Paul Pfeiffer

The acclaimed video and sound installations, sculptures and photographs of Hawaiian-born American artist Paul Pfeiffer (born 1966) deal with the idea of an "afterglow" of mass-media images that are rooted in the collective memory of a globalized media society, and that can be deconstructed with the aid of some heavy editing. Pfeiffer digitally manipulates found media footage, relentlessly cutting, retouching, duplicating and layering the material with the aim of freeing the viewer to experience its ideologically loaded cultural constructedness. In the 1999 video "Fragment of a Crucifixion (After Francis Bacon)," for example, basketball star Larry Johnson's whoop of victory is looped into a weirdly unnatural expression of terror (or death, as the title suggests). This volume surveys Pfeiffer's works of the past 15 years, with abundant color reproductions.