Paul Pfeiffer

Paul Pfeiffer
MC Gallery
December 2 -- February 17, 2007

Paul Pfeiffer’s images jolt a viewer and come forward as forceful breaks in the usually seamless and fluid medium of video. Take his most famous video work, Fragment of a Crucifixion, After Francis Bacon, 1999. Former Charlotte Hornet’s player Larry Johnson, without basketball or recognizable team logos on his jersey, appears to enact some sort of primal groan or scream. The display bursts forth over and over, caught forever in Pfeiffer’s constant, revealing looping. This is not ordinary television.

Thus John Baldessari once described Pfeiffer’s work as an “offensive strike against the inherent passivity of video." Especially in the form of television, video is conducive to physical inactivity and mental stasis. Basketball games, for example, are recognizable and safe -- when the crowd pulses and cheers, we pulse and cheer. When the crowd stretches, we stretch. It is a mass moment, action by inertia -- commercial break, fridge, commercial for things in the fridge. As Pfeiffer himself has commented, “People are used to being told what to think about what they see.”

With this in mind, he tries to break through these signifiers by not allowing or erasing them. The crowd is expunged. The basketball goals have disappeared. The basketball game, usually desired to be viewed as large as possible all over the U.S. on increasingly bigger screens, is reduced to a couple of inches of projection on the wall. The basketball game as a whole, as a complete context for Johnson in the video, is not allowed. No narrative or events push one forward. There is no way to become bound up in the video. We are not allowed our cues, not given our indicators of what to do.

Pfeiffer, in his new exhibition at MC, presents more thwarted mass moments in the form of photographs and four video works. The overall effect of the show is a bit disjointed, at times very recognizable and ordinary and at other times fresh and evocative. Pfeiffer, however, expands his already intense critique of technological culture and how it gets bound up in older rituals we sometimes don’t know we are still inacting.

The photographs extend his Four Horseman of the Apocalypse series. Again, we have isolated figures in stadiums on basketball courts, but unlike the video work which has a creepy, spectral feel, the figures in the photographs take on sort of prophetic magnitude. With the crowd trained on them, they appear as figures with answers. The best photo work of the show is of a child, born aloft and focused upon by spectators and cameras. In reality, this must be the son of a star basketball player. In Pfeiffer’s world, the little boy’s presence is amped and exalted like a golden calf.

There is also a photograph of a man standing at a press table in the middle of an empty arena, his hand covering his face in expressionistic gesture. This man seems like discoursing minister, full of pomp and rhetoric, and what occurs here is quite interesting. Does Pfeiffer suggest that signifiers of video and spectacle inducing media cover up feelings in society that seem to be much like old fashion worship? Are basketball players and media figures our temporary gods, replaced each night by new symbols? There is pessimism at work here.

The crux of the show, however, is not the photographs. For as good as they are, we’ve seen this work before. The centerpiece instead is three mini-stadiums built out of plywood. Two have voyeur holes. One is completely closed.

The first stadium piece, Pfeiffer calls it Commander Robot 1, 2006, is completely closed with a surveillance camera inside, and the recording of the inside of the box is projected on the wall outside of the box. The projection is of the opening of a Queen concert, with Freddie Mercury and the boys erased. The opening replays over and over. We, like with the Johnson piece, are not allowed the event, only a piece of it to let us know what is happened, what our expectations are, what are desires appear to be. However, we cannot see the projector, we cannot see the recording in process. This adds a nice twist to his previous work. A viewer feels physically displaced from the concert.

The other two stadium works can be looked into. You bend over and view small interior screens through a small open doors, the oil from people’s foreheads already collecting above the tiny portals. Your eye shoots across the mini-floor to recordings of crowds, all shot in the Philippines, Pfeiffer native land. The crowds, for lack of a better term, are bored. They seem to be people in their mid to late twenties and they look completely unimpressed. Over and over, they produce a chant. Collectively, the chant is forceful and impressive. Individually, the chant seems to barely make it out of the person’s mouth. Again, the event enacts a ritual that appears to be something when projected or recorded and is revealed as something else, in this case a little moment inside a little stadium projected by people that want to be somewhere else.

Pfeiffer’s work seems tailor made for “society of the spectacle” and “image world” rhetoric. The work seems to counteract the trajectory of desire supposedly brought on by late capitalistic society if you believe in that sort of thing. Pheiffer does not give us bigger televisions, but small screens with more interaction. He does not offer spectacles that create featureless individuals but instead undercurrents technology that seems to induce such ideas. In many ways, his work owes a lot to Bruce Nauman or Nan June Paik, using the mechanical equipment of video to create a physical relationship. What is interesting about Pfeiffer, however, is that he notices that video merely covers much older and familiar human tendencies. This needs to be said, over and over, so we don’t forget it.

