Birthplace: Douglas, Ariz.:
Since He Was Knee-High

The autobiographical impulse in Farber becomes explicit with this painting. In Birthplace: Douglas, Ariz., he reshuffles the props of this repertory theater into a new play, one that tackles his past. Two game cards, each with an image of a boy in Sunday clothes and the word »brother« underneath, are dealt down the left-hand side of the painting to introduce Farber’s siblings. An oversize fire sale sign next to a toy house hints at the torching of the family dry-goods store by a doting mother anxious to cash in on the smoke-damaged goods to follow Farber’s oldest brother to his campus life in Berkeley. These obscure anecdotes of the painter’s early days are sent sprawling across a terrain layered with larger references, anchoring the personal in the historical.
The painting’s ground has been taken over by comic-strip pages, carpet samples, open books, book jackets, food labels, redrawn photographs, etc. Farber acts as an archeologist intent on constructing, through the examination of the objects, a social background to the chronicle of a life. The tracks that bracket the painting invite narrative wandering but also assert the importance of the railroads in the life of Douglas. In the right-hand corner, the word »copper« on the blue book jacket reminds the viewer of the mining that built the town; the toy gangsters nearby allude to the violent Copper Wars between miners and management.
More important than the specific decoding of all the painting’s information is its organization as sets of interlocking, intersecting paths, segments, interchanges. At this point, Farber has the sense he can include everything, can compose his picture to keep the viewer constantly underway and convinced of the value assigned to separate elements. Even when the references are obscure, the objects too numerous to count; much less decode, the viewer, thanks to Farber’s compositional rigor, never reads the accumulation as an unordered conglomeration, a pile. Farber’s world unfolds piece-by-piece—full of blocks, attractions, conjunctions and disjunctions, weavings and breaks—but never haphazardly.
Because Farber proceeds by addition, he always insists on the discreteness of each and every object in his painting. Everything is assigned a materiality of its own: an image is never freed from a material context, but remains an illustration on a package label or a picture in a book, creased by its binding. It is the specific weight Farber gives to his objects, their definition and claim to space, their near-equal standing which pushes to the fore what links and separates them—the in-between. Such painstaking setting of each object in relation to those around it gives to the painting an unstoppable associative drive. This deep-dish American finds himself sharing a Madeleine or two with Proust. It is not nostalgia per se at stake in Birthplace: Douglas, Ariz.—any more than in Remembrance of Things Past—but the mechanistic articulations through which memory is elicited by the materiality of objects and their perverse meshing of gears. Birthplace: Douglas, Ariz. has the charm of a naïve painting, of a conversation with a perfect stranger who insists on parading the details of his life, on displaying his wallet photos. But across the surface vibrates a mental energy that constantly transcends the anecdotes of Farber’s life and strains the ambulatory metaphor of »road« paintings like Thinking About »History Lessons.< The Farber machine is about to alter, once again, its own code of production.

Rohmer’s Knee: Tight and Loose

By the time of Rohmer’s Knee (1982), the machine has stepped up its disjunctive pace. Farber has abandoned the lush textured ground which, in both Thinking About »History LessonS« and Birthplace: Douglas, Ariz., accommodated the objects. In its place are hard-edged sections of solid, dense, nonporous color at odds with the labored modeling of the objects now threatening to escape this low-gravity field. This circular painting demands a fast first reading from across the room. The see-sawing between figuration and abstraction—the humorous ill-fit derived from serving Hieronymus Bosch figures on top of a slice of Ellesworth Kelly pie—makes the painting oscillate in the surplus of its codes.
In the billiard green center of the painting, Farber places a scribbled question: »What’s wrong with off the top of the head?« And around this verbal defense of spontaneity, in complete contradiction to it, he plots the painting as precisely as ever, engineering a spiral escape from the center via various tracks and rulers. What haunts Farber’s paintings from this point on is an admission of his difficulty displaying looseness, his difficult improvising. But he continues undaunted, doubling up the humor of defending spontaneity smack in the middle of a rigorously planned painting by referring it to Claire’s Knee, an Eric Rohmer film which follows the psychological chess-moves dreamed by a civil servant to satisfy a summer obsession to touch a young woman’s knee.
In Rohmer’s Knee, Farber’s obsessive planning tightens the bolts so much that he strips the threads. If the painting is full of paths, they are not read as such. What is seen instead are fast jumps across the abstract ground, unimpeded and encouraged by the rhythmic reappearance of the same object in different locations on the board. This metronome motion forces the viewer to humorously take stock of the most mundane objects, to seek pattern: two watermelon slices, two metal rules, two curves of track.

