"...For me it’s a bit like using the vernacular
of our time. I’m attracted to the idea of working in
a way that is not of the nineteenth century but is really
of today."
"So the question always comes up: who is using who,
or who makes who? Is the image making us or do we make images?
It seems really difficult to tell these days. It’s
a double-edged sword."
"...You can’t attempt to push the envelope without
in some way being involved or inside the envelope."
"...In the Philippines today it is hard to walk down
the street without consuming the detritus of American pop
culture."
"I’ve had a special interest in domestic interiors
that also are scenes of horror or of the uncanny."
"...The interest is not so much the occult per se.
It’s really a question about the narrative or the image
that can inspire that kind of terror."
"It seems like reality itself is being formatted and
tailored for precisely this situation where whatever I do
I’m encouraged to think of myself as potentially being
on TV or potentially being before an audience."
Scenes of Horror: Poltergeist,
The Exorcist, and Amityville Horror
ART:21:
Can you talk about "Poltergeist"?
It's one of the few sculptural pieces you've produced.
PFEIFFER:
Well, one thing about "Poltergeist"
is that although it seems most obviously sculptural, in terms
of the production process it is also digital and in a sense
also filmic. The title refers to the movie "Poltergeist"
and the sculpture specifically is a detail in a scene from
the movie, but an important detail I think. The detail it
relates to is a moment in the kitchen in this haunted house
in the suburbs in California somewhere. Everything seems normal
and then one day in the kitchen Mom turns around and finds
all the kitchen furniture rearranged, in literally the blink
of an eye, into this baroque configuration. There's this elaborate
pile on the kitchen table. I think of that moment as being
similar to the stairway in the Amityville Horror in that it
describes a kind of an exchange or a communication that is
happening between a human entity and something that would
be it’s reverse or it’s antithesis, something not
human.
I studied this scene for a while and figured out a way to
reproduce that figure piece by piece, or that configuration
piece by piece in a 3-D rendering
program on the computer. I sent the file containing the coordinates
of this three dimensional model to a company in Los Angeles
that turned it back into an object. And the way they did that
is using a rapid prototyping machine that is normally used
to make things like sunglasses and automobile parts—to
get from the invention step to the step where you can then
mass produce the object. But what’s really happening
with this machine is a block of dust is collected in a glass
box and then lasers come down and, following the coordinates
in the computer file, selectively meet. And where they meet
it generates just enough heat to fuse the plastic particles
into a solid form. And it goes this way, working from the
bottom upwards in minute layers. It’s a bit like a laser
print, but thousands of laser prints one on top of another
to produce a three dimensional form. At the end the glass
box is lifted off and the excess plastic powder is blown away
to reveal this object.
So one of the interesting things about it is that if you look
at it on a micro-level, because of the way it’s made,
it’s almost the way a tree grows from the inside out.
What you have left is a very fine pattern that’s almost
like tree rings. If you inspect it closely enough you can
kind of tell how this thing was made, but otherwise it seems
very difficult to me to have any sense of how it was made.
That was what interested me about the process. Aside from
the manual clicking and dragging of creating the computer
model from the original source material of the movie screen
to the finished object, it wasn't touched by human hands.
And in the end this object arrived at the museum, packed in
Styrofoam bubbles, as though by magic. An object made by machines,
but in the way I look at it, made by a kind of ghost in the
machine.
ART:21:
What do you think this speaks
to for other people?
PFEIFFER:
I’m not sure. But the thing
that really interested me in the process is that we’re
talking about a technology that is very much in use in the
world and is really the way that objects that are much more
familiar to us in everyday use—this is the way they’re
made. They’re prototyped with a machine like this. So
for me it’s a bit like using the vernacular of our time.
I’m attracted to the idea of working in a way that is
not of the nineteenth century but is really of today. I don’t
know if any of this comes across in the object as such. And
in some ways I feel like maybe it’s one of the most challenging
things that I’ve done. It provides the least in terms
of a point of entry. But for me, the point of entry in that
piece has to do with the question of how it was made.
ART:21:
Do you feel that you are utilizing
technology to suit your interests as an artist, or that the
technology is pulling you along, making you as an individual
in the process of working with it?
PFEIFFER:
I guess that’s the contradiction
I feel working as an artist today. These days we live in a
world of incredible image making tools and in a way it’s
not even the tools themselves. It’s that you are really
dealing with a system. There’s a huge machine, or a huge
infrastructure that undergirds every individual image we see
on TV. And for me it’s very hard to dissociate the single
image from that entire network. So the question always comes
up: who is using who, or who makes who? Is the image making
us or do we make images? It seems really difficult to tell
these days. It’s a double-edged sword.
