Paul Pfeiffer is one of the most renowned contemporary visual artists in New York if not the USA. He was born in Honolulu, Hawaii in 1966 as the son of William and Ruth Imperial Pfeiffer, former great musical directors of Silliman University. His father was American and his mother was Filipino. He spend his elementary and high school years in Silliman University, but left in his junior high school year for New Mexico. There they lived in the camp of the native Americans where he finished his high school years. After deciding to pursue arts, he went to arts school, visited Hunter College in New York and attended the Whitney Independent Study Program.
Pfeiffer received numerous awards and fellowships, like The Bucksbaum Award given by the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2000.
What caused you to pursue visual arts? Did you have mentors or other people who brought you to this path?
“There were many causes which brought me to visual arts, well starting from my elementary and high school years. I was not so socially active and I found interest in arts. My parents were very supportive, which was a great help, especially at the point where I was looking around and deciding whether actually to commit on going to arts school. I had an older sister who actually went to arts school, but she never pursued it as a career. My parents were generally supportive, but my sister, having been through art school knowing what it was all about, was encouraging me as well.”
What where the events that influenced you in your art? Did your roots also influenced you art?
“I started off from a very personal place and part of what committing into contemporary art means, is that you go from the very personal to something that is more larger in history and in movements. And certainly now, I feel that there is a kind of resonance with the history of pop art. Particularly I connect with some kind of a fascination with American culture, by which I mean TV culture in particular. When I call it that it's also global. In that sense I feel like my artwork and my interest have in some ways particular roots here. Becoming aware and zooming American culture from a distance you see that there is something surreal in growing up in the tropics such as Philippines and constantly being aware of this other culture which is very far away but is also very present to us. It is some kind of a disjunctive reality. And in some ways, now living in New York
I feel the experience like TV and what comes through from advertisements and movies, which is literally disjunctive because of distance. And its not here but actually equally in the US. There is this thing where things are just unreal. And that is what makes American culture so desirable. There is a desire to dissect it and see what is behind it. And that is a major part of what motivates me as an artist. There are a lot of idols. And the older I get the more there are and the more I can appreciate their art. As different as their work may be from mine, but I think that is a part of the process again. Developing a kind of a language, could be like a visual language or maybe an identity.”
What inspired or caused you to do this project here?
“My coming here is part of general interest and I suppose in some ways coming back to a place where you played a role. I'm not a big fan of autobiography, and I don't like to encourage that, because I don't believe it can tell the whole story of a person.”
Is this your usual style of visual arts or is this a new field for you? Especially since this is in cooperation with a speech choir.
“This is totally new and totally an experiment and this is what I am nervous about because ideally this would be done behind closed doors without an audience and this is actually the first step of the process that is going to result in a finished work of art. We actually expect a lot from the audience, which is one of the reasons we got tickets where the entrance is free, so in some kind of way the audience are guinea pigs of the experiment.”
How do you usually go about in creating a project? Or is every project totally different from each other?
“Generally, I try to begin by trusting intuition and then it is kind of trial and error. I try not to wait for the last minute, and get through it more slowly and easier. Its trial and error and in the process you discover things that you didn't expect to find. Sometimes I see things on TV and it just clicks and I try it out. It pays to cultivate sensitivity to things outside your realm, and getting outside of your own self can be a real creative source. It has to be harnessed, you have to take control and there is responsibility involved as well.”
