PAUL PFEIFFER:
I’ve always had an interest
in domestic interiors that also
are scenes of horror or of the uncanny.
One of the most compelling
images when I was a teenager
was the movie The Amityville Horror.
In that movie, the stairway
plays a very important role.
It’s the central corridor along
which a meeting of gazes occurs
between the human inhabitants, the family,
and this nonhuman inhabitant, the Devil.
That’s what led me to the idea of recreating
the central stairway in the house.
So in the final piece, you really have two images—
the large projection looking
from the top of the stairs
down into the entrance coming through
a live feed from inside the diorama.
And as you move close to the wall,
you find a little hole with
light coming out of it.
And looking through the hole,
you see the diorama itself.
You find yourself looking
in the opposite direction
from the bottom of the stairs
upward towards the second floor.
Making images and objects,
you can’t help but think about what it is
you’re actually doing beyond merely fabrication.
In a way, you’re really setting up relationships
between objects and images and people.
I think of “Dutch Interior” as an
exploration of this kind of most basic
and fundamental of relationships,
between oneself and another.
There’s something really seductive
about pre-digested images.
You’re served literally 500
channels on TV, like why go out?
There’s a huge infrastructure that undergirds
every individual image we see on TV,
and for me it’s very hard to
dissociate the single, you know,
image from that entire network.
So the question always comes up, who’s using who?
Is the image making us or do we make images?
I'm really attracted to
images of amazing spectacle.
That's one of the things that
brings me to the sports scene.
Especially big events involving mass audiences
but also things like newscasts, beauty
pageants, professional wrestling–
all kinds of stuff.
It seems that there’s something
inherently compelling about
repetition and about the loop.
You know, it’s like a fireplace, or
sort of like a moth to the flame,
it’s just you know, something
that kind of draws you in.
Makes you just want to kind
of stare at it for a while.
I borrow so much of what I use.
I think of myself much less as an author
and more like a poacher or
a translator or a mediator.
Last night was really quite unique,
I’m actually advocating this as opposed
to dry footage from the television.
Still in a way I feel like I'm
watching something like a TV image.
And I'm watching material that
I've been working with already.
The title “Fragment of a
Crucifixion” is a direct quote
from a Francis Bacon painting from the fifties
and like many of Francis
Bacon’s figures he’s screaming.
And the question is screaming
why or because of what.
I saw in that image of the basketball
player “Fragment” video figure again,
surrounded sensorily by extreme situation,
at the center of the attention of thousands
of people and under bright lights.
And what that implies is a kind
of sense of the figure again
dissolving into the accumulation of
capital until it becomes an image.
Literally part of it is that
he just made a million dollars,
but it also seems like a very
precarious position to be in.
There is a kind of humiliation
in that process of simply
becoming objects of admiration or
people simply becoming consumers.
What led me to start working
on the “Long Count” pieces,
where the boxer is erased from the ring,
was a failure that I encountered when I
was working on “Fragment of a Crucifixion.”
In that original scene there were
quite a few other players on the court
so I removed the other
players, the basketball hoops
and quite a few other details.
And so I was going very slowly, frame by frame,
trying to make sure that there
was kind of seamlessness to it.
What I found was that there was
one particular figure in the image
I could not get erasure of that figure.
A few months later just looking back at it again
I thought in a way there was
something really interesting
and integral to the material ah,
about that kind of evidence of the erasure.
And, so I decided to try to do
another piece, “The Long Count,”
that capitalized a bit more on this quality.
And so that's what I think of in a way as craft.
Building a relationship to the material,
discovering the things that it
will do despite your will that
may end up being more interesting then what
you were trying to will the material to do.
I would happily sit in my
room and do this work all day—
it’s a bit like meditation.
I also feel like it’s a bit
like painting or drawing,
in the sense that you leave your everyday kind of
consciousness of the world and
achieve a certain kind of focus.
“Morning After the Deluge” is a direct
quote from a painting by Turner.
It refers to, this investigation of
a perceptual phenomenon in nature
and also has a biblical reference,
since the “Morning After the
Deluge” is the story of Noah’s ark.
So if you really think about it,
it’s the morning after the
complete annihilation of the world.
These days it’s quite idealistic
to think of the viewer
as being anything but distracted given
the kind of image-saturated world
that people function in.
In the “Morning After the Deluge,”
you have to be there for at
least the first few minutes
if not for the full 20
minutes to see the full loop
and to get the full sense of
the sun rising and setting.
In a way, it’s not very viewer-friendly.
The shot is in real time—
it almost looks like nothing’s happening.
You really have to kind of stand for a while
to get the sense that the sun
is slowly setting and rising.
In the meantime though, there’s a
lot of other action that’s happening
on a much smaller scale.
You have birds flying very
quickly through the screen.
It’s almost at like a pixeled level,
barely there at all but projected big.
This is something you get to see—
this is maybe what you enter
in on as a moving image,
but as you sit with it a while longer,
the bigger movements become
more accessible to you.
I like to think that there might be
someway to create something that,
you could take something away from it even
if you’re only there for, like a fraction.
If you’re asking yourself, ‘is
there anything beyond television?’
you could turn off the television and go outside,
but I think what’s more interesting
for an artist is to attempt
to answer that question through an
exploration of the media itself.
And I’m attempting to answer it through
a kind of creation of the illusion.