Paul Pfeiffer: Interrupting the Broadcast | Art21 "Extended Play"

(gentle music)

- The first time I experienced
a basketball game was

at Madison Square Garden,
probably around 1999.

I remember less about the specific game

or even what teams played.

It was more just the atmosphere,

the drastic shifts in scale,

the feeling of smallness when
you're a part of a crowd,

but also the monumentality
of the athletes.

There's something, to me,

really moving about the relative nakedness

of athletes and just the amount

of spectatorship focused on their bodies.

It was definitely a transformative moment.

I was sort of looking at it

like an alien from an
outsider's point of view,

abstractly and maybe almost
like anthropologically,

and developing that interest,

it's been a series of
unfolding revelations

of the machine, the
infrastructure behind the image.

It's like an onion

and I'm still in the
process of unpacking it.

(soft upbeat music)

(crowd cheers)

Sometime in the early 2000s,

I got this invitation from faculty members

at the University of Georgia
to come and give a lecture.

I did a little research on the university

and realized that they were one

of the top four schools for
college football in the US.

I told them I'd love to come down,

specifically with the thought

that through the art department,
I might explore the culture

of a real American football school,

having no idea what
that really meant except

that it looked like a
really intense culture.

I had this initial experience where,

in the midst of the game happening,

there was this shiny thing
in the corner of the stands

and that was the band

and I was immediately like, "What's that?"

(upbeat band music)
(indistinct chatter)

- Brian suggested going for
a little bit wider shot,

since we can't get that close.

- And so I quickly became fascinated

with exactly what they were doing

in the context of the game.

(crowd cheers)

(Commentator speaks indistinctly)

- The title "Red Green Blue"
refers to the color components

of the broadcast image.

As an artist, in a way, my interest is in,

not sports per se, but sports as one scene

for the moving image
and mass entertainment

and what I'm doing is moving
a viewer's attention around

the stadium by presenting
juxtapositions of images

that are normally not in
a broadcast of a game.

(indistinct radio chatter)

But see, that's our kind of good stuff.

- Okay, 'cause sometimes
I'll be right here.

- I had eight cameras at each game.

Three of them were in static positions.

The other five were roaming cameras

and they were shooting
in 30 second increments,

trying to get the maximum
variety of details.

So this is one of the establishing shots

and it just shows.
- So who's that?

Is that the band director?
- That's the band director.

(upbeat band music)

(Paul laughs)

- [Band Director] It's that last song,

we're gonna pick it right back up.

Yeah.

- [Paul] The kind of
texture and experience

of being inside the stadium,

it's all running off of a script

and there's a person in the control room,

which is at the other end of the stadium,

and their official title

is the Director of Fan Experience.

- [Commentator] Bulldogs,
it's first and fifteen.

- Hey, but in all seriousness,
if we do score here

and they go to a player,
let's knock out Jersey Mike's.

- [Paul] Really, they're curating

or choreographing the experience

of the game on many levels.

- [Commentator] Touchdown Bulldogs.

(crowd roars)
(upbeat band music)

- [Paul] So the musicians are a part

of the spell of the game.

(upbeat band music)

- [Band Director] Two,
two short PA, Dixie Land.

- The band director,

he would talk about
how he was purposefully

slowing it down, creating
a swelling crescendo

of sound during say like,

you know, "America the Beautiful,"

and you could literally see people start

to cry as this happened.

You're seeing the machinery operate.

(upbeat band music)

It spoke of a self-awareness

of inciting emotion in this crowd.

I began to just really think
of it as like the production

of a kind of mass ritual,
almost like a religious ritual.

(whistle blows)

(crowd cheers)
(upbeat band music)

I think of art as the finger that points.

To me, there's a value

of becoming more conscious
of the manipulation.

My agenda is in a way to call attention

to that process of mediation.

(upbeat band music)
(crowd cheers)

Whether you love or hate football,

it's a big part of American culture,

and so to me, in the end, a football game,

its familiarity makes it an
interesting ground to unpack.

To take something that's the most familiar

and to defamiliarize it becomes a process

of breaking the spell.

To produce almost like
a kind of disturbance.

(upbeat band music)

(crowd cheers)
(insects chirp)

(insect chirping continues)