It’s reminds me of a definition of what vernacular is
that I read once: it’s that thing which both institutes
and subverts the rule. So, can you get beyond the spectacle
by making more spectacle? It’s an interesting question
to me. In a way you can’t attempt to push the envelope
without in some way being involved or inside the envelope.
At the same time, I’m not so attached to a model of political
transgression that is so centered on the individual. I think
things can be done creatively and in terms of advancing a
greater liberation of oneself and other people. Without there
having to be a leader of the revolution, or even a dramatic
spectacle of revolution per se.
ART:21:
Your piece "Dutch Interior"—let’s talk about that. Where did the desire to
make that come from.
PFEIFFER:
One of the things that’s
always interested me are miniature doll houses. Some of the
very earliest personal projects that I undertook when I was
a teenager was making, not really doll houses but miniature
interior settings. What I used to do is make these settings
and at the time I didn’t really have access to doll house
furniture or stores and that kind of thing. So it was really
just working from scratch. And I made a 1920s looking American
grocery store or five and ten stores, and I remember making
an antique shop and various other things. Which my mom was
really proud of me for, but then was horrified because...at
some point I would take them outside to the backyard and douse
them with kerosene and then burn them. I don’t know why,
but there was something somehow fascinating about watching
this miniature world go up in flames. I didn’t have a
video camera at the time.
ART:21:
But do you think it was about
a filmic impulse?
PFEIFFER:
Perhaps it was something like
a filmic impulse. I guess what I was creating was something
like the fireplace that I could look into and watch this strange
morphing of material that was going on as it burned. No living
things involved, it was just really about wanting to make
a certain kind of moving image. I also find it interesting
that years later somebody told me that some of the first works
that Robert Gober did, that I don’t think are very well
know, are doll houses that he would then burn.
ART:21:
Was there any theme in the settings?
PFEIFFER:
Well, the one thing that I had
at the time was a book on how to make doll houses and it so
happened that within this book what you are given is a series
of kind of quintessential American interior genres.
The five and ten cent store and the antique store. Various
kinds of domestic interiors and different periods or different
interior decoration styles. So in a way that was my inspiration.
Not so much the particular environment I was living in, because
I was actually in a small town in the Philippines at that
time, but more these archetypal interior spaces that I was
looking at in a book.
ART:21:
Do you think there's a relationship
to religious altars in there?
PFEIFFER:
I suppose there is, yes. I actually
did make some miniature religious themes as well. I made several
versions of a miniature nativity scene, but I also think what
we are talking about is I grew up in a university setting
that was Protestant, and that also means that it was American.
It was basically built by American missionaries and, more
generally speaking, in the Philippines today it is hard to
walk down the street without consuming the detritus of American
pop culture.
So it sort of made sense that living in the tropics I was
still influenced by a book representing images of American
suburbia. In a way that was part of the mindset.
ART:21:
So you weren’t thinking
of a world that was real.
ART:21:
Yes. One of the most compelling
images at the time for me was the movie "The Exorcist"
because I was a teenager when that movie came out and never
saw it and was not allowed to see it. But at some point it
was almost all-consuming in terms of the kind of terror that
it inspired. One of the very first diorama pieces that I have
made as an adult was essentially returning to that moment.
It occurred to me that the bedroom of Reagan in the movie
"The Exorcist" is probably the architectural
setting that I grew up with as the image of terror, and it’s
something that I never even saw. It was something that I just
recreated in my head. So I literally watched the movie over
and over again, memorizing the details of that room until
I could physically fabricate that room in miniature. I gave
it the title "Quad Nomen Mihi Est?" which is a reference
from the movie as well. It’s the priest talking to the
possessed girl and asking in Latin, who are you?
ART:21:
And so all this led up to the
work "Dutch Interior"?
ART:21:
Alright. Well to begin with,
I think for a long time I’ve had this fascination with
domestic interiors and it goes back to my dollhouse making
days. And I suppose I’ve had a special interest in domestic
interiors that also are scenes of horror or of the uncanny.
And maybe what I am really interested in is what I think of
as the uncanny—that moment when the familiar turns against
itself and suddenly reveals itself to be, in fact, quite strange.
So with the piece "Dutch Interior", where that came
from was another movie that features scary domestic interiors
that goes back to my early childhood imagination and it’s
the movie "Amityville Horror."
Revisiting that movie, I think what is really interesting
(because ultimately it’s kind of a bad movie) is how
the camera becomes a stand in for the devil. So that the movie
is really filmed with these very discomforting scenes where
you are viewing the family and you’re viewing this otherwise
ideal suburban house from behind a bush, or peaking around
a tree, or peaking in through a window or through some corner
in the house that really wouldn’t be the place where
a human being would stand. It's either too low or too high.
