Salon 91
22.09 - 23.10.2021
We alight on art like birds briefly touching down on wires, as sentient creatures in search of pause, reference, rest, breath, a renewal of energy. Maybe you were a bird once? I want you to remember that time. Think. Recall.
Where did you first encounter Amber Moir’s cumulous watercolour monotypes? Was it in a small exhibition space on Cape Town’s Kloof Street, a minute or two after your attention was stirred by the street-facing display of an inexplicable little event recorded on calico? Or, perhaps, it was a friend of a friend who alerted you to the mysterious energy of her abstract compositions by sharing an image on social media?
Don’t worry if you can’t remember. I also can’t. Not precisely. I forget that I too once was a bird.
I want to do two things here: first, clarify something obvious, the difference between a monotype and a jpeg, by which I mean, distinguish between an action and its afterlife as representation; and second, piggybacking off these maybe prosaic insights, venture a few thoughts on Moir’s hand-made work, its basis in risk and experimentation and, importantly, its call to openness.
As I write this, I am toggling between my sentences and photos I took of Moir’s exhibition, Composition by Field, with a fancy-pants iPhone and Fujifilm digital SLR camera. One particular work, Intonation (Still Reverberating), a pitch-rolled monotype made with red watercolour pigment, has prompted some head scratching. In the photo taken with my Fujifilm, the red is the colour of brick and, to me, resonates with thoughts of built structures and home. However, in the photo taken with my iPhone, the red tones resemble rusted iron. In a third photo, found online, the hues are reddish pink, like the sparkling wines made with the skins of pinot noir and meunier grapes.
But it is the kinetics of Intonation – with its striations flowing in opposing directions, almost like fingers raked through mud – that hold my imagination. Much like the works that hang opposite (the acid yellow Clear Light) and adjacent (the multicolour tetraptych Locus I-IV), Intonation is a vibrant event site. It can, if you allow it, prompt unexpected associations. In addition to those already mentioned, it brought to mind the volatile energies recorded in Red House, a 2006 photo series by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin depicting various marks etched onto the walls of an Iraqi prison, now abandoned but formerly occupied by ethnic Kurds. Something happened in that prison, something human and deliberate. All that remains is an unreliable trace, and a sequence of photos.
The conundrum of which red is the correct red in my photos of Intonation ought to highlight an obvious fact: none of the photos is precisely true to the red pigment Moir compressed into the fibres of an unbleached textile with a pitch roller. At risk of overstating the obvious, Moir’s watercolour monotypes and the digital images that represent them bear little in common. The former is an actual thing; the latter is an immaterial proxy. A monotype is a unique print impression, a non-reproducible thing, whereas a jpeg represents a set of logics related to compressing digital images.
Compression also plays a role in Moir’s monotypes that feature abstract fields of tertiary and organic colours. After painting watercolour pigments onto a sheet of polypropylene plastic coated with gum arabic, Moir lays calico over the painted image. She then draws an impression by pulling a pitch roller weighing 100kg over the wet image. The water-filled roller is the same colour as the red wheelbarrow in William Carlos Williams’s 1923 poem, the barrow he claimed so much depended upon. Similarly, so much depends upon the pristine red roller in Moir’s studio.
By contrast, weight is irrelevant to jpegs. These mobile and easily trafficked data files owe their existence to complex mathematics and the principles of predictive coding. The name itself is an acronym for an image-compression standard established in 1992 by the Joint Photographic Experts Group. Standards represent useful benchmarks for industry. In effect, they ensure reproducibility: do this, and this should happen.
Moir came upon her signature method, printing with a pitch roller, by rejecting standardised artistic methods and processes, including the mechanical press. In 2014, while a final-year student at the University of Stellenbosch, Moir became increasingly frustrated with the pristine and contained monotypes she was producing on a machine press. She wanted to work on a larger scale and to make the process more challenging and unpredictable. During this time, a close family member passed away. She came undone.
Kathryn Smith, an artist and generous teacher, advised Moir to find a way to deal with unpredictable and unknowable processes. Moir travelled to a family farm in the Swellendam region, where she produced a large monotype measuring five metres in length. The impression was produced outdoors on an uneven surface with a pitch roller used in the late 1800s to level terrain for horsing events. The resulting work defied simple evaluations of success. A grieving ritual with a performative quality had yielded an unexpected painterly image characterised by intimacy, immediacy and directness. The strange and difficult process nonetheless remained true to her printmaking background.
Moir has since adapted her risky field experiment to suit the needs of a studio-based practice. Mostly, it involved translations of scale, means and site, but the basic volatilities that underpinned the original process remain. Moir’s compressive method of making print impressions continues to be rooted in unexpected outcomes. This unpredictability, I would argue, is central to her process. Take the unplanned folds, flows and tiny pink stains marking the luminous surface of Clear Light. They are singular and cannot be reproduced, except as digital copies.
Where a jpeg gains its utility as a descriptive document, Moir’s monotypes achieve their form and agency by engaging risk. Risk is frequently eulogised in the story of non-figurative painting. Art critic Harold Rosenberg, in his landmark essay ‘The American Action Painters’ (1952), repeatedly emphasises risk. Will and risk, he writes, evidence the ‘the dialectical tension of a genuine act’ in action painting. Risk also informed how poet and curator Frank O’Hara, writing in a 1960 exhibition catalogue, accounted for the work of Helen Frankenthaler. O’Hara described Frankenthaler, a painter who came to prominence by staining large untreated canvases with paint thinned to watercolour texture, as ‘daring’ and ‘willing to risk the big gesture.’
