Paul Pfeiffer in "Time" - Season 2 - "Art in the Twenty-First Century" | Art21

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.