Paul Pfeiffer (American, b. 1966) digitally edits and erases footage from sports broadcasts, films and concerts, removing players and performers to shift attention onto crowds, equipment and the machinery of spectacle. He describes the resulting works, spanning video, sculpture, photography and installation, as “video sculptures”. Born in Honolulu, Hawaii, he spent part of his childhood in the Philippines before relocating to New York in 1990.
Pfeiffer earned a BFA in printmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1987 and later studied at Hunter College and the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program. His 1999 work Fragment of a Crucifixion (After Francis Bacon) digitally edits a broadcast basketball game so that the players appear only as ghostly afterimages, while the crowd's reaction remains. The piece references a 1944 triptych by Francis Bacon and won Pfeiffer the Whitney Museum of American Art's inaugural Bucksbaum Award in 2000. In Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse #10 (2004), he removed every competitor, logo and scoreboard from a photograph of a basketball player, leaving a single ambiguous figure venerated by the crowd around him. Other sculptures recreate props and sets from horror films such as Poltergeist, The Exorcist and The Amityville Horror using computer-generated models.
