A BIRD’S-EYE VIEW

Simultaneously on view at the Temporary Contemporary is an exhibition in almost humorous contrast to Turrell’s. Where he raises rational objectivity to a level borderering on Olympian grandiosity, the paintings of Manny Farber do everything to emphasize their intimate, slightly wacky subjectivity.

By the time Farber started showing his paintings hereabouts he already had such an entrenched and excellent reputation as a film critic one was inclined to assume the painting was the occasional avocation of an exceptional writer who happened to be rather incidentally gifted with pictorial virtuosity that he did not take too seriously.

Well, first impressions are always wrong and full of valuable misinformation. Farber, who is 67 and lives in San Diego, has been painting for 40 years. He does, however, paint like a writer, constructing elaborate still-life compositions that bristle with objects suggesting words plus quite a few actual jottings, musings and maxims such as the profound, “Stir them doggies or you’re going to get cold hash.”

It also turns out that the sense that Farber does not take himself seriously as an artist has some basis in poetic fact. Obviously, he would not have cranked out enough pictures in the last 10 years to fill half of T.C. if he did not cleave to the pictorial muse with some dedication, but he still paints with slangy careless ease like a virtuoso illustrator who can knock out an apple so fresh you can hear it crunch but who does not think there is anything remarkable about that.

The attractive part of Farber’s art is its unpretentious ease. In seemingly endless variation, Farber paints what is essentially a bird’s-eye view of a work table or desk top littered with all the homely clutter that accumulates in such places. Sometimes it’s toy trains, at others it’s stationary supplies, then it’s a sexy broad, or the milkman.

What, on a desk top? Well, Farber doesn’t just paint what’s there. He paints images created by random thoughts as he sits ruminating at his desk. Visual puns and free associations. He lets you know this through his use of space. The bird’s-eye view is not consistent but swirls and shifts around in a kind of Cubo-Surrealist space that lets us know this is a Litero-Visual version of certain kinds of autobiographical blank-verse poetry probably of the Beatnik persuasion.

As the unpretentiousness of this art layers over, it reveals the character a complex intellectual and aesthete doing his damnedest to be a regular guy. What apparently wishes to be taken for earthy Quaker Oats poetry actually itches with allusions to other art. There’s a big dose of Wayne Thiebaud Pop; the crafty discursive simplicity of late Paul Wonner still lives all understructured with Richard Diebenkorn abstraction. It’s art that reeks with so much muffled ambition it nearly chokes on itself. If you don’t like representational art, it will do for abstraction. If you want content there is much of that but it never fuses, it just chats away.

The kind of arty slang that comes out of these paintings is a generational style inherited from the ‘50s that it served very well. Today it casts these paintings in a light that never falls on Turrell’s panoramic projects. Farber’s reticence makes the work at once irritatingly overbearing and willfully inconsequent.

Its most authentic quality is the evocation of a certain kind of personality--the hero of a novel by Saul Bellow, clever enough to do anything including constantly outwitting himself. It’s an aesthetic persona we want to strangle while unfailingly recognizing ourselves within it.