After years of abstract work, Manny Farber’s figurative painting begins in 1974 with the American Candy Series—fast, intricate, small-scale parlor games that entertain an ambiguous relation with their genre, still life.1 Currently, he is painting large flower arrangements which once again present themselves as both celebrations and subversions of still life.
The moves made in the interim did not seem at first to portend such a return. After the American Candy Series, Farber systematically explored the possibilities opened to painting by a referencing to film. He was uniquely qualified to do so, having had a dual career as painter and film critic since the 1940s. This exploration took him from American B-movie staples (Hawks, Sturges, Mann, Wellman) to European contemporary avant-garde (Straub/Huillet, Fassbinder, Rivette). The paintings of this period (1976-78) always stress the presence of Farber himself at the »center« of the painting. This primary effect of the Auteur Series was generally overlooked by critics and reviewers, who took these paintings as simple, »objective« depictions of the films to which they explicitly referred, often neglecting the nature of Farber’s recastings and his increasingly autobiographical subtext.
The paintings that follow, from Birthplace: Douglas, Ariz. (1979) to »Keep blaming everyone« (1984), make explicit this autobiographical drive. They also make clear what Farber as a painter has derived from film beyond a set of coded references: an esthetic that insists on the transformative dynamic of the image. At stake in these paintings is the mapping of his mental processes; their originality stems from his anti-dialectical approach, the pluralist strategies that tend to produce contradictions within each picture without offering any resolution. In their refusal to coalesce into single images, their reliance on a cumulative »and …and…and« advance, these paintings operate as boards that can be entered or exited at any point, where each object functions as a switching device, where ideas of closure and origin seem irrelevant.
The work derives an edginess from Farber’s self-conscious battle between a rhetorical longing for jazzing improvisations and a constantly reaffirmed need for tight compositional planning, a yearning for hand speed and a reliance on a patient, exhaustive rendering of each object. Between these polarities, the paintings assume their modernity as stubbornly self-involved, celibate desiring machines. For a decade, the Farber machine has been constantly humming, nuts and bolts exposed, producing its own codes at ever-increasing speed. This essay attempts to define its periodicity, its lack of fit, its reliance on incongruity and the humor behind it. It does so through 13 paintings, always trying to articulate the Farber mind as a by-product of the machine.
The American Candy Series:
Cracker Jack Perversity
To revamp a list of tactics the painter offered in an interview with Richard Thompson (Film Comment, May-June 1977): The American Candy Series was an occasion for Farber to work his stance on color (organic, mixed); composition (off-centered, favoring deployments, paths, segmented lines); space (shallow, lateral, dispersed); texture (unevenly worked, accumulative, sedimentary); subject matter (two-bit, nostalgic, all-American). These ingredients add up to pictures that, though seemingly innocuous in the sweet mundanity of their props, reveal themselves as off-kilter machines full of stop and go, as still lifes that resist stillness.
Cracker Jack (1973-74) is a good example. The picture’s aerial, tabletop perspective creates a flat space across which candy-counter props advance in broken lines. The painting gains speed and change-up pacing from this segmentation, with each distinct object pushing the one that precedes it and pushed by the one that follows. Striking off at a near 90 degrees from each other, two lines—one composed of a Cracker Jack box and an Abba-Zaba bar laid end to end, the other of lollipops—angle in from the picture’s edges and skew its framing. Both lines conspicuously avoid the center of the picture and with it any easy, hierarchical reading. Objects on the lines offer detours, suggest turns that send the viewer off the path and across the unpopulated center only to be deflected back. Farber seems intent on playing this bumper game from every corner of the table, to better reveal the empty expanse at the center of the picture. There the game played is textural: a multi-directional layering of washes, with the parcel-paper brown of the inner square covered unevenly with a gray cut in places with green, blue, pink.
This insistence on patina, with its slight color modulations, harks back to the Color-Field and process maneuvers that Farber made his trademark in his earlier abstract paintings (see A.i.A., Mar. ’78). But his passage to figuration, the need to give each object its due, engages Farber in a different paint and color handling against this ground. He works the dense cadmium yellow of his Abba-Zaba wrapper or the blood-orange of a lollipop opaquely, building detail with short, labored strokes. The intense compositional circulation that characterizes the painting gets broken by moments of absorption in the exhaustive rendering of the objects, moments that contradict the motion that led to them.
What characterizes the American candy Series is the pragmatic perversity with which Farber pursues all the possibilities for compositional unease, staccato pacing, disquiet. But amid the multiplication of composition, color and texture relations, what remain undisturbed are the similarity of the objects within the broken lines that animate the paintings and the fact that Farber abides by the »a candy is a candy is a candy« neutrality of still-life painting. With the Auteur Series, this assertion gets side-swiped by the reference to film and filmmakers.