»Have a chew on me« and Nix:
Then and Now

By this point Farber is producing paintings that announce themselves first by the discrepancy of figure and ground: both »Have a chew on me« (1983) and Nix (1983) scatter objects across some 11 feet of vertical color bands. A then-and-now attitude permeates these paintings. There is a return to the American films of the ‘30s and ‘40s; the references are to William Wellman and, once again, Preston Sturges. But the take on the material differs from the Auteur Series. Farber is not analyzing these films so much as reevaluating his interest in them and his link to the American past they partake of.
Across »Have a chew on me« Farber gives the viewer images of tools (hammers, pliers, crowbars, awls, etc.) to tie his subject to the ‘30s ethos of the nobility of manual labor. Revamped as one of a series of game-card images at the bottom of the painting, a Walker Evans photograph of a single crowbar tags this ideology to one of its most prominent exponents. But the painting multiplies sarcastic imagery. Across the painting, tools become unwieldy, menacing instruments: an overalled figure pinned under an oversized pair of pliers acts as a paperweight for a note reading »Old Fashioned.« Farber, brooding over his own experience as a high-construction carpenter, is bent on revealing this other side of the »noble worker« myth—a myth he somehow bought as a young man when he joined the Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners in the late 1930s.
But the critical reevaluation of ‘30s ideology is not a way for Farber to pretend he has escaped it. He takes pains to show how much it still informs his own workaday approach to his boards. The paintings are ones of patience: of time spent sweating the details of a cartoon borrowed from Fontaine Fox; of depicting one object thoroughly before going on to the next; of working the board with everything at hand (paint roller, masking tape, knives, scrapers), shifting techniques but always toning down his own virtuosity, as if trying to retain the workman’s anonymity he sees as the elegance of the ‘30s.
Stocked with Sunday funnies, flickers of film scenes, sports column writing, the Farber mind constantly rearticulates its existential choices. It is not by chance that after Birthplace Douglas, Ariz. sex crops up more and more insistently on Farber’s boards. In »Have a chew on me« (titled after a line from Wellman’s Other Men’s Women), he underscores the chauvinistic sexuality at work in the Wellman film. A chaste adultery story—courtesy of the Hays Office—of two train engineers competing for one woman is turned inside out by Farber, and the object of their attention is cast as a naked woman submissively presenting her backside and trapped between a roast beef and a corncob. The arrangement states what the film leaves unsaid. What Wellman is serving up in the kitchen and dinner scene is not the roast, about which much is made in the film, but the lady of the house. Farber broadsides the sexism in the Wellman film while once again acknowledging it as a part of his own make-up. Spelling it out, a note reads »Fornication. Get personal.« And personal he gets.
The nervous elegance of the painter’s calligraphy is all over these boards. The words are scratched through the surface of the paint, with Farber varying the line, the visual speed and urgency of each note. They recall previous tactics (quotations caught in mid-phrase which demonstrate Farber’s ear for film dialogue), but they also assume other functions. Sharp reminders punctuate the boards. From Nix: »Stay Mad,« »Too Static,« »Start with freehand, bigger drawing«; and from »Have a chew on me«: »Put the figure upside down.« These missives allow Farber to describe, in a delirium of accumulation, how the painting was or should have been painted, how it should or might be read, how the next one might or could be done. The »Get it finished« scribbled on a grade book in »Have a chew on me« is the self-targeted quip of a painter whose working method denies the possibility of closure, of resolution, of completion.
With Nix and »Have a chew on me« Farber produces arrangements absolutely uncentered and seemingly able to extend laterally without end. The operation ultimately seems to trap representational painting into a frantic dispersal that evokes Pollock, all the while maintaining successfully the integrity of the objects. At this point the tactical positions of the American Candy Series (avoiding the center, skewing the framing edge, deploying paths) and of the Auteur Series (extending the references, suggesting narrative) have been overrun. What inscribes itself on the boards is a pure process of production, and Farber’s work seems to stand in the room like the schizophrenic table Henri Michaux once described in a discussion of art:

As soon as you saw it, it filled the mind. God knows what it went about—its own business, no doubt. What hit you was that it was not simple but not complex either, initially or intentionally complex, or the result of a complex design. More to the point, it had been de-simplified as it had been worked on. As it stood, it was a table of additions…and only finished in as much as there was no way to add anything to it…It could serve no purpose, nothing you could expect of a table … there was no way to handle it (either physically or mentally). Its surface, the useful part of the table, having been gradually reduced, was disappearing, with so little relation to the clumsy framework that it struck you not as a table, but as something »other,« a contraption for which there was no manual. A dehumanized table, nothing graceful about it, nothing bourgeois, nothing rustic, not a kitchen table, not a work table. It lent itself to no function, it defended itself, it refused to serve or communicate. There was something stunned and petrified about it. It suggested, maybe, a stalled engine.¹

There is nothing genteel about paintings like Nix and »Have a chew on me,« none of the self-assurance that comes with the fell-swoop appropriation of contemporary media imagery, none of the emotive pandering of Neo-Expressionism. Farber’s paintings stand celibate, whirring at a pace so fast once could confuse it with stillness, inviting decoding and then spinning off preemptively and perversely a thousand and one codes. It is a state of intense vibration, where the many moving parts of the Farber machine could at any moment be shaken loose.

»Keep blaming everyone«
vs. Apple, Nadir St.

