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.