Hardcover, 160 pages
9.25 x 11 in.
24.13 x 27.94 cm.
An iconoclastic and essential voice in American film criticism, Manny
Farber (1927-2008) was also a remarkably resourceful painter. This book
celebrates Farber's lush visual art, showcasing his table-top still
lifes crammed with personal associations, pop artifacts, and scrawled
wisecracks--a series of intimate yet indirect self-portraits, spanning
decades.
Samples of Farber's sly, brash art criticism, previously uncollected,
are offered alongside film reviews, manuscript pages, school quizzes,
and notes.
The book's editors provide essays and additional commentary; tribute and
analysis are supplied by nearly two dozen other contributors, including
Richard Armstrong, Olivier Assayas, Bill Berkson, Durga Chew-Bose, Anne
Boyer, Moyra Davey, Josephine Halvorson, JP Gorin, Greil Marcus, Carol
Mavor, Patricia Patterson, Chris Petit, Amanda Petrusich, Kelly
Reichardt, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Luc Sante, Robert Storr, Gina Telaroli,
Wim Wenders, Robert Walsh, and Alice Waters.
The book comes on the heels of Helen Molesworth's exhibition at The
Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles: "One Day at a Time: Manny
Farber and Termite Art"--a Farber retrospective and wide-ranging group
show in which Molesworth revisited and explored Farber's seminal 1962
essay "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art." Molesworth commends Farber
for embracing the glories and uncertainties of the everyday, creating
work that is continually gnawing away at its own boundaries.
"Farber is this extraordinary case of someone equally fluent in two
practices, painting and writing, that inform and modify each other
incessantly. It is his existence at the confluence of these two
practices that makes his work so layered, contradictory, polyphonic. In
short, ALIVE."
--JP Gorin
"It's been said that Manny Farber's film criticism resembles his
painting--or maybe vice-versa--in that both are chiefly concerned with
exploding a thing into its constituent bits, and then gently surveying
the remnants, figuring out how or if they complement each other."
--Amanda Petrusich
"The dizzying appeal of exposing enormity in what's miniature."
--Durga Chew-Bose
"Images of no small exuberance, they urge equal recognition of the
flip-side of plenitude: There is no stopping things, no end to the
immoderate, chattering, centerless prolixity in which the average
earthbound soul finds (or loses) itself, immersed."
--Bill Berkson
Edited and with essays by Michael Almereyda, Jonathan Lethem, and Robert
Polito.
Designed by Scott Massey
