The Brooklyn Rail

This well-deserved mid-career survey of Paul Pfeiffer’s work demonstrates how much he has been able to create compelling and timely work that engages and interrogates the ways and means of spectacle without surrendering to the cheap thrills of what is often called spectacular. From the beginning, his work has taken what could be seen as the excess of the imagery or subject matter he selects so as to re-form and reactivate it using a calm, focused restraint.

Several of the earliest works included remain his best known, possibly because they are built with structural economy. For example, both Fragment of the Crucifixion (After Francis Bacon) (1999) and The Long Count (Rumble in the Jungle) (2001)—despite using footage from an NBA basketball game, or, even more dramatically, one of Muhammad Ali’s history-making prize fights—are intensified by removals from the clips they sample. Starting with the erasure of visual details like the court or ringside text, or all of the basketball players except Larry Johnson, or even both boxing legends from the infamous 1974 bout in Kinshasa (Ali and his opponent George Foreman), then reconfiguring each clip as a soundless loop, and finally projecting the first quite small on a wall or displaying the second on a very small monitor, these two works become quiet and mesmerizing objects by which we contemplate a singular Larry Johnson rooted in a nearly frozen scream that is both ecstatic and tragic, and marvel at the “auras” of the missing Ali and Foreman from a historic and symbolic event. Pfeiffer applies pressure to all of the materials he uses to create something extraordinary, intensifying the complexities of the work that emerges and keeping it open to the inevitable transformations of meaning.

The above descriptions gloss over the impact of the works’ installation and the specificity of their equipment. They each rely upon an apparatus that attaches the work to the wall, but to different ends: the first projects its image back onto the wall by way of small round projector attached to a curved mounting arm, the second thrusts its image quite far out into the space by way of a very small monitor attached to the end of a long metal conduit pipe. More than most of the installation artists of his generation, Pfeiffer early on maintained the ways in which his work is sculpture while extending into the territory of site-relational installation, not to mention the realm of the cinematic. It is not only possible, but maybe preferable, to engage these videos as we would a modernist sculpture, giving ourselves over to the orchestration they perform upon our position in relation to them, as we go up to one on the wall, while the other meets us out in the space.

Pfeiffer continues to expand upon the theme—and the consequences—of the navigation of approach and distance. His consistency is reinforced and amplified by the impressive material and visual range of the work, so much so that in a couple of instances I found myself concluding that he had actually achieved the spectacular without sacrificing his investigative principles of restraint.

First, there is The Saints (2007), Pfeiffer’s re-staging of the 1966 football (soccer) match in which England defeated West Germany to win its only World Cup, displaying the footage on a small monitor in an enormous room outfitted with speakers that broadcast the reactions of a crowd he brought together in Manila to watch (or re-watch) the legendary battle. Then there is Vitruvian Figure (2008), a sculpture that can rightly be called a monumental miniature. Based upon the design of the 2000 Sydney Olympic stadium, it is a diorama that is the size of a small house, largely because it imagines an arena built to seat one million people. Pfeiffer worked with skilled laborers in the Philippines to produce it, and it literally embodies his overarching interest in viewership and the structures used to focus, sustain, and/or intensify it, with neither a projector nor monitor in sight. I will admit I struggled a bit to keep this last work in mind while considering examples from a more recent series that continue to this day. “Incarnator” (2018–ongoing), at this point, consists of eight sculptures that take the form of the head, torso, pelvis, arms, and legs of the heavily-tattooed Justin Bieber. These objects, made in collaboration with artisans who produce santos for Catholic churches and private worship, travel the complicated colonial history of their making to arrive at, let’s say, Bieber’s well-documented form, leaving me, for the time being, not ready to make the leap with Pfeiffer from the lasting quietude of so much of the rest of his work. Or maybe I should say “not yet.”