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Window into the South African landscape, 1994
Interview with Monique Pelser Aug 2005
MP: What inspired you to create Fix (2003)?
NM: I was given the opportunity to animate in Capetown. I had 10 days to learn and complete something if possible. I spent 5 days on two preconceived ideas, which I then abandoned. The short paint events that make Fix were a practical response to the complexity of animating, and a very short window of opportunity that I did not want to give up. The imagery was taken from work I was doing at the time and also arose spontaneously from the process; realistically, what can I actually do with paint.
MP: How long did it take you to complete the animation?
NM: The raw footage; 4 days very very intense work. 6 months of disillusionment with the footage, 3 months of interaction with Ric Random on the music, another month to finalize the editing.
MP: The title Fix – what does it refer to?
NM: Stop frame animation tends towards speed and agitation if its not absolutely controlled. As a beginner I found the big challenge was to slow things down. The frenetic activity of the paint had to be stopped, fixed, pinned down. The paint had to fix a position, a meaning.
MP: What do the nails signify?
NM: The nails [apart from stopping the motion] represented in Fix and paintings I did before fix a specific level of visual reality. 1. Paint as a physical entity [like clay or toothpaste] 2. Paint as a representation of itself, i.e. A mark that has body and color but evokes nothing but itself and the fact that someone put it there [this is a blob of white paint] 3. Paint as an optical illusion of itself, where color and tone are defining rather than its physical presence. 5. Objective reality where paint is used illusionisticaly to describe what we see. White is no longer white but a highlight perhaps. 6. Symbolic, where objects take on additional meaning beyond describing themselves. So the nails represented an intrusion into a non-representational world by the representational and symbolic.
MP: You are concerned with the complexities of mark making. Can you elaborate on this?
NM: As in 4 above I was very specifically interested in what we are actually seeing when looking at paint. It is possible for a paint mark to represent only itself and the hand of the artist [gesture]. This can be an enclosed world evoking action without any meaning. Marks seem to have innate vitality and locked in potential. The boundary between mealy betraying the presence of the artist and actually evoking some aspect of our environment is mostly indefinable.
MP: The use of stop-frame animation develops and extends the technical aspects of oil painting. What in your opinion did you achieve through this process?
MN: I think the revelation for me was that I could improvise and be quite free. Animation obviously adds time motion and even sound to an otherwise static silent tradition. Working with music takes on dimensions completely closed to a single painting. In some sense the motion of the paint was simply an expression of the artistic struggle to make paint meaningful.
MP: The image becomes flexible through the process of animation and grows out of the technique. What problems or successes were you faced with during this process?
NM: The big issue is speed and flow. One is working with a single image, any adjustment made needs to be followed by something that fits the logic and which combined will fool the eye. Things degenerate into frenetic jerkiness very easily. To start with all I could hope for was to make the paint seem to move to be alive without anything representational. But paint techniques seem to offer exiting and unobvious [non TV like] forms of motion especially on the boundary between representational a non-representational.
MP: Would you say that you are influenced by performance art? If so, to what capacity?
NM: No.
MP: Is the work directed at your society and or politics in anyway?
NM: All art is directed at society and will always have a political dimension. However Fix has no social or political agenda. It is mostly aesthetic discourse, but the search for meaning within the work is not entirely confined. The visceral quality of paint evokes flesh, the nails seem to penetrate and wound, the paint bleeds, it acts and comes to rest, the hearts and music create a sense of longing and inner strife.
MP: Do you think your works examine or break down the position of art in society?
NM: I think Fix looks inwards at painting, under its skin, but is unconcerned with its position or validity in society.
MP: Do you actively make use of parody, irony or of satire in order to do so?
NM: There is some parody in the way the paint thrashes around trying to be a painting, but can only be paint.
MP: Why break painting down to its basic form?
NM: I think it's inevitable; painting over many years that at some point one will scrutinize the medium itself. I found it very liberating and it generated a far more sophisticated and layered approach to any subjects. It's exiting to be able to terminate meaning at any level and to know that you are doing it when you are doing it and to be able to accept its validity.
MP: Do you wish to challenge the values that inform the viewer's expectations and assumptions about art/ animation?
NM: No. I make no presumptions about the viewer's assumptions.
MP: In one of the clips of Fix you are reflected in your studio, making the marks on the foil surface. Why bring yourself into the work?
NM: I did not like this one because it looked a bit like a how to paint movie. But in the end if I ignored this there was something sumptuous about the reflected color and in a way it was quite truthful and novel for me at that point. The muted reflection activated the entire screen and allowed me to animate two things at once. I will do it again, but exclude the idea that the reflection is the artist.
MP: In the animation you worked with various surfaces and materials, why and what were the outcomes?
