Manny Farber: Paintings & Writings

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 remarkablyresourcefulpainter. This book celebrates Farber's lush visual art,showcasinghis table-top still lifes crammed with personalassociations,popartifacts, and scrawled wisecracks-a seriesof intimate yetindirectself-portraits, spanning decades.

Samples of Farber's sly, brash art criticism, previously uncollected,are offered alongside film reviews, manuscript pages, schoolquizzes, and notes.

The book's editors provide essays and additional commentary; tributeand analysis are supplied by nearly two dozen other contributors, including Richard Armstrong, Olivier Assayas,Bill Berkson, Durga Chew-Bose, AnneBoyer,Moyra Davey, Josephine Halvorson, JP Gorin, GreilMarcus,Carol Mavor,Patricia Patterson, Chris Petit, Amanda Petrusich,KellyReichardt,Jonathan Rosenbaum, Luc Sante, Robert Storr, GinaTelaroli,Wim Wenders, Robert Walsh, and Alice Waters.

The bookcomeson the heels ofHelen 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 forembracing 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 twopractices, painting and writing, that inform and modify each other incessantly.It is his existence at the confluence of these twopractices 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, theyurge equal recognition of theflip-side of plenitude: There is nostopping things, no end to theimmoderate, chattering, centerlessprolixity in which the averageearthbound soul finds (or loses) itself,immersed."
-Bill Berkson

Edited and with essays by Michael Almereyda, Jonathan Lethem, and Robert Polito.
Designed by Scott Massey