The Farber Machine

Patrick Amos and Jean-Pierre Gorin

After years of abstract work, Manny Farber’s decade of figurative painting begins in 1974 with the American Candy Series – fast, intricate, small-scale parlour games that entertain an ambiguous relation with their genre, still life. Then he undertook 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 (1976-8) distinguish themselves by their reliance on a syncretic discourse, always stressing the presence of Farber himself at the ‘centre’ of the painting. This primary effect of the Auteur Series was generally ignored by critics and reviewers, who took these paintings as simple, ‘objective’ depictions of the films to which they explicitly referred – they refused to see the nature of the recastings Farber was attempting and the increasingly autobiographical subtext he was providing in his analysis of Fassbinder, Hawks, Sturges or Straub-Huillet.

The paintings that follow, from Birthplace: Douglas, Ariz. (1979) to ‘Keep Blaming Everyone’ (1984), make explicit this autobiographical drive. And they also make clear what Farber as a painter derived from film beyond a set of coded references: an aesthetic that insists on the transformative nature of the image. The interest and strength of Farber’s figurative work lies to get a great extent in his successful importation of the dynamic of the film image and the specific problematic it opens for him. At stake in these paintings is the mapping of his mental processes; and the works’ originality holds to his anti-dialectical approach, the pluralist strategies that tend to produce contradictions within the picture, and within each of its gestures, without offering any resolution. In their refusal to coalesce into a single image, their reliance on a cumulative ‘and ... and ... and’ advance, these paintings operate as rhizomatic arrangements, boards that can be entered or exited at any point, where each object in the field functions as a switching device, where ideas of closure and origin seem irrelevant.

The work derives its edginess from Farber’s embattlement, his compulsive need to bring each move to a standstill by producing immediately next to it a critical counter-movement. The debate is always conduced with an excruciatingly acute self-consciousness. It rages between Farber’s rhetorical longing for jazzing improvisations and his constantly reaffirmed need for tight compositional planning; a yearning for hand speed and his reliance on a patient, exhaustive rendering of each object in the field in order not to short-change it. Between these polarities, the paintings assume their modernity as stubbornly self-involved, celibate desiring machines. In that respect, the zigzag Farber engineered in his return to still life – his ability to produce one more contradiction, to display the very stylistic concerns he so adamantly pretended himself incapable of – becomes comprehensible, and the coherence of Farber’s figurative work is confirmed. For a decade, the Farber Machine has been constantly humming, nuts and bolts exposed, producing and breaking its own codes at ever-increasing speed. This essay attempts to define its periodicity, its lack of fit, its reliance on incongruity and the humour behind it. It does so through thirteen paintings, always trying to articulate the Farber mind as a by-product of the Machine.

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1. See Manny Farber, Negative Space (New York: Da Capo, 1998), p. 354.

The American Candy Series: Cracker Jack Perversity

To revamp a list of tactics the painter offered in an interview with Richard Thompson: the American Candy Series was an occasion for Farber to work his stance on colour (organic, mixed); composition (off-centred, favouring deployments, paths, segmented lines); space (shallow, lateral, dispersed); texture (unevenly worked, accumulative, sedimentary; subject matter (two-bit, nostalgic, all-American). (1) These ingredients add up to pictures that, although seemingly innocuous in the sweet mundanity of their props, reveal themselves as off-kilter machines full of stop-and-go, as still lives that resist stillness.

Cracker Jack (1973-74), for example. Its aerial, tabletop perspective creates a flat space across which candy-counter props advance across the picture in broken lines. The painting picks up speed and change-up pacing from this segmentation. Striking off at a near-ninety 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 conspicuously avoid the centre 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 centre only to be deflected back. Farber seems intent on playing this bumper game from every angle possible, from every corner of the table, to better reveal the empty expanse at the centre of the picture. The game played here is textural: a multi-directional layering of washes, with the parcel-paper brown of the inner square covered unevenly with a grey cut in places with green, blue, pink. The flat application with wide, dry brush gives a second-coat-in-need-of-a-third feeling to the ground – a chalky surface through which under-layers of colour appear. This insistence on patina, with its slight colour modulations, harks back to the colour field and process manoeuvres Farber made his trademark in his earlier abstract paintings.

