"...What was going on was not so much erasure and it
never really is. It’s actually more like camouflage..."
"...What remains is not an absent figure but an intensified
figure by virtue of the fact that you are lacking some aspects
of a context to place it in."
"...I really like the combination of a title that conjures
up the history of the evolution of the figure study and
at the same time a suggestion of a kind of larger epic occurring..."
"...It’s extremely difficult to sit in the arena
as an artist with a camera and be dispassionate and be removed
from the emotional intensity that’s going on."
"We have great power today to make images that are
truly spectacular and to achieve a kind of perfection, and
there is something terrifying to me about it..."
Erasure, Camouflage, &
“Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse”
ART:21:
Can you talk about the photographic
sequence "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse?"
PFEIFFER:
"Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse"
is the title of an ongoing series of photographs. It started
with five images that were material drawn from publicity stills
of Marilyn Monroe, with the central figure removed. And at
this point it’s kind of morphed into something else.
Now I’m raiding the archives of the NBA and finding photographs
that I’m manipulating to, generally speaking, remove
a lot of contextual
detail to leave a kind of solitary figure in the setting of
a crowd of people.
The series started with research that I was doing into, at
the time, images of Marilyn Monroe. Why Marilyn? At that point
I thought this has got to be one of the most famous human
bodies in the archive. It conjures up so much, it’s such
a legend. And so I went through these images and ended up
selecting a few of them and then going in and erasing Marilyn
Monroe from the image. One of the things that really interested
me was that in the process, really what was going on was not
so much erasure and it never really is. It’s actually
more like camouflage in the sense that you are taking pieces
of the background from around the image and very slowly applying
these pieces over the body so that in the end you’re
presenting the illusion that you are seeing through to the
background. But in fact you are inventing background material
that wasn’t there before.
What I found out or what I ended up with, which I didn’t
really expect, was in some ways the most abstract
images that I’ve made so far. Unless you know that Marilyn
was there you wouldn’t otherwise know that there was
a figure there, much less that it was specifically Marilyn.
At the time I was really quite focused on the process itself
and the historical resonance and the emotional resonance that
I felt working on these images. I’ve been asked after
the fact how I would describe that, and I’ve thought
that it’s a bit like what people describe as far as ghost
limbs among soldiers. In a war people lose a limb and will
have this continuing feeling like they still have that limb.
Like a ghost limb. Another kind of dramatic example is when
the World Trade Center went down. For long afterwards you
sort of looked up and expected to see something there. Although
it’s literally taking the figure away, in some ways it’s
also intensifying something about the figure that used to
be there.
Now this year and late last year I’ve been continuing
this series under the same title, "Four Horsemen of the
Apocalypse," but talking a very different approach. Now
I’m starting from images that I’m drawing from the
online archive of the NBA. These are images that you can pull
up on your screen and then order for something like twenty
or thirty bucks a pop, and some of them are quite amazing.
They go back to the 1950s and are some of the most striking
images of sports legends in the environment of the stadium
or the arena with the crowds in the background. And so I’ve
been selectively appropriating these images and manipulating
them to remove all the contextual detail, so that what remains
is not an absent figure but an intensified figure by virtue
of the fact that you are lacking some aspects of a context
to place it in.
In the last of these images that I completed, for example,
I started from an image taken from a game in which Wilt Chamberlain
is putting the ball in the basket and there’s three or
four figures around him all trying to prevent him from doing
that. And the figure that remains is not Wilt Chamberlain.
It’s actually one of the minor figures from the margins
of the image. All the others were removed and this sideline
image was moved to the center. So for me it’s quite striking
because, by virtue of being in the margins, I suppose the
person who composed the shot wasn’t too concerned with
what the figure on the side was doing. He’s reaching
up to stop the ball and is in this position that’s so
foreshortened that his shoulders almost completely cover his
head. His head is thrown far back and his legs are extended
out in a kind of extreme way.
Moving this figure to the center makes sense if you see him
on the margins. It's an odd contradiction that you’re
left with because now it seems the shot was composed completely
around him. And it's breaking every rule of composition.
It looks like his head is chopped off, all of his limbs look
awkward. To me it almost resembles the figure in a photograph
of a lynching. At any rate, there’s a strange kind of
inconsistency to the composition of the image. At the same
time this awkwardly composed person is standing dead center
in an arena surrounded by thousand of people who are watching—and there is no ball, no basket, no reason for him
to be jumping or floating in this way. It is the sense of
not just a lack of context, but in a way it looks like this
figure has somehow been frozen into this frame. It looks quite
airless and almost like a stain on the image.
ART:21:
Where does the title come from?
PFEIFFER:
Well, the "Four Horsemen
of the Apocalypse" is an art historical reference in
that it refers back to the woodcuts of Albrecht Dürer,
who in some ways was really an innovator in the field of the
representation
of the figure and was a naturalist and sort of a scientist
in himself. He was really involved in defining the building
blocks of the figure study and the representation of people
during his time. And simultaneously it’s a biblical reference,
since the four horsemen of the apocalypse are precisely the
figures that appear at the point when the world comes to the
end at Armageddon. It's very dramatic, none of which appears
in any way in the photographs. There aren’t even four.
At this point there’s eight of these figures in the series.
But I really like the combination of a title that conjures
up the history of the evolution of the figure study and at
the same time a suggestion of a kind of larger epic occurring
having to do with some kind of dramatic ending or shifting.
ART:21:
How does the process of erasing
or camouflaging the figure in photography translate into your
video works? What is that process like?