The Auteur Series:
One Reference Too Manny
Farber found in tagging a painting to a film a way to indulge the love of connoisseurship that had marked his work as a critic. To follow the line of associations called up by the line of objects along the bottom of the painting The Lady Eve (1976-77) is to be led hopping down the story line of Preston Sturges’s 1940s comedy, The Lady Eve. It goes something like this: The ocean liner on the Holiday tobacco box alludes to the offshore boy-meets-girl of Hoppsey Pike (Henry Fonda, as the ophiologist and heir to »The Ale that Won It for Yale« fortune) and Barbara Stanwyck (a cruise cardsharp). The film—though not the painting—proceeds with an intrigue as sticky to unravel as a Tootsie Roll wrapper: him falling for her, her falling for him, him shying away when he discovers her real line of work, her seeking revenge and landing him with the help of an assumed aristocratic identity. Farber’s toy-train engines jump to the location of one of the film’s last scenes, where Stanwyck destroys Fonda (as they speed through tunnel after tunnel toward their honeymoon) with the revelation of an invented, tumultuous sexual past. And to Sturges’s outlandish maiming of Freud, Farber adds his own variation: a broken candy bar closes the painting’s line of objects and stands (if one dare say so) for the emasculation of Hoppsey Pike.
To go this far is to go where Farber pointed. He has packed the painting with referential twists and turns for the cognoscenti. But the screwy, coded connoisseurship always proceeds in tandem with the formal maneuvering in the painting. The half-circle of props Farber assembled as his own shorthand of the film is whimsically counterbalanced by a lone notepad listing the ingredients Sturges compiled as the diet of Hoppsey’s pampered snake and used throughout the film as a leitmotif—»feeding four flies, a glass of milk, and a piece of white bread to a snake.« This handwritten note frames what Farber considers a staple of Sturges’s fast-paced verbal humor: the relentless milking of an absurdist one-liner. And by holding his own string of objects up to Sturges’s list, the painter parallels his working methods with the director’s: the constant recasting of the same material, wringing as much as possible out of every move, every situation, every object. In short, the cockeyed logic of this painting nails down a kinship with Preston Sturges.
But any one-to-one correspondence, the fixity of any code, is anathema to Farber. So by the time of A Dandy’s Gesture (1977), he is busy freeing up the reading of his props, casting them in more independent roles. The stepping-stone advance of candies on an abstract field has been replaced by scale models whose encounters are staged on the more literal ground of newspaper layout pages. And the stuff of news is all over the picture, ironically cut down to size with toys. A model airplane from Only Angels Have Wings loses its wing on a mountain peak made of a half-eaten candy, and its outline is tentatively sketched in two places on page one of The Front Page. A toy tiger and an elephant from Hatari face off across a train tack, just down the line from a lone boxcar. The objects still provide a crash course in Hawks’s genre-bound career—Farber never lets go of one feature when adding another—but now the toys begin to animate the space of the painting, establish their own fictional terrain and scale-shifting game.
With the new disparity of scales and objects Farber can better impose a system of reading that mixes different densities of information and constantly shifts gears and speeds across the painting. A length of train track shunts the composition to the left and provides fast visual transportation down the painting. The viewer lands on the page of a spiral-bound grade book full of handwritten film notes that demand a slower, horizontal reading. A nearby candy bar’s »LOOK« label seems to cheerlead this diligent line-by-line deciphering, but, in typical Farber fashion, its bright wrapper also distracts from any close reading, sending the viewer in search of some other bright object in the field and away from the notes. Farber’s notes focus on the elegant, tight-corner maneuvering that animates Hawks’s Hollywood vehicles. He sees it as the pragmatic dandyism of a back-lot director with a job to do, a deadline to meet, and his own soul and artistic signature to save in the process. By delivering this message on a college grade book, Farber puts his own jobs as teacher and critic more immediately in the painting, as if to equate Hawks’s predicament with his own.
A Dandy’s Gesture is awash with Farber’s own painterly dandyism: his compositional sleight-of-hand, his will to display style within self-imposed constraints (a small space, five-and-dime items), his insidious need to drag himself into the painting by the most detoured route. But A Dandy’s Gesture also points at the problem raised by working the references from the inside, by giving free rein to connoisseurship. If the Auteur Series avoids the »a candy is a candy is a candy< reading, it traps Farber into the conundrums of »a dandy is a dandy is a dandy.«
Nowhere more than in The Films of R.W. Fassbinder (1977) is the contradiction that animates the Auteur Series in evidence: The painter’s empathy with his subjects ultimately creates an ornery relationship with the viewer, which expresses itself through the manic acceleration of the referencing process. In this painting every object in the field can be tied to a Fassbinder film: a phone off the hook on a dollhouse brass bed is from The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant; a magazine masthead names Fassbinder regular Hanna Schygulla and alludes with its screaming headline, »Factory Worker Goes Crazy Kills Boss«, to Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven; an altered label on a beer bottle names »Ali,« a character from Fear Eats the Soul; and on and on. Farber’s accumulative drive is in such high gear that the viewer always knows a game is being played, even if he senses he is not eligible to participate. Reference pop up as pure incongruities: a lone fox ambles across the painting (Fox and His Friends); a toy convertible is parked on a snapshot (The American Soldier).