But his passage to figuration, the need to give each object its due, engages Farber in a different paint and colour handling against this ground. He works the dense cadmium yellow of his Abba-Zaba wrapper, the blood-orange of a lollipop, or the bubble-gum-pink of a candy cigar opaquely, building detail with short, laboured strokes. There is an almost puritanical pursuit in his rendering of the caramel corn pattern on the Cracker Jack box label, an obsessive attention paid to the swirls of a lollipop, a manic devotion to his coarse approximation of the highlights of a cellophane wrapper. The intense compositional circulation that characterises the painting gets broken by moments of absorption in the exhaustive rendering of the objects, moments that contradict the motion that led to them. Ultimately, Cracker Jack and all the paintings of the American Candy Series are cranked up to deliver irregular speeds, unbalanced attentions.

What this list hints at is Farber’s fascination with processes – a spillover from his abstract period. What characterises the American Candy Series is the pragmatic perversity with which he pursues all the possibilities for compositional unease, staccato pacing, disquiet. But amid the multiplication of composition, colour 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 neutrality of still-life painting. With the Auteur Series which follows, the ‘candy is a candy is a candy’ assertion is going to be sideswiped 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 at the bottom of the painting The Lady Eve (1976-77) the way the eye follows the objects that initiate it is to be led hopping down the story line of Preston Sturges’ 1941 comedy of the same name. It goes something like this: the ocean liner on the Holiday tobacco box alludes to the offshore boy-meets-girl of Hopper 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’ 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. Once geared up, the Farber Machine multiplies the entrances and exits into every object in the field, and, for the cognoscenti, he has packed the painting with as many referential twists and turns as there are visual paths in this two-by-two-foot arena. But the screwy, coded connoisseurship always proceeds in tandem with the formal manoeuvring in the painting. Across the empty expanse of the centre, Farber plays two collections off each other: the half-circle of props he assembled and, on a note pad, the list of ingredients compiled by Sturges himself as the diet of Hoppsey’s pampered snake, used throughout the film as a leitmotif – ‘feeding four flies, a glass of milk, and a piece of white bread to a snake’. On the handwritten note, Farber frames what he considers a staple of Sturges’ fast-paced verbal humor: the relentless milking of an absurdist one-liner. By holding his own line of objects up to Sturges’ list, whimsically counterbalancing his half-dozen objects with the single page listing some half-dozen items, the painter parallels working methods: 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, and the chuckle that seizes the viewer in front of its incongruity is the measure of Farber’s success.

In the Auteur Series, the painter charges his objects with a second, referential function. But the ocean liner in Farber’s The Lady Eve remains trapped in the specific knowledge of Sturges’ The Lady Eve, as it is trapped on the tobacco can label. And any one-to-one correspondence, the fixity of any code, is anathema to Farber. By the time of A Dandy’s Gesture (1977), he is busy trying to free up the reading of his props. The stepping-stone advance of candies on an abstract field has been replaced by models whose encounters are staged on a more literal ground. Hard lines mark out the perimeter of newspaper layout pages, and wide vertical sweeps of blue-gray wash divide them into columns. The stuff of news in the making is all over the picture, ironically scaled down by the use of toys. A model airplane 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. A toy tiger and an elephant face off across a train track, and a runaway train car threatens to intervene. As usual, Farber never lets go of one feature when adding another to his Machine. The objects in the painting still provide a crash course in Howard Hawks’ genre-bound career – the tiger is from Hatari! (1962), the place from Only Angels Have Wings (1939), the newspaper layout from His Girl Friday (1940) – but now animate the space of the painting and establish their own autonomous fictional terrain.

