Between Bosch and Cézanne (Manny Farber, 2001, oil on board, 96 x 96 inches)
Often in Farber’s paintings, the work takes material form as a workspace not quite sorted out.
Various angles, perspectives entwine and compete within the distribution of objects, figures, instruments, unruly but patterned, too composed to be haphazard.
The late paintings increasingly feature a dense invasion of vines and flowers and other plant life, which overtake and lyricize a space once occupied by candy bars, train tracks, things manmade.
[T]he garden has become Farber’s most compelling and persistent figure for the interface between art and work, between perception and experience, between beauty and transience. If vision here is always posed as a composite assemblage of acts, the process of making is shown to be always incomplete, a shifting mix of play, of labor, of tedium, of elation, and of loss. The ethical dimension of Farber’s art is crucial, for he operates, sometimes unsparingly, close to the edge of lyrical fatalism in his disclosure not just of the processes of decay in nature and in built things, but also of the hopelessness of all systems of organization, of storage, of categorizing. But in the face of impermanence and disintegration, Farber’s choice of the ground plane as his field of activity, like Smithson’s with the Spiral Jetty, affirms the value of the contingent, the immediately available, of matter and things at hand as the basis for rearrangement and redistribution into provisional but revelatory constellations of heightened experience. -Jonathan Crary
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