After »Have a chew on me« and Nix, the machine goes to pieces. Farber cranks out boards that head off in opposite directions, each one making off with parts wrenched loose from the machine.
The circular board of »Keep blaming everyone« (1984), divided into three pie sections of red, black and white Constructivist color, is all file folders, clipboards, torn notebook pages that throw at the viewer a relentless barrage of messages. Never has the level of infuriation been so high, nor the self-deprecation been given such free rein: »Stupid,« »Why don’t you change your style…,« »Don’t be so heavy and serious, go easy on violence and meanness,« »Stop thinking,« »Pious is better,« »Piss. Fuck. Shit.« The painting is a self-targeted expletive which relegates to seven o’clock on the circle a couple of flash-card pictures—a rabbit and ass—stamped with the words »MANNY« and »FARBER.« Scared as a rabbit? Dumb as an ass?
At this same time the painter is producing work that has nothing to do with the self-flagellation of »Keep blaming everyone.« Cut-out pieces like Apple, Nadir St. and Oh, Brother! (both 1984) are enlargements of sequences taken from previous paintings, and, as such, are as close to single imagery as he has ever come. What was part of a larger network in Birthplace: Douglas, Ariz. is now isolated as a single architectural gesture: the right angle of the two books in Apple, Nadir St. or the linearity of a row of houses in Oh, Brother! The paintings establish a congruence between the image and the shaped framing edge, settle into a reading at a single distance, and thereby reach a formal contentment Farber had always avoided. The immediacy of the shapes and the flat, simplified, edge-to-edge roller application of the color give these arrangements a big-toy attractiveness. They are like the pieces of a small child’s puzzle, the painter’s blocks of childhood—an innocence on the other side of the acerbic, frantic notations of »Keep blaming everyone.«
The logic of the machine is that it builds itself up, hits a limit, falls apart, then begins the cycle all over again. The Farber machine built itself up from the American Candy Series, hits the limit with »Have a chew on me« and Nix, breaks down into its components in paintings like »Keep blaming everyone« and Oh, Brother! And it is ready to start all over again, to inscribe on new boards its processes of production.

Domestic Movies: The Present Tense

When the machine starts up again it is as if it has returned to square one—the American Candy Series—but with ten times the square footage. The candies have been traded for flowers, and the neutrality of still life reestablished. But in the reassembling of the machine, its register has been given a quarter turn. What was a lateral ordering is now vertical; what was separateness and fixed borders is now entanglement and snarl; what was linear alignment is flow; what was network is mesh. With Domestic Movies (1985), Farber adopts a different sort of compositional unease. Where the American Candy Series caught the viewer off-balance with the aerial vantage and cagey ricochet dispersal, this painting confronts the viewer with a pushy, forward-thrusting perspective. The aerial perspective gets skewed by the presence of tall plant shoots Farber »should« but does not foreshorten; the gladiola stalks, for example, reach a full third of the way up and across the painting, denying the perspective of the clay pot from which they spring. The contradiction casts the ground as both curtain and table, and the painting consciously tangles the »up« movement of the stalks with the »along« movement of the film-leader ribbons Farber curls through the painting. The objects are still discrete—the plants are potted—but they weave together and push toward the viewer.
The life size, the profusion of sensual blooms, the top-of-the-head brushwork, the preponderance of perishable goods, the absence of exterior references all give the painting a relentless immediacy. The day-to-day domesticity evoked by a bowl of porridge or fruit insists on a present tense rather than on the »then and now« of earlier coded recastings and reexaminations. Domestic Movies is an exuberant exercise in the act of painting, obsessed with hand speed and spontaneities, with sensual aggressivity. More than ever Farber mixes painting styles, moving from Manet to Matisse in the space of eight feet but remaining Farber by fully modeling a dish of lemons only to flatten all the more a sketchy pitcher and its stems. The background reinvigorates the sectioning of »Have a chew on me« and Nix with luminescent cadmium yellow and turquoise-favoring-green now worked with shadow and thickness. Of all Farber’s paintings, Domestic Movies has the most aggressive and disparate palette: bright lavenders, magentas, citric yellows and violets coexist with flat, unfired clay browns, manila, bottle greens. The minimal variation of an eggshell white on white opposes, across the board, a jarring overlap of color planes—yellow on orange on magenta on turquoise.
As the stammering machine works itself back up to speed once again, it remains self-centered, self-absorbed, consistent in its production of contradiction. What persists is Farber’s real lack of confidence in the isolated image, his refusal to simplify or settle his pictures or to bow out of them, his radical sincerity even at the moment of contradiction.
One cycle of machine took Farber from Cracker Jack to Nix in the span of nine years. Domestic Movies initiates a new cycle and begins it with far greater painterly complexities. It is as if Michaux’s table has been cleared to once again accommodate a new, more intricate place setting. To project what the Farber machine will generate from here may be difficult, but what remains certain is that it will add, not subtract, not revise, not back up. It will come out the other side of its own logic. It will constantly rearticulate its own desire. With candy and flowers, Manny Farber has been a strange and persistent suitor of painting, always trying to entice the medium to places it has never known.

 

 

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