PFEIFFER:
The editing process that I use
is very slow and ultimately very manual and requires going
frame by frame, even though to a degree the process
is somewhat automated through software tools. It’s like
the computer can only think so much and then the human hand
and eye really have to do the rest of the refining work. It’s
partially because this kind of editing software is really
meant to be used in tandem with other shooting techniques
and framing techniques. So that, for example, if you really
wanted to remove a figure in an efficient way you should start
by shooting the figure against a blue background which is
standard practice in the special effects world. Then it becomes
very easy. But in my case I’m using found imagery and
often archival imagery, which to begin with is not even very
high quality. It’s already degraded from age. And I’m
often taking an image that’s at it's ninth or tenth generation
by the time it reaches the shelf at a video store and I pull
it of the shelf.
So what it means is when I get to the editing I have to go
very slowly. A certain amount of the automated tools in the
software I can’t use. I just simply have to go and do
it manually. I’ve already started to work with other
people and build a team to work with me on this. I’ve
gone back to my oldest friends in art school who I know are
amazing craftsmen because I hung out with people who had the
same kind of love for doing this kind of work that I had.
To edit a three minute piece like the "Long Count"
pieces, it would take me and two or three other people roughly
two or three months. And that's now that we’ve gotten
better at it, to do three minutes worth of finished footage.
And what’s curious to me is it’s actually a process
that I enjoy. If I had my way and there were no other added
complications to renting a studio,
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
consciousness of the world and achieve a certain focus. People
would call it right brain focus, but at any rate, it draws
you in and can be quite relaxing and enjoyable especially
if you don’t have some horrendous deadline to meet. At
the same time, this kind of process predates the computer
and goes back to the way animation was done in Hollywood early
on where you would find practically a room full of what amounts
to animation factory workers overseen by a foreman who makes
the important decisions about what the figures are doing.
Ultimately you have a large team of people who are paid less!
[LAUGHS]
ART:21:
Let’s talk about the NBA
in San Antonio where the process of obtaining your source
material is quite different from dipping into an archive of
images. The filming process with the Spurs—what were you
trying to do there?
PFEIFFER:
I started out in this process
thinking, I’ve spent the last couple of years trying
to accumulate footage from commercially available tapes and
off the TV, and wouldn’t it be great to take it one step
further, or one step closer to the source and try to get exactly
the images I want on the spot? Especially because I’m
working with special effects software to do a lot of the manipulations
that I am doing. And what I have or what I can generally afford
is a consumer level version of much more expensive machines
and software that only Hollywood can use. So I’m really
interested in trying to figure out how to move past the consumer
level. Not necessarily to do something more Hollywood, but
to my mind kind it’s a way of getting deeper into the
material.
Ultimately, if you look at how the images are made that leads
back to Hollywood and back to professional sports. It’s
these places that the tools were really made for. The consumer
tools are a secondary output. Everything is really tailored
for a much bigger industry. I find it really an interesting
possibility to work somehow closer to that, even though I
know that with copyright issues and all the money that’s
involved there’s plenty of reasons not to.
When I was developing a plan for the ArtPace residency in
Texas, I found out that the Spurs—the basketball team
in San Antonio—and the owners of the Spurs, are quite
friendly to artists and they are patrons of the arts in Texas.
So through ArtPace I approached them, and lo and behold they
were like "Sure, you can come and shoot as much footage
as you want at the game." I approached it as kind of
an experiment. Wasn’t exactly sure what I was going to
do and how I was going to do it but thought, let’s just
go in there and try something out and discover a few things.
One was that after a few days of shooting it became clear
that what I could shoot—and actually they gave me a camera
man to work with, they were so generous—what I could
shoot and what I could tell the camera man to shoot, in the
end wasn’t necessarily more interesting than the kind
of stuff that I could pull of the television in a way. The
television broadcast crew has ten cameras instead of just
one, with fancy track systems that allow for really smooth
motion shots.
The footage that I could get off the TV is of a much higher
quality then what I could actually shoot myself on the court,
without my duplicating the infrastructure and having ten cameras
myself and doing what they were doing precisely. The other
thing that I discovered is that there’s an enormous amount
of activity happening in the stadium beyond the game itself,
and that’s what I found myself really interested in and
focusing on. At a certain point I just stopped filming the
game and turned my camera around and started filming the crew.
Season Three! [LAUGHS] I mean the camera crew in the arena,
and watching how the whole spectacle
worked. Which is quite amazing. The final effect is that it’s
extremely difficult to sit in the arena as an artist with
a camera and be dispassionate and be removed from the emotional
intensity that’s going on. At a certain point, especially
if it was a good game, I just wanted to put down the camera
and just watch. How do they do that?
It’s a fascinating thing because I got to talk a bit
with the people who produce the games, not the players, but
the audio visual technicians who produce the games. And they
are timing the bringing down of the lights and the bringing
up of the lights at every moment. And where the camera men
are standing. It’s interesting to watch the camera men
because often times you’ll have a row of three or four
camera men, and they are so well trained in terms of following
the game that it’s like a ballet. Without even looking
at each other they move perfectly in tandem. The sight of
four cameras all moving...it’s almost like a chorus line.
ART:21:
Do you think filming live events
has generated a shift in your thinking?
PFEIFFER:
Well I guess it relates to me
to the idea of a reduction of things to images. We have great
power today to make images that are truly spectacular and
to achieve a kind of perfection, and there is something terrifying
to me about it as well because maybe these images become so
perfect that you forget everything else. So in a way there
is like a shrinking possibility in the mind or in the imagination.
It’s kind of like if you’re served literally five
hundred channels on TV, why go out? There are obviously plenty
of reasons to go out, but there’s something really seductive
at the same time about the comfort of pre-digested images
that are available. It makes me wonder if ultimately what
we are talking about is not just the proliferation of images
or a more distracted viewer or freedom of choice in terms
of the consumption of images, but really a shrinking of the
imagination.
