Paul+Pfeiffer

by Daniel Wright

Paul Pfeiffer

Pfeiffer (b. 1966) is an artist who uses images, and more specifically videos, to put societal trends in context. In most of his pieces, he uses sports and its environment to ask questions of human consumerism and life. In his piece //The Saints// (show below), a model of a stadium is placed in one corner of an empty room. Audio of a sporting event, with the cheering, booing, etc. is played throughout the empty room. Then at the opposite end of the room, there is a tiny monitor playing video of a soccer match. This is one of many works in which he takes an original piece highlighting amazing spectacle and transforms it. The manipulated piece comments of the dehumanization that comes with an increase in consumerism. In a segment of Pfeiffer for Art21, he stated that the idea that we could flip through 500 channels on the television to entertain ourselves brings up questions about the frantic pace of human life.

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The idea of pace is his focus in the piece //John 3:16//. In this work, Pfeiffer manipulates hundreds of images of basketball games in order to center the image on the basketball itself. But more important for this piece is the approach he takes to display the video. Similar to //The Saints//, the video is put onto a very small monitor for viewing. Every time I look at the monitor being used in the context of viewing sports, all I can think of are the small, portable televisions that are sold to watch sporting events. The idea is that if one could not stay in one place, watching a sporting event would not be impossible. This is the main concept behind //John 3:16//. The video itself is very frantic, with the parts of the image surrounding the ball moving very quickly and the basketball remaining in the same spot. Pfeiffer is trying to comment on the theory that the greater technology we have at our disposal for entertainment, the more we get caught up in the methods of watching and do not slow down to enjoy the more important aspects (in this case, the sporting event). Today, society prioritizes consumption of media.



The most remarkable aspect of Paul Pfeiffer's art is the process to make the pieces. He is very meticulous, occasionally editing videos frame-by-frame. One piece in particular, a video of a Muhammad Ali fight, with Ali and his opponent entirely editing out of the video. Pfieffer frequently uses the tools of information displays in his pieces. Most of his recent work has involved a monitor and the idea of viewpoint. For example, shooting a video of a model house, projecting it onto a screen, and then poking a hole in the screen to view the original model house. Overall, the combination of viewpoint and the frantic pace of consumerism are the overarching concepts found in his work. His belief is that "There is a kind of humiliation in that process of simply becoming objects of admiration or people simply becoming consumers." I wonder whether or not our perspective is the reason why he believes this is so. Is is possible to put people in the context if a consumer society? Can we every know the extent to which we are becoming consumerist?

For this final project, I would like to work with similar idea regarding the processes that Pfieffer uses. The ideas of media, consumerism, and sports isn't particularly appealing, but I'm intrigues to see where the use of monitors will lead me in regards to the concepts of the piece.