Out of Bounds: Paul PFeiffer's "Caryatid" and the Borders of Representation

In his digital video works, contemporary artist Paul Pfeiffer wittily manipulates footage culled from television broadcasts of professional sports. In Caryatid (2004), Pfeiffer digitally erased the soccer ball from a series of brief clips of European-style football matches. Once-heroic dives and spectacular athletic feats are montaged together into a bloopers reel of amusing missteps and clumsy tumbles. Making light of the seriousness of the game, the artist’s interferences place him dangerously close to the position of the spoilsport, a figure Johan Huizinga warned against in Homo Ludens (1938). According to Huizinga, the spoilsport’s actions do more than merely disrupt the play of the game. By disavowing the seriousness of play, the spoilsport threatens the sanctity of the pretenses to which the participants have willingly subjected themselves—the ritualistic rules of the game. But the rule-breaker’s actions aren’t wholly destructive; they can also lead to changes that better reflect the needs and desires of new players and audiences. Working in digital media, Pfeiffer is an artist comfortable on the edges of the accepted bounds of the art object, familiar with transgressing norms and expectations. Pfeiffer’s violation of the video record parallels his antagonism of the rules of representation inherited from the history of Western art. By pressing on these parameters, Pfeiffer attempts to inflect the rules of play in order to accommodate digital-age technologies into a newly defined art object.

Location: LDSOA, Room 150