‘"Manny Farber: About Face"’

"Manny Farber: About Face"

On a light background, perhaps a drawing board with various pieces of paper either pinned to it or lying on it, packages of candy rest: long green and white strips of School Boy Taffy, single packages and pieces of Bazooka bubble gum, Sun Maid Raisins, Cracker Jacks, Planters Peanut Bars, and that waxed-paper-wrapped marvel of childhood sweetness, Bit-O-Honey. Little pieces of what look like chocolate are also scattered about (or maybe those are some of the raisins), as well as a single piece of candy corn and a Donald Duck Pez dispenser, still in its plastic wrapping, resting against, of all things, a packaged bottle of ink.

While I know this is going to sound strange, rarely have I had a painting resonate so much in me, to the point that I went to the store and bought not one, but two Bit-O-Honeys, savoring every sweet, chewy morsel. It might have been purely Pavlovian, but I think it had as much to do with the artist and the artist's skill as with his choice of subject.

Manny Farber isn't an everyday name, but he's well known in both writing and artistic circles as a film and art critic and a painter, and a few dozen of his paintings, including School Boy Taffy, from 1976, and two of his sculptures are on view at the Austin Museum of Art – Downtown this summer. In Taffy, Farber has both lovingly represented and arranged his sweets, executing them almost photographically. Contrast this with Farber's earlier pieces represented here, untitled abstract paintings of little more than huge pieces of stained construction paper pinned to the wall or his two early sculptures, both untitled, consisting of pieces of wood recovered from construction sites and colored lightly with acrylic paint, then hung on the wall, blurring the line between painting and sculpture. Compared with a painting like Taffy, it's easy to see why this exhibition is called "About Face."

If you go, plan on spending some time. Farber's mostly large, oil-on-board paintings are fascinating mixtures. It's almost inappropriate to simply call them paintings because they so often seem to be collages, still-life renderings of objects always seen from a bird's eye view, personal, complicated, and idiosyncratic. After the "about face" of his earlier period, over the next 30 years Farber's work moves from the representation of the "American Candy" series to paintings literally crowded with open and closed books, potted flowers, and handwritten notes, often bisected by train tracks or the edges of varicolored panels, like a still-life film. In the Nineties, the panels remain, but the backgrounds become darker, the objects fewer, and the need for representation less pressing. More recently, Farber seems to move toward something much more impressionistic, with nature at the center of everything, the paintings crowded with flowers, but always busy and complicated, bursting with energy, life, rhythm, and movement. Farber is, in a way, the quintessential American painter, defining himself and his art through the objects that surround him. It's materialism as artistic expression. What could be more American than that?