Paul Pfeiffer

Pfeiffer appropriates still and moving imagery from popular culture—including movies and televised sporting events—and digitally manipulates them. Through this process, he creates seemingly endless moments that direct the viewer’s attention to singular details rather than the original contexts of the images. Unlike many of his predecessors working in film and video, Pfeiffer is not trying to create, or provide for the viewer, a cinematic experience. Instead, he builds on historical precedents by selecting and manipulating archival images to create innovative new works, or what he calls “video sculptures.” These works challenge us to decipher narratives based on both our recognition of the preexisting imagery and the modifications that Pfeiffer has made.

In his interview with Chrissie Iles in, A Decade of Conversation, he explains, “I started experimenting with video at the moment when it became possible to work with video on the computer, and I found my material in this virtual, digital space.”

There is a lot of honesty in interviews with Pfeiffer and you can learn a great deal about artistic practice when listening to how he deals with his problems. The sates that he dealt with the problem of “how to display this stuff and make it physical.”

Acknowledging the body of the viewer in the space was a kind of playing with spaces within spaces and activating a sense of shifting space within the viewer’s perception. This became a way to continue thinking about how to work with video in some ways a sculpture in some ways architectural without in the end having to put an object in the space.

Paul Pfeiffer has mastered certain post-production digital editing techniques to accomplish his sophisticated examinations of identity and social structures. In JOHN 3:16 (2000), the artist digitized more than five thousand individual frames of a basketball shot and repositioned them to highlight the fetishization of the ball among black males, thus rendering a sort of elegy for the black male sports player.

This piece like the piece Live from Neverland, 2006 touches on issues of race but Pfeiffer has something interesting to say about this, in his interview with Brian Curtin he says that “As far as art-making goes, race, like religion, or like Jackson himself, is a way into people’s psyches. Race itself is not so interesting. Sure it’s part of the picture, but it’s just one dimension. Ideally, I want my work to oscillate between different readings.” I appreciate this reply. In continually thinking about my interest in editing footage of cartoons from my childhood I have thought of delving into the history of cartoons such as the Smurfs, which has many theories on racism and politically incorrectness. It is good to have further perspective on works that deals with these issues.

Curtin, Brian. "Accessing Other Dimensions Paul Pfeiffer." ArtAsiaPacific Magazine July-Aug. 2009. ArtAsiaPacific Magazine. July-Aug. 2009. Web.

A Decade in Conversation. New Haven [u.a.: Yale UP [u.a., 2010. Print.

Rush, Michael. New Media in Art. London: Thames and Hudson, 2005. Print.

"Paul Pfeiffer: In The Zone Current Exhibitions Exhibitions." Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Web. 08 May 2011. .