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 of 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. Farber accelerates this vertical slide by running a thin layer of paint down the tracks to blur the cross-ties he has painstakingly etched one at a time. The viewer lands on the page of a spiral-bound gradebook full of handwritten film notes that demand a slower, horizontal reading. As if further prodding was needed to encourage close scrutiny hereabout, the painter brands the word ‘LOOK’ in bold letters on a nearby candy bar. But he makes sure the bright red of the candy wrapper also bids the viewer to move on quickly and in another direction altogether – up and across to a toy boat, the only other bright spot in the field, which distracts from any close reading, sending the viewer in search of some other bright object in the field and away from the notes.

The handwritten notes concentrate on how Hawks goes about getting his job done. One line insists on Hawks’ pragmatism; another sums up the reduced means with which the director builds his effects (‘ ... movie is orchestrated with gestures, postures, head moves, clothes, patterns ... ’); a third reveals how Cary Grant pulls off his role in Only Angels Have Wings by injecting it with test pilot gangliness. Farber’s attention focus on the elegant, tight corner manoeuvring which animates Hawks’ 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 gradebook, Farber puts his own jobs as teacher and critic more immediately in the painting, as if to equate Hawks’ 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. In the Auteur Series, he catalogues the figures of his Pantheon but, even more, places himself among them. When Farber sets out to reflect on a director, he always lands on himself, and sometimes far away from the point of departure. More than appropriation – to use a term in fashion – he deals in perverse, self-absorbed recasting, in hijackings.

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 wrought by ‘a dandy is a dandy is a dandy’. Example: The Films of R.W. Fassbinder (1977). What attracts Farber to Fassbinder is the director’s grafting of hard-edged, tawdry social themes (lower-middle class taste, boredom, desultory sex, domestic violence) onto painterly concerns (attention to patterned textures, repetitive use of frame-within-a-frame devices, composition in shallow space). The Fra Angelico-of-the-gutter elegance of the Munich Wunderkind speaks to Farber; the bleak vision, the compositional concerns, the treatment of space, and the high-low mix of art history and pulp material are as much his as they are Fassbinder’s. Nowhere more than in The Films of R.W. Fassbinder 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. The tour is exhaustive: a vegetable cart is lifted from The Merchant of Four Seasons (1972); a phone off the hook on a dollhouse brass bed is from The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972); a sketch of a hanged man suggests What Makes Herr R. Run Amok? (1970); a toy soldier, The American Soldier (1970). A magazine masthead names Fassbinder regular Hanna Schygulla and alludes with its screaming headline, ‘Factory Worker Goes Crazy Kills Boss’, to yet another film, Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven (1975), and on and on and on. Farber’s accumulative drive is in such high gear that viewer always knows a game is being played, even if he senses he is not eligible to participate. The altered label on a beer bottle signals something is up whether one knows the word ‘Ali’ names a character from Fear Eats the Soul (1974) or ‘Irm’ is actor Irm Hermann, the lead of The Merchant of Four Seasons. The Machine is imploding, and the references pop up as pure incongruities: a lone fox ambles across the painting (Fox and His Friends, 1975); a toy convertible is parked on a snapshot (The American Soldier again). It is as if Farber is bent on forcing the viewer to interrupt with the question, ‘Where is that fox coming from?’ in the same way Godard irritates or humours a scene and frustrates the audience’s need for continuity by having a secondary character ponder aloud, for no good reason, ‘Where is that music coming from?’ in Sauve qui peut (1980).

