stop and Thiebaud start? Cezanne does some apples in front of a scarf--

LO: And nobody calls it Pop.

MF: No, they don't even consider it. It's an insult. It's debasing. I get irritated at the use of high/low. It just seems illegitimate to me.

LO: When you started painting objects in a representational way--

MF: I was coming in after a whole slew of people who were doing that type of work.

LO: But you were coming to it after doing work that didn't look to have as much personal content. Is that fair to say?

MF: I don't know. When I was doing those big latex things, I was just about as personally involved with them as I was with anything else I've painted. Neither Patricia nor I would have done them if we thought we weren't involved physically and emotionally in the work. It was very exciting and very personal.

LO: You said earlier that you felt your work didn't involve enough risk-taking. When I think about the kinds of things that you put into your representational paintings, especially the little notes, the written revelations, it seems pretty risky and revealing.

MF: Yeah, it does. It seemed like a legitimate thing to do, painting these pictures, to insert information that was going through my head. If you look back to what I was doing in school, in the first grade, I was always trying to upset the decorum of the class. It's not dissimilar.

I was one among a lot of painters or sculptors who were involved in diary work. I don't think I ever initiated or even came close to initiating a type of subject matter or type of design. I wish I could be more original. I guess that's the one reason that the large so-called abstract paintings caught on so well--they seemed original in process.