Death Firmly Etched Into Farber Show

Within living memory, retrospective exhibitions were reserved for renowned artists. They functioned to honor individuals of fully ripened expressive and formal achievement. Not uncommonly such tributes were posthumous. Mournfully, the artist commemorated in USC’s “Robert Farber: A Retrospective” did die in 1995, at age 47. Yet only a small fraction of local visitors will recognize his name. Working in New York, he started making art only in the mid-’80s after pursuing a career in the theater.

This 50-work survey shows Farber growing from early forays into conventional Abstract Expressionism to progressively more intense autobiographical material combining symbolic and figurative imagery. The ensemble speaks plainly of an intelligent, talented beginner who wasn’t vouchsafed enough time to mature artistically.

This sense of incompleteness becomes a crucial, if unintended, part of Farber’s expressive content. His truncation comes to symbolize the thousands of worthwhile lives snuffed, like his own, by complications from AIDS. The exhibition itself mirrors a troubled world where, in the eyes of many, art-for-art’s sake is a luxury conscience can’t presently afford.

The artist, a homosexual and recovering substance abuser, pursued this activist theme most affectingly in his “Western Blot” series. Each composition consists of several rectilinear units unevenly joined by sections of ornate architectural detailing suggesting the Gothic. Color is largely confined to funereal black, white and gray with metallic accents in silver and gold plus bits of finished wood.

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Individual panels collaged with photographic images of sculpted grotesques, saints and cherubs are set against abstract textures variously suggesting stormy landscape and organic microscope smears. All this is punctuated with the occasional syringe, medicine bottle or intravenous tube.

Each composition bears lettered quotations. Contemporary voices including homeless AIDS sufferers alternate with witnesses to the Black Death, the bubonic plague that decimated half the European population in the 14th century, killing some 75 million.

“And against this pestilence no human wisdom or foresight was of any avail,” Boccaccio wrote.

Some viewers may find Farber’s parallel excessively apocalyptic. For those who don’t happen to belong to a high-risk group, it’s easy enough to think, “Well, yes, this is terrible, but the comparison is counter-productive. Bad as AIDS is, it has killed less than a half-million in the U.S., and treatment’s getting better.”

Tempted to this copped-out statistical objectivity, a couple of things need to be kept in mind. Farber’s take was, from his point of view, poetic and true to his experience as a gay man. He was dying, and so were a significant number of his friends.

The straight population has little reason to feel immune. The numbers of HIV-positive heterosexuals reported from India and Africa are authentically scary. After all the historic plague came to Europe from the Far East.

Finally, it needs to be recognized that Farber’s exhibition represents an aesthetic phenomenon that’s still new and unsettling. This and similar art embodies the direct experience of real people in circumstances with deep social implications. This genre tends to dissolve aesthetic detachment and ignite sensational empathy.

It’s possible to feel theatrically manipulated by such work until we remember it represents actual human drama. In the autobiographical text for “Western Blot #15” Farber says, “To look at me you’d never know I was HIV +.” He waxes ironic in a minute-long video loop. A postcard-perfect beach relaxes in front of an old song about “A Summer Place.” Abruptly the scene is enveloped by a huge black ball that reverses the idyll into a photo negative. A prompt appears reading “Sorry for the Interruption, Please Stand By.”

Farber’s final work is purged of polemic, which only heightens its pathos. “Concrete Wall” is a beautiful, cloudy pearlescent sky and an implacable wall. It must have comforted Farber to realize that he had at least made a beginning. Maybe that’s all we can do.

Carl Belz wrote the main catalog essay. Playwright Edward Albee contributed a preface. Previously seen at Brandeis University, the exhibition was coordinated here by Farber Foundation director John Paradiso and the Fisher Gallery’s Kay Allen.

* “Robert Farber: A Retrospective,” USC, Fisher Gallery, 832 Exposition Blvd.; through Dec. 12, closed Sundays and Mondays. (213) 740-4748.