Image courtesy of MC Gallery, Photo Credit: Joshua White

Robert Rauschenberg

Robert Rauschenberg
28 Shirtboards
Bobbie Greenfield Gallery
December 2 -- January 20, 2007

In 1953, Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly went to Italy on an artist grant. Actually, the grant was for Twombly alone, but the meager sum kept them alive and working for a few months abroad. The money did, as money does, grow short, and Rauschenberg discovered he was broke and without a job. Hearing of an opportunity in Morocco, he spent his “return home” money to get there and Twombly joined him. Eventually hired by a heavy equipment company, Rauschenberg made it home to the States.

The trip had an intense influence on the two artists. During the voyage, Twombly made the sketches that would become the backbone of his distinctive scrawl and graffiti break from the Abstract Expressionists. His North Africa Sketchbook eventually fed into paintings such as Tiznit, 1953 and Criticism, 1954, which many critics see as turning points towards his mature style. Twombly was thinking deeply about painting and drawing at this period, and furthermore Europe had entered his consciousness in a real way. In 1958, he would move to Rome for good.

Rauschenberg, on the other hand, was making strange, small work made from discarded items like feathers and rocks, hotel stationary and penny flea market books. Many of these works were shown in Walter Hopps’ landmark Rauschenberg: The Early Fifties show at the Menil collection in Houston in 1991. Rauschenberg used his European experience to make a series of Joseph Cornell like shadow boxes, though he had not yet heard of Cornell. He took a number of impressive photographs of Moroccan cities and landscapes, showing the influence of Aaron Suskind at Black Mountain College in Asheville, North Carolina. He also made a suite of bizarre shirtboard collages, a strange hybrid of Surrealism and the unlikely influence of Joseph Albers.

These Shirtboards, a series of twenty or so, are now presented in the form of a 1990 recreated edition at Bobbie Greenfield Gallery at Bergamot Station in Santa Monica. They are unassuming, sober works, but contain many of the issues that Rauschenberg carried with him through his entire career.

If anything, the Shirtboards are a playful ribbing of Albers. Rauschenberg was famously frustrated with Albers discipline and his rigorous formal exercises. The Shirtboards recall one such activity. Albers would have students do was arrange shapes cut from construction paper into visual experiments, so the students could push abstract forms as far as they could to understand their possibilities. In Morroco and North Africa, Rauschenberg took on these activities, turing them into vehicles for the hodge podge of life.

In his Shirtboards, Rauschenberg cut from newspapers and books, setting a precedent that he continues to this day, but unlike his later work, the clippings do not seem formal experiments as much as static grounds, placed right in the center of the paper. Albers would do the same in his prints and his Homage to the Square series, but would use an applied color theory to activate the static field. Rauschenberg’s Shirtboards are noticeably drab in terms of color, but he does activate the field. Adding insult upon insult, playfully of course, to Albers, he places pictures of birds and insects, feathers stuck in paper pockets, drawn arrows, and scientific diagrams into the formal exercise. Unwanted things, stuff of the world, floods into Alber’s sacred formal space.

This is what Rauschenberg is famous for. As Leo Steinberg said, “He let life in.” Unlike Twombly, Rauschenberg doesn’t seem remotely interested in Abstract Expressionism at this time. On the surface, he seems more in line with someone like Max Ernst or even Tristan Tzara, using seemly random things to create visual and verbal impact.

Unlike the Surrealists, Rauschenberg’s Shirtboards have a sort of crafty animism about them, a mixture between a voodoo fetish box and a handmade birthday card. They match the tone of the sculptures Rauschenberg was making at this time. Evidenced only by photographs, the sculptures appear much closer to Native American dream catchers than they do to anything in going on in the French circles of Paris and New York. The sculptures were hairy, feathery mobiles shifting and swaying in the wind. The Shirtboards continue the spirit of these sculptures.

How fascinating to think about -- Twombly furiously sketching, taking on the bravura gestures of Ab Ex with gesture itself, and Rauschenberg seemingly poking around the Moroccan terrain for rocks and feathers to make mobiles. Furthermore, Rauschenberg remade this work in 1990, and early photographs of his New York studio shows the Shirtboards still hung with prominence on his proverbial mantle. What is it about these works that Rauschenberg does want to let go or what is it about them that Rauschenberg must carry with him?