Poets and critics can only speculate on risk in painting; artists have to confront it head on. In 1984, commenting on the role of risk in her engrossing colour-field paintings, Frankenthaler told art critic Karen Wilkin:
The only rule is that there are no rules. Anything is possible – metallic paint or something ugly or pouring a huge quantity of paint on thin paper. It’s all about risks, deliberate risks. The picture unfolds, leads, unravels as I push ahead. Watching it develop, I seize it. More and more I feel led into the manifestation of how it must look. Despite the fact that it exists because I am the insistent developer of how it will look, it must appear as it does.
As it once was, so it remains. Moir’s monotypes – with their sometimes-intense concentrations of colour, swirling lines, creased and torn surfaces and sublimated literariness – embody a deliberate risk taking in which anticipation, possibility and uncertainty coincide.
The spontaneous improvisations of Frankenthaler and other post-war American painters were emblematic of a broader cultural moment. One of its key doers was poet Charles Olson. Among the objects in Moir’s exhibition is a handmade artists’ book that reprints Olson’s 1950 essay ‘Projective Verse,’ an influential manifesto, of sorts, that attempted to define a new energetics for Anglophone poetry freed from inherited and artificial form. The essay laid the groundwork for New York School poets like O’Hara. Moir’s book, which additionally features non-figurative pencil drawings as well as fragments of her watercolour monotypes, shows her to be an attentive reader.
Olson’s thoughts on kinetics, principle and process in new-fangled ‘projective’ or ‘composition by field’ poetry are extensively underlined, circled and anatomised. Sometimes Olson’s words are even crossed out. For example, in Moir’s book, ‘The revolution of the ear…’ is subtly reframed to read as ‘The revolution of the eye…’ It is a gentle intervention, one correlative to Moir’s quietly persuasive way of resolving her images, sometimes without doing anything except rolling an image, and, more recently, by pasting additional elements onto the surface and using pencil to gently induce latent forms in her monotypes.
In an extended note written on a blank page opposite Olson’s concise yet dense essay, Moir quotes the American poet’s idea of field composition as that which implies ‘a pragmatic openness to the world, and from which it follows that form is never more than an extension of content’. Reading this and other interventions, it is clear that Moir has discovered a rigorous but open language capable of articulating her process-based approach to image making. It is an approach that now encompasses gestural watercolour paintings, some redolent of Nel Erasmus (formerly also a director of the Johannesburg Art Gallery) and Cecil Higgs at her most abstract.
The aesthetics and culture of spontaneity associated with post-war abstraction (in particular its New York and Paris strains) have been entombed, disinterred and reburied several times in South Africa. It has again been laid to rest following the emergence of insistently figural and identity-wracked painting in the 2010s, a painting now supremely ascendant. Trends are a bit like weather: they blow in, do stuff and then pass. In the midst of a storm, it is hard to see. Singularities are easily missed.
Moir’s work deliberately refuses reference and narrative. Colour, line, form and balance have underpinned her output since her confident debut solo exhibition in 2019. In the time since then and now, her recondite work has won a small but appreciative audience. Artist James Webb, who is used to walking a lonely path, admires the difficult atmospherics and magic of Moir’s work. Her work, he says, invites associative readings.
‘From the little I know about Cecil Higgs and her use of the natural world as a theme, I want to jump to the way some of Amber’s works make me think of tangles of aquatic weeds and long grasses waving in a pond,’ he told me. ‘I think of a chaotic Giverny,’ he added, referring to the garden paradise where Claude Monet lived for 43 years. ‘I think of the Chinese watercolour landscapes without their epic narratives.’
What I’m trying to suggest here is that Moir is not one of Rosenberg’s weak mystics, nor is she a zombie formalist dressing up old ideas in unbleached cotton. She is, to borrow from Olson the poet (not the essayist), a kingfisher. In 1949, a year before publishing ‘Projective Verse’, Olson wrote his poem The Kingfishers. It is a fever dream of civilisational anxieties and hesitant humanist ideals. From a particular vantage, this poem, written at the atomic beginnings of the Anthropocene and arrival of Mao Zedong, makes a compelling argument for the place of non-referential painting – now, tomorrow and the forever after. It also enables us to recognise what Moir is doing.
The kingfisher, informs Olson, is a cavity nester. It will bore into a riverbank and lay its ‘translucent eggs’ on fish bones, ‘not on bare clay, on bones thrown up in pellets by the birds.’ Olson describes this waste matter as ‘rejectamenta,’ adding that, as the bony residue accumulates, it forms ‘a cup-shaped structure’ in which the young are born. Moir is a kingfisher among birds. One, two, three solo exhibitions in, she has refined an insistently haptic practice that operates at the threshold of printmaking and painting. Incubated in a nest made from flotsam of the past, her exhilarating work represents change. Or rather, as Olson phrases it in his poem about a kingfisher, ‘is change,’ a change that ‘presents no more than itself’.