Or from someplace that would really be uninhabitable to an
adult human, maybe a child, but maybe not even that. I started
watching it out of a curiosity about how the camera was really
being used. And what I noticed is that in that movie the stairway
plays a very important role. In a way it’s the central
corridor along which a meeting of gazes occurs between the
human inhabitants—the family—and this non-human
inhabitant, the devil.
There’s many really disturbing scenes where you’re
looking down the staircase at the family coming up or looking
up the staircase at the priest coming down, that kind of thing.
And that’s what led me too the idea of recreating this
scenario of the central stairway in the house. I worked with
a person who makes miniature settings for Hollywood movies
in Los Angeles. And he helped me create this interior. So
in the final piece what you have is a moving image that’s
built around this dollhouse-sized diorama. You really have
two images. And the viewer comes to be in the middle of a
circuit loop, or a video feed loop between these two images.
One image is a large projection of a view looking from the
top of the stairs down into the entry way of the house, and
it’s coming through a live feed from inside the diorama
using a little surveillance camera. And it's projected on
a wall that’s roughly thirteen feet high and eighteen
feet wide. And as you move close to the wall the image sort
of disintegrates into the screen pattern of the projector
and you find a little hole with light coming out of it. And
looking through the hole you see the diorama itself, which
is built into the wall. And you find yourself looking through
the peephole and looking in the opposite direction from the
bottom of the stairs and the entryway of the house, upwards
towards the second floor where the camera is. Although it’s
hidden so you don’t see the camera. And that’s it.
It’s a circuit between these two images: the actual dollhouse
that you can only see through the peephole and then this other
view which is a video image offered by the surveillance camera
and projected bigger. As a viewer you’re sort of circulating
between the two.
ART:21:
So you took this image from your
childhood and you heightened it?
ART:21:
"The Amityville Horror"
I also never saw as a kid, but I got a hold of a copy of the
paperback book and read through that completely and it terrified
and fascinated me. "Helter Skelter" was another
one, same thing. And I suppose looking at it now, the interest
is not so much the occult per se. It’s really a question
about the narrative
or the image that can inspire that kind of terror. And what
is terror anyway?
I think of terror as really a disturbance in one’s sense
of the normal or disturbance in one’s sense of groundedness—who
I am and who other people are and what the world is and maybe
what the boundary between these things are. In the case of
"The Exorcist" it literally is about a force that
mixes up the boundary of the individual and the world outside
the individual. I’m really interested in that discomfort
and that sense of alienation from one’s sense of centeredness
in one’s body or in one’s sense. And so with the
"Amityville Horror" piece I suppose what really
interested me about the stairway was that here was an architectural
rendering of just that—an image or a space that represented
a dialogue between the I and the not I and the kind of terror
and the sense of the home becoming an un-home that that represents.
ART:21:
Is it an interest in the heightened
sense or spectacle, like in sports?
PFEIFFER:
Yes, the same thing in the sports
spectacle.
My interest in a way is how does an individual function and
even excel in a situation of that kind of extreme visual and
emotional overload. I came across something that doesn’t
relate directly but I find really interesting and that’s
an account from the writer Franz Fanon. He describes the child
of the colonies moving to the big city, say from the Caribbean
to Paris. And in a particular paragraph in the book he narrates
that the child of the colonies comes to Paris and finds himself
on a subway and he’s smoking a cigarette. And as he smokes
he sees himself smoking, and everything that he does he sees
himself doing it, almost as though he were looking at himself
from somebody else’s viewpoint, no longer centered in
his body but somewhere out there.
And that’s a curious thing. It makes me think of what
an actor might feel like before the camera. In a sense everything
that the actor is doing is being done for an invisible audience
that doesn’t exist yet. Or the actor is doing it for
the camera, but really for some imagined sense of a viewer
who is going to come later. So it’s an interesting kind
of synchronicity between this specifically colonial setting
and a much more common setting today involving, not the colonies,
but technology and the thinking behind reality TV for example.
It seems like reality itself is being formatted and tailored
for precisely this situation where whatever I do I’m
encouraged to think of myself as potentially being on TV or
potentially being before an audience. And I think of that
as becoming the definition of reality or the parameters for
a kind of reality that we will live in if we’re not already
living in it now.
And there's a history that comes before that that relates
to the colonies and to say even racism and other things as
well. Say schizophrenia, where you have an individual who
for some reason feels compelled to push past the boundaries
of themselves and almost live as though they were somewhere
out there looking back at themselves. This kind of relationships
between the building blocks of subjectivity—or how
I define who I am in relation to other people and to the world—and image making tools is maybe the real meat of the
exploration that I’m involved in.