The painter’s will to nettle the viewer is all over the picture. He offers material to be read but places it upside down and half erases it to boot. Like a snapshot amateur, he bumps the head of his doll figure against the top of the painting. As in A Dandy’s Gesture, the reflection on Fassbinder turns into an unabashed display of the painter’s idiosyncrasies: the repetitive patterning (the floorboard striping of the ground reappears on a table top and as the lines of a loose-leaf page); the empty-center composition that pushes objects to and past the edge; the internal reframings achieved with the shifting rectangles of snapshot, note page, bed, magazine, loose-leaf notebook; the jagged cutting-up of the remaining ground by those same rectangles; the contradictory perspectives, the oblique, high-angle look on the objects against the flat, frontal vantage on the blue-grAy inner rectangle; the Farberization of Fassbinder color, dulling down its plastic shine, dropping its reds and lubes with a gray. The picture gains an unsettled energy that makes it not so much a »bad« painting— just »wrong« in the same way Godard’s handling of a conversation will focus the camera on the listener instead of the speaker, or will wander away from them altogether.
The acceleration of the referencing in The Films of R.W. Fassbinder is characteristic of the way Farber works. He always pushes the logic of his moves to the nth degree, and one senses in the humorous gridlock of references in this painting an impatience with the system he has set up for himself in the Auteur Series. But the machine he has built cannot back up or slow down. His dependence on film can only be broken by one more film reference, which will transform the insider’s homage into cross-examination.
Thinking About »History Lessons«
In Thinking About »History Lessons« (1979), Farber uses as a point of departure a Jean –Marie Straub/Daniele Huillet adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s only novel, The Affairs of Mister Julius Caesar. In the book, Brecht charts Caesar’s rise to power through his canceled checks and his laundry bills. In History Lessons, the Straub/Huillet team one-ups Brecht’s didactic wackiness by collapsing the centuries and engineering a historical travelogue: a long car sequence in the streets of contemporary Rome punctuated by imaginary encounters between a modern-day character and key figures in Caesar’s career (a banker, a legionnaire, etc.). The Brecht/Straub/Huillet attempt to multiply the points of entry into historical material, to get to the big event by the side door, to investigate the clichés of biography and subvert them was bound to seduce Farber. He was not too far from this approach himself when he telescoped a filmmaker’s entire career into a single painting and triangulated it with dime-store items to define Hawks’s relationship to the studio work ethic of the 1940s or Fassbinder’s to moral decay and pulp culture in modern Germany.
In one of his last film articles (»Kitchen Without Kitsch,« Film Comment, December 1977), Farber commended Straub/Huillet as »major spade-and shovel workers in framing that places the material close to the surface« and »creates both a feeling of cement blocks and extraordinary poetry at the same time.« Visually, the same no-shortcut attitude dominates Thinking About »History Lessons.« Progress across the painting is step-by-step, literally bumper-to-bumper over a patchwork of stipplings, stripings and washes. As a visual dissonance, as a critical counterpoint, Farber introduces a large Japanese pornographic image. The Japanese shunga, an image which drives its erotic force from offering in the same frame a long shot of the lovers’ entanglement and a close-up of their erotic juncture, throws light on the puritanical impulse behind Straub/Huillet’s formal visual tactics and starched Marxist choices of subject matter. What the Minimalist visual esthetic of Straub/Huillet denies is precisely what Farber sees as the power of the film image—its transformative nature. He sees it as movement, as never resting on itself, always leaking at the edge, always creating the need for another shot, another image, always existing as a switching device to route and reroute attention. What underlies Farber’s work is his attempt to revitalize painting by importing this dynamic of the film image. Thus the refusal of his pictures to coalesce into single images; their contentious relationship with any centrality; their multiplication of compositional strategies and viewpoints; their multivalent appropriations; their dependence on paths, routes, networks, and the painter’s insistence on a nomadic reading of his boards. Finally, the debate with Straub/Huillet is philosophical: Farber is not a dialectician but a pluralist.
With Thinking About »History Lessons« Farber breaks out of both the Auteur Series’s small format and the confines of the film or career under examination. He is no longer content to stay behind the scene—be it a scene from Hawks, Sturges, Fassbinder or Straub/Huillet. The painting is all about the painter’s method and the contradictions he sees between single image making and the critical layering of information. From the parlor games of the American Candy Series and the mask games of the Auteur Series to Thinking About »History Lessons« Farber has increasingly personalized the debate and set a course bound to bring him closer to the surface of his own painting.