The pure products of America
go crazy--
mountain folk from Kentucky
or the ribbed north end of
Jersey
with its isolate lakes and
valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves
old names
and promiscuity between
devil-may-care men who have taken
to railroading
out of sheer lust of adventure--
and young slatterns, bathed
in filth
from Monday to Saturday
to be tricked out that night
with gauds
from imaginations which have no
peasant traditions to give them
character
but flutter and flaunt
sheer rags succumbing without
emotion
save numbed terror
under some hedge of choke-cherry
or viburnum--
which they cannot express--
Unless it be that marriage
perhaps
with a dash of Indian blood
will throw up a girl so desolate
so hemmed round
with disease or murder
that she'll be rescued by an
agent--
reared by the state and
sent out at fifteen to work in
some hard-pressed
house in the suburbs--
some doctor's family, some Elsie
voluptuous water
expressing with broken
brain the truth about us--
her great
ungainly hips and flopping breasts
addressed to cheap
jewelry
and rich young men with fine eyes
as if the earth under our feet
were
an excrement of some sky
and we degraded prisoners
destined
to hunger until we eat filth
while the imagination strains
after deer
going by fields of goldenrod in
the stifling heat of September
somehow
it seems to destroy us
It is only in isolate flecks that
something
is given off
No one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car
William Carlos Williams, "To Elsie" or "The pure products of America / go crazy"
from Spring and all (1923)
Much like his art, even Paul Pfeiffer's name rings with an ethereal familiarity grounded in a misspent adulthood immersed in tv culture. Yes, our visiting artist this week shares his name with Josh Saviano's nerdish character on "The Wonder Years", wherein, week after week, Fred Savage's older, wiser and fictional inner narrator (voiced by Daniel Stern) neatly tied up the loose ends of a late '60s childhood with a kernal of '80s cynicism wrapped in a lyrical and nostalgic lilt of phrase. Paul, the generally faithful next-door neighbor, was never privy to these inner monologs, nor was he granted any of his own. So, he had to try harder, toil away in the magic space between scenes, that silent partner of narrative, until he was allowed back into the main storyline, plot points ironed out and ready for his close up. Paul Pfeiffer, visiting artist, seems to work that same magic space of narrative, but, in his case, he's doing it right in front of our eyes, like a game of three-card monty. And boy, he's more obsessive than Paul Pfeiffer, the awkward middle school teenager, ever dreamed of being. I mean, subtly, and sometimes not so subtly, altering EACH frame of his short animations to either emphasize, say, the basketball, or erase the main characters (as in the Ali fights); that's COMMITMENT. (Most animators I know spend months, if not years, on a single piece; Pfeiffer seems to turn these things out almost overnight, or so it seemed as he shared them with us a few nights ago.)
But, beyond the sort of trumped-up, manufactured familiarity of his name (trumped up and manufactured by ME), I also felt many of his ideas were familiar, too. I had to ask myself, just what is the difference (in technique anyway) between Pfeiffer and Dan Reeves (a video artist who, at least 5 or 10 years ago, was already working with that morphing sensibility) or Tony Oursler (another video artist who projects odd videos onto sculptural surfaces) or William Carlos Williams (see epigraph to this post; though where Williams aims for our gut, our bankrupt and proudly illegitimate lusts, I felt that Pfeiffer allowed too much unearned mystery into his tableaux; does the puppet-like dance of his Stanley Cup sufficiently address the thirst for skillful brutality that birthed it? I guess I'm saying "no".) or Lucas Samaras (whose mirrored corridor is in the Denver Art Museum collection, of which I was reminded of by Pfeiffer's peephole corridor)? I'm not saying that I don't have some respect for Pfeiffer's energy and talented manipulation of a wide variety of material (and materiality), just that, but for a moment here and there, it all seemed "overly" derivative (to be distinguished from a certain amount of derivative quality that's sort of inherent in responding to living in the world we're in these days.)
That said, I do need to acknowledge that I found the small pieces with imagery that mimicked/referred to religious art to be alternately resonant and (gasp!) moving. Perhaps because my experience of religious art is fairly cursory I didn't care (or know to care) how the specific context of any given appropriated composition/overall suggestion might have related to its new context. All that mattered was that sort of blanket approximation of religious meaning and cultural power. Whereas, when I felt I could sort of place TECHNIQUE among recent work/artists, the newer work lost some juice.