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 frame. He labours at keeping things coarse, overworked, off-balance. As in A Dandy’s Gesture, the reflection on Fassbinder turns into an unabashed display of the painter’s idiosyncrasies: the repetitive patterning (the striping of the ground reappears in the lines of a loose-leaf page and along the table top); the empty-centre 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-grey inner rectangle; the Farberisation of Fassbinder colour, dulling down its plastic shine, dropping its reds and blues with a grey. The picture gains an unsettled energy that makes it not so much a ‘bad’ painting – ’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. But the Machine he has built cannot back up or slow down. The 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-Danièle Huillet adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s only novel, The Business Affairs of Mr Julius Caesar. In the book, Brecht charts Caesar’s rise to power through his cancelled checks and 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’ relationship to the studio work ethic of the ‘40s or Fassbinder’s to moral decay and pulp culture in modern Germany.

Thinking About 'History Lessons' (1979)

2. Ibid., pp. 340-341.

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The debate with Straub-Huillet is philosophical: Farber is not a dialectician but a pluralist. He produces contradictions and allows them to stand without leading to revision or resolution. Farber’s method is never one of ‘either/or’; he favours ‘and ... and ... and’. And, because he 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 a flower illustration on a seed packet 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 the questions of what links and separates them – of the in-between. In this, Farber occupies the same territory as the eighteenth century English painter George Stubbs, whose arrangements of horses across the canvas resisted the symbolic, the metaphoric, and asserted, in the clarity, fixity, and separateness of each object, that what was represented remained itself. By refusing, like Stubbs, to assign the image a purely emblematic function, Farber adds another ‘and’ to his stammering Machine.

In the Auteur Series, the containment of the small format paralleled the containment of Farber’s moves within the film or career under his examination. The larger format of Thinking About ‘History Lessons’ confirms that Farber has recast his relation to film. He is no longer working solely within the film, or 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 parlour games of the American Candy Series and the mask games of the Auteur Series to Thinking About ‘History Lessons’, Farber set a course bound to bring him closer to the surface of his own painting.

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

The autobiographical impulse in Farber becomes explicit with this painting, and in it he tackles his past. Birthplace: Douglas, Ariz., (1979) takes on a sunny joie de vivre, but at the same time is less decipherable to a viewer unschooled in the anecdotes of Farber’s early life. 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 to introduce Farber’s siblings. An oversized 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 her oldest brother to his campus life in Berkeley. The inbred references give this painting the charm of a conversation with a perfect stranger who insists on parading the details of his life, on displaying his wallet snapshots.

Birthplace: Douglas, Ariz. (1979) (detail)

Birthplace: Douglas, Ariz. is also a road picture – as in road movie. The painting, with its emphasis on geography, on travel along literal tracks, roads and paths, borrows from that film genre, as do other paintings of the same period. The terrain is a paramount: its expanse cuts the figures down to size, its endlessly worked textures swallow the incidents on it. In short, at the heart of these paintings and now central to Farber’s preoccupation is the relationship between history – with a small ‘h’ – and geography.

In this painting, Farber grounds the personal in the historical and sends the anecdotes of his early days sprawling across a terrain layered with larger references. The aerial field effect of the earlier road picture Thinking About ‘History Lessons’ remains, and Farber has reshuffled the props of his repertory theatre into a new play. The ground has been taken over by comic-strip pages, carpet samples, open books, book jackets, food labels, redrawn photographs, etc. He acts as an archeologist intent on constructing, through the materiality of objects, a social background to the chronicle of a life. The tracks which 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 which built the town; the toy gangsters nearby allude to the violent Copper Wars between miners and management. A Chamber-of-Commerce anecdote accounts for the slide of a lone Arizonian hopper across the painting: the site of the town was determined, once upon a time, by a train car full of ore rolling to a stop from the mining hills of Bisbee. The word ‘anti’ on an altered Aunt Jemima label takes the road of a pun to allude to the Black GI camps at the edge of Douglas in the ‘20s and to the racism of the town. And, and, and, and.

But more important than the specific decoding of all the painting’s information is its organisation 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 rigour, 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.

