Paul Pfeiffer makes video art that, at its best, exploits the one-to-one relationship between viewer and image more commonly found in the experience of painting than of most video. The resulting intimacy can be disarming.
At the Project, the New York-based artist has his L.A. debut with a show of three video works, two sculptures and a photograph, including a work related to the one that gained him instant notoriety at the 2000 Whitney Biennial. "Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion" (2001), like the Francis Bacon painting to which the title refers, is a video triptych that uses art of the past as a springboard for up-to-the-minute meditations on current social obsessions.
The triptych is made from three miniature video projectors affixed to the wall on short armatures. The side-by-side projected images are tiny (just 4 by 6 inches), requiring that you stand close and peer into them.
What you see is a short, repeating loop showing a familiar modern spectacle--a pro basketball game in a huge stadium, witnessed from the court-level closeness of network TV. The image on the wall is writ small and with concentrated intensity, like an electronic manuscript illumination.
The crowd-filled bleachers are a silently roaring blur and flashbulbs pop like a summer meteor shower, but there isn't a basketball player in sight. Pfeiffer has digitally erased the men, who leave ghost-images in the rippling electronic ether. All that's clearly seen is the basketball careening through space, back and forth. It's like essence-of-thrill, pure sensation weirdly abstracted.
"Sex Machine," a second, single-image work with a similar format, shows a short loop of a pop singer on stage in close-up and in mid-croon. His facial features have been digitally erased. In any event he's largely obscured by the chunky microphone, which he caresses with both hands. They're clasped around its girth in a manner at once erotic and prayerful (Francis Bacon again). The muffled soundtrack repeats a breathy gasp.
Pfeiffer's video erotics assume monumental scale yet more subtle resonance in "Dutch Interior." The wall-size projection shows a view down a staircase toward a tastefully appointed, middle-class foyer in a domestic environment. Nothing moves, except for the enlarged fuzz of the video scan lines.