NM: I was interested in subverting the earnestness and earthiness of oil paint. The trashiness of holographic wrapping paper for example formed a nice counterpoint to the mud like oil. The harshness of turquoise card is quite shocking with oil splashed onto it. Also being a bit of a purist with my paintings I felt free to use materials that would loose their identity in the translation to digital. Some of the papers crinkled and moved unexpectedly which added another layer of richness. Doing short events, it was nice to start on something which required a different response each time.
MP: Time is a fundamental element in your work as well as the process of painting, stop-frame animation and of course in human existence. What are your thoughts and feelings about this?
NM: Stop frame pretty much started me on the multiple images [grids] as a direct analogy for time. In paintings like Scores, 2005 and Passing Time, 2005 I was taking all those animation stills and actually displaying them on one work. In Fix my sense of time was far more to do with history and our motivation to act, to struggle. It sounds over the top but I see humanity in that blob of white paint thrashing around.
MP: What is the major theme that has run through your work since you were a student at Rhodes University?
NM: … There are concerns that just seem to reoccur. A sense of alienation in an indifferent environment. The vital but contingent nature of the individual. Fear of loss [random misfortune] and the slipping away of time. Ways in which the act of painting can be conceptually significant [as opposed to just be a way of making a picture]. The interplay between referential and non-referential paint.
MP: How do you feel your work has developed and what have been the major influences on the development of your work?
NM: My work has always developed in an evolutionary manner; visual concepts and iconographies arise out of the studio process and suggest ways forward or come to dead ends only to be picked up later. My work in general has moved from an instinctive emotion gut feel process to concept based imagery but with emotion still being the driving force. In the past the whole image may be arrived at by chance [automatic processes] and now chance is woven into clear visual and/or iconographic starting points. Meaning was the residue of the process, and now it is usually the starting point. Major forces for transition in my work have been, the need to move away from the East Cape Landscape label, abstract expression and automatic processes became a dead end, the desire to remove any reference to race politics in my work, the birth of Sophie and the ensuing heightened sense of mortality.
MP: A key aspect of your work is the 'brushstroke'; the breaking down of image to its most basic form, why do you feel this is necessary in a contemporary South African art context?
NM: I felt the need to really unpack the limits of meaning in painting, to really be able to control the dynamics between content and form. At what point is a mark just a mark and how and when does it take on meaning no matter how subtly? It's about freedom to say as much or as little as one wants to on any given canvas. I feel confident making a statement about my fear of loosing Sophie or Tanya but at the same time I recognize the validity of an image that is mute. SA art is largely driven by issues of history and identity, there is a lot of psuedo sociological and psychological discourse, the mark is an aesthetic abstraction that asserts its autonomy; its is language before it says anything.
MP: Does your work that precedes Fix explore notions of abstraction? Please could you include an example or two?
NM: It goes back to my early work which I would describe as my mature landscapes, in these I was using paint and the process to generate harsh visceral fields of paint that evoked some kind of landscape, at that point the paint was more important than the vestige of landscape that it described. Meaning derived from a mysterious alchemy of mark making. Meaning was discovered through the process, not imposed on it. The critical thing was not what you painted but how you painted it. In this context the mark, gesture how the paint was laid down was the magic ingredient. This attitude is for me now just one strategy integrated into a more layered approach to painting.
MP: You introduce the lettering of R.i.P in the second clip of the animation, what does this reference of death refer to?
NM: Death. Hahahahahahaha…no it's a bit more complex. Stop frame animation is very difficult to slow down in a fluid manner. It tends towards frenetic pace and jerkiness especially for the novice, as I am. But this energy seemed to express something about manic activity for its own sake, so the paint thrashing around was a direct expression of our own instinctive restless energy. The R.i.p and the nails were a way of bringing the life of the paint to an end. There had to be a way to stop the obscure endeavors of the paint. Below this symbolic interpretive level the RIP was simply the intrusion of the representational into a mute none representational zone. The RIP was an ambassador for the literal.
MP: Often during the animation the brushstroke 'bleeds', either from a puncture wound from the nails or spontaneously. Why does it bleed?
NM: Again two levels of engagement, firstly I was playing off the idea that the paint was alive, struggling to define itself in that sense it made sense for the paint to bleed, sometimes blood red some times some arbitrary green or blue. The drip sits on a boundary between evoking only itself and something else, like blood, It is just a drip of blue paint then its not, it's the paint bleeding blue blood, At this level it evokes only those two ideas, If one chooses to interpret this further and assign a greater meaning, then it fits with the idea that paint is an abstract representation of our selves.
MP: You also mentioned previously that, "In Fix my sense of time was far more to do with history and our motivation to act, to struggle." How has this influenced what you are working on now? Please could you explain what you are working on?
NM: In Cows and Chickens the question of motive and purpose arises. There is timelessness to their endeavors and urges. They are always struggling to survive, and in the painting, struggling to define themselves in a neutral environment. What motive can they have? There is none, just a blind will to live. I don't think we are any different, just more complex. In the Hide and Seek series the characters playfully evoke the absence of purpose without forfeiting their persistence and vitality.
Thank you for your time.