The painstaking setting of each object in relation to those around it, its function as switching device between tracks, gives to the painting an unstoppable associative energy. 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 rather the mechanistic articulations through which memory is elicited by the materiality of objects and their perverse meshing of gears. One cannot separate the toy house from the Japanese erotic print it is riveted to. Locked together they yield Farber’s relation to the sequestered sexuality of the town and times. Nor can the cop be wrenched from the Shaker drawing of a basket of apples. The small figure in blue functions as a necessary part of the machine it forms with the drawing. The self-policing which kept the Shakers form hanging their own artwork is rerouted and amplified by the cop’s presence, and Farber engineers yet another mechanistic linkage to recall the repressive times of his youth. Thus, across the painting the obsessive attention to detailing, the time spent to get each object ‘right’ and, as in Proust, the ‘failure’ to do so which propels the painter toward one more association.

Birthplace: Douglas, Ariz. has the charm of a naïve painting, 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. 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 colour at odds with the laboured modelling of the objects. Now de-grounded, the objects threaten to escape this low-gravity field, and the painting screams for 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 Ellsworth Kelly pie – makes the painting oscillate in the surplus of its codes.

In the billiard-green centre 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, Farber plots the painting as precisely as ever. It sprints out from the closed circle of tracks that surround the note, escaping by a visual roller-coaster loop around a striped coffee can – one stripe providing the exit and another the entrance to a curved sidetrack. He accentuates the counterclockwise motion by striking a pair of tangents to the centre circle with two rulers, and pushes his props outward to the edge. The painting is left unaffected by that call for spontaneity, and the question, ‘What’s wrong with off the top of the head?’ remains a rhetorical one. The Machine embraces its opposite and identifies what Farber sees as his predicament as a painter: the overwhelming self-consciousness of his own moves. What haunts Farber’s paintings, from this point on, is an admission of his difficulty in displaying looseness, his difficult improvising. Farber knows all too well any improvisational move will call up comparisons to other moves – his own and others’ – and instigate a series of responses that will lock the original gesture into place. 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 (1970), 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 to such an extent 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 oatmeal boxes, two watermelon slices, two metal rules, two curves of track. What is the binary rhythm of this production?

'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. The scattering of objects across some eleven feet of colour stripes in ‘Have a Chew on Me’ (1983) and Nix (1983) is formally reminiscent of Muybridge’s practice, in his photographic studies of human motion, of placing grids behind his models: a somewhat perfunctory nod to ‘method’, ‘structure’, ‘science’ in front of which, day after day, a Victorian mind let his fancies loose. Beyond formal similarities, the mixture of work and sex in ‘Have a Chew on Me ‘ and Nix harks back to the contradictions of the Victorian mind. But Farber exposes his contradictions with a absolute disdain for any piety, any wish to end up on the right side or to show himself in a favourable light.

A then-and-now attitude permeates both these paintings. There is a return to the American films of the ‘30s and ‘40s, and 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 analysing these films so much as reevaluating his interest in them and his link to the American past of which they partake.

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 and pathos of the nobility of manual labour. 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 that denies the dramatic elevation of the single tool on the card. Across the painting, tools become unwieldy, menacing instruments, squashing coveralled figures, dragging them down by their sheer weight. A 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 ‘30s.

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 work-a-day approach to his boards. The paintings are ones of patience: of time spent sweating the details of a cartoon borrowed from Fontaine Fox so as not to shortchange the cartoonist; of divvying up the work, depicting one object thoroughly before going on to the next; of working the board with everything at hand (paint rollers, 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.

His recycler’s impulse to rearrange fragments in new and different patterns and configurations extends beyond the pure formalities of painting. Farber’s reshuffling of props, his make-do methods and his progress from one painting to the next suggest the mind of a bricoleur at work.

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3. Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (University of Chicago Press, 1966), p. 17.

