Paul Pfeiffer, Resident Artist Lecture 2016

Artist Paul Pfeiffer begins his lecture talking about his relationship to printmaking, photography, sound and video, and how it has always led him to be drawn to the idea of mechanical reproduction. Pfeiffer talks about the mediation of a machine or a technology that comes between the hand and the image, and how he associates this with larger modes of image making: advertising, mass media, and popular culture. Pfeiffer also thinks about the traditions of appropriation and manipulation in contemporary art, specifically in the American context of the picture generation of the 1980s. Pfeiffer also talks about psychoanalysis, and how there is an attempt to create philosophy from an embodied position that accounts for not just logic and the analytical mind but experience on all levels and the sensory. For Pfeiffer, this is extremely pertinent of what we do as artists. Pfeiffer also talks about a project that has been ongoing involving experiments with language in the Philippines; a collaboration with the students of American University where he grew up, to introduce new or other forms of text and videos to them.