Paul Pfeiffer: The Machine in the Ghost

The romance between art and the ethereal is an epic tale of unrequited love. The attempt to capture and create an object of nothingness is the sort of elusive never ending conundrum that keeps the magic alive. The work of Paul Pfeiffer has been discussed in realms as varied as pop surgery, technology remix and sacred/profane dilemmas. It is impossible to write anything about the work of Paul Pfeiffer without an epic disclaimer. Having been Paul Pfeiffer’s primary dealer for over ten years I hereby admit that it is impossible to claim any sense of objectivity and I have absolutely no interest in refuting the supposed lack of veracity to anything I might have to say about the work because obviously any economic interest precludes there being any other interest. That said, Pfeiffer’s is a medium and ghost catcher without peer.

Moving image work is on fire. The pixels are slowly burning the retina of the screen wherever the image becomes too static. We usually refer to this image as a ghost. A ghost being something elusive a visual memory caught from the side of the eye. The body of work at World Class Boxing represents an excursion into Pfeiffer’s Haunted House of Celebreality.

Goethe’s Message to the New Negroes (2001,2002) takes it’s title from an essay title of Negritude poet and Senegalese President Leopold Senghor. This fact is immaterial to the work. The pieces are a series of investigations that Pfeiffer began with John 3:16, where the ball instead of being a tracking object is a static object while the world spins around. The stated and the implied object of why we watch the spectacle (the game versus the celebrity/hero worship) become objects of spinning meditation like a Jasper Johns target or a traditional mandala. Noting the sculptural element, the moving image screen is thrust away from the wall changing it’s size and scale through proximity. We are so naturally inclined to place ourselves in a stated position from our screens, here the viewer is put in an off putting voyeur mode to examine a video not much bigger than a cell phone, circa the 80’s. Pfeiffer enjoys allowing the viewer’s own body to be juxtaposed against the body in question (or implied body) on the screen.

The truest opposition to one’s own body is the idealized body one finds in sport. Pfeiffer’s (healthy?) obsession with sports figures juxtaposes the ideal body with the viewer’s own. For the two videos with the title Caryatid we first question the goals that we seek to adorn our heroes with – in this case the Stanley Cup – paraded without the bodies in question. In all of it’s glory the cup becomes a sad memorial of ecclesiastic worship, bobbing and weaving as if powered by it’s own glory. Ozymandias without the man.

Finally Caryatid (2008) represents an elegant ode to failure that finds beauty in misery and pain. But thats not what it’s about. Caryatid’s are traditionally female figures. Pfeiffer’s feminizing of the fallen soccer is a paean to homoerotic supremacy. I didn’t say that. That’s not what it’s about. Caryatid is a spin on the meditation on red green and blue that is not only the cornerstone of video transmission but an eloquent nod to a quest John Baldessari had three decades earlier. If there was any truth to that whatsoever it was accidental.

Ghost catching is a Sisyphean exercise that has dubious merits as an avocation. Pfeiffer normalizes the practice or he absolutely doesn’t.

Paul Pfeiffer was born in Honolulu, Hawaii in 1966, but spent most of his childhood in the Philippines. Pfeiffer relocated to New York in 1990, where he attended Hunter College and the Whitney Independent Study Program. Pfeiffer’s groundbreaking work in video, sculpture, and photography. Pfeiffer is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, most notably becoming the inaugural recipient of The Bucksbaum Award given by the Whitney Museum of American Art (2000). In 2002, Pfeiffer was an artist-in-residence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at ArtPace in San Antonio, Texas. In 2003, a traveling retrospective of his work was organized by the MIT List Visual Arts Center and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

Christ Ian Haye is a poet, critic and gallerist who splits his time between New York, Los Angeles and Berlin. He founded the gallery The Project (1998-2009) and now is the impressario behind dba Christian Haye.