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, past 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, 1931), he underscores the chauvinistic sexuality at work in Wellman’s 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 Wellman’s film while once again acknowledging it as a part of his own make-up. His treatment of the female figure always veers more toward the blunt sexuality of a Bellocq bordello photograph than the quaintness of the academically-funded voyeurism of Muybridge. And to spell out, in a puritanical choice of words, how much the critical look at Wellman becomes self-examination, a note in the green section of the canvas reads: ‘Fornication. Get personal’. And personal he gets.

The nervous elegance of Farber’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, building them on their material support as islands of spontaneous handwork. They recall previous tactics (quotations caught in mid-phrase which demonstrate Farber’s ear for film dialogue; film notes which here find their place among library cards, cancelled checks, as the flotsam of Farber’s life), 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 painted, should have been painted, might have been painted; how it should or might be read; how the next one should, might or could be done. This frenzy is such that the messages are sent in two directions at once: The ‘Go for tricks’ which ends the stutter-step of playing cards dealt along the bottom edge of the frame in ‘Have a Chew on Me’, and the instruction to ‘Start here’, might address equally the painter and the viewer. But the ‘Get it finished’ scribbled on a gradebook in the same painting is the self-targeted quip of a painter whose working method denies the possibility of closure, of resolution, of completion, who is forever adding one more twist, who seems reluctant to move on to another painting because he is always seeing the possibility of further connections in the one underway.

It may be in this respect that Farber’s periodic return to Preston Sturges makes the most sense. The affinity is with a director who is at every turn upping the ante; who, because of the escalating craziness of his storyline, finds himself in such a jam by the end of The Palm Beach Story (1942) that he has to invent – in the very last scene – not one but two sets of twins to secure a happy ending.

With the boards of Nix and ‘Have a Chew on Me’, Farber produces arrangements absolutely uncentred, rhizomatic in design, 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 objects, their discreteness, their specific weight. At this point the tactical positions of the American Candy Series (avoiding the centre, 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:

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4. Henri Michaux, Les Grandes Epreuves de l’esprit et les innombrables petites (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), pp. 156-7. English translation: The Major Ordeals of the Mind and the Countless Minor Ones (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974).

'Keep Blaming Everyone' (1984)(detail)

Meanwhile, the painter moves to another corner of his studio, takes off the hair shirt and produces work that has nothing to do with the self-flagellation of ‘Keep Blaming Everyone’. The cut-out pieces 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 a single architectural gesture: the right angle of the two books in Apple, Nadir St. (1984) or the linearity of a row of houses in Oh, Brother! (1984). 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 colour 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, stops, 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 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 lateral displacement 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. And what existed between Then and Now is cast in the present tense.

Domestic Movies (1985)

In Domestic Movies (1985), all the escapes seem now to be at the top of the painting. The diptych’s vertical panels affirm the upward bias of the plant shoots and flower blooms that extend both up the boards and toward the viewer. The aerial perspective gets skewed by the presence of tall objects Farber ‘should’ foreshorten, but does not; 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 life size, the blooms, the top-of-the-head brushwork, the absence of exterior references, all give the painting a relentless immediacy. It seems obsessed with hand speed and spontaneities, with sensual aggressiveness. Farber mixes painting styles, moving from Manet to Matisse in the space of eight feet, but remains Farber by fully modelling a dish of lemons to flatten all the more a sketchy pitcher and its stems. The eye gets lost in the punctual profusion of markings with which the painter sketches his flowers. The background itself, which reactivates the sectioning of ‘Have a Chew on Me’ and Nix, has been given a luminescent cadmium yellow and turquoise-favouring-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, blood orange 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 colour planes – yellow on orange on magenta on turquoise.

In one cycle the 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, perhaps, not possible to project what the Farber Machine will generate from there. But one thing remains certain: 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, what a strange and persistent suitor of painting Manny Farber has been, always trying to entice the medium to places it has never known.

This text, the revised version of a catalogue essay which accompanied an exhibition of Farber's art curated by Julia Brown at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (November 1985-February 1986), first appeared in Art in America (April 1986), and is reprinted here with the permission of Jean-Pierre Gorin.