Emerging as an artist in the 1990s, during the “first digital turn,” Paul Pfeiffer made ample use of the consumer-grade editing software that was then being introduced to the market. A series of works involving the erasure of players from televised footage of sporting events won him near-instant acclaim during those years. In this film, shot at LAMOCA on the occasion of his first retrospective exhibition in the U.S., Pfeiffer explains the thinking behind these early efforts and the increasingly ambitious ones that followed. The show’s title, “Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom,” cues the viewer to the broad historical scope of the artist’s practice. For Pfeiffer, technology is not only a means of production but also a central subject of inquiry. We are technical animals, Pfeiffer suggests; we are freed by our machines as much as we are defined by them. As he says, “I’m really trying to build off of a kind of popular understanding of post-production to describe something much bigger, a kind of current perceptual regime we’re in that we’re not always aware of because we take it as natural. It is the water we’re swimming in or the air we’re breathing.”
Paul Pfeiffer was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, in 1966 but spent the greatest part of his childhood in the Philippines, where his parents worked as schoolteachers under the auspices of the Methodist church. He earned his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in printmaking, a practice that would continue to influence his thinking as he turned his attention to photography and video during his graduate studies at Hunter College and the Whitney Program in New York. To Pfeiffer, every image is a layered composite of “screens,” which can be altered by way of addition as well as subtraction. Around the turn of the millennium, his incisive treatment of the culture of spectacle gained a broad, international audience. His work has been featured in solo shows at numerous renowned institutions, including the Whitney Museum of American Art (2001), MUSAC León, Spain (2008), and Sammlung Goetz in Munich, Germany (2011). Pfeiffer is represented by Paula Cooper Gallery in New York and Thomas Dane Gallery in London.
Crew Credits –
Production:
SCI-Arc Channel Creator and Executive Producer – Hernán Díaz Alonso
SCI-Arc Channel Executive Producer – Reza Monahan
SCI-Arc Channel Creative Director – William Virgil
Segment Producer – Jan Tumlir
Director – Reza Monahan
Director of Photography – Bailey Galvin-Scott
B Camera – Michael Rice
C Camera – Peter Rupkey
Sound Engineer – Chris Trueman
Post-Production:
Story Producer – Jan Tumlir
Editors – Cal Crawford/Reza Monahan
Additional Images and Video Provided by the Artist and MOCA
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