In Conversation: Paul Pfeiffer

This conversation begins with the premiere of Art21's new Extended Play short film, which focuses on Red Green Blue and the artist's time at UGA. 

Contemporary video artist Paul Pfeiffer discusses his recent exhibition at the Athenaeum, Red Green Blue with media scholar, Dr. Phillip Auslander; Assistant Director of Bands and Director of Athletic Bands at the University of Georgia, Brett Bawcum; and contemporary art historian, Dr. Isabelle Wallace.

Paul Pfeiffer (b.1966 Honolulu) has had many one-person exhibitions at Whitney Museum of American Art (2001); the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2003 and 2017-18); the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2005); MUSAC León, Spain (2008); Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2009); Sammlung Goetz, Munich (2011); Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila (2015); Inhotim, Brumadinho, Brazil (2018); and The Athenaeum, Athens, GA (2023). He has presented work in major international exhibitions, most recently the Performa Biennial and the Honolulu Biennial in 2019 and the Toronto Biennial and Seoul Mediacity Biennale in 2022. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; M+, Hong Kong; The Guggenheim; Tate Modern; and the Pinault Collection, among many others. The first large-scale retrospective of his work in the U.S. opens at The Geffen Contemporary at LA MOCA in November 2023.

Dr. Philip Auslander is interested in the performance of gender identity, the relationship between performance and media, and the documentation of performance. He has published eight books, the most recent of which are the third edition of Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (Routledge, 2023), In Concert: Performing Musical Persona (University of Michigan, 2021) and Reactivations: Essays on Performance and Its Documentation (University of Michigan 2018). Auslander is a Professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech.

Brett Bawcum is Assistant Director of Bands and Director of Athletic Bands at the University of Georgia. He shares responsibility for design, instruction, and administration of the Redcoat Marching Band and serves as its primary drill-writer. He also directs the Basketball and Volleyball Pep Bands, conducts various concert bands, and teaches courses in a variety of areas including Instrumentation/Arranging and Marching Band Techniques. His conducting, arranging, and/or performing work can also be found on commercial recordings by such artists as Band of Horses, Half Dozen Brass Band, and Modern Skirts. He has also served as producer, associate producer, or editor for seven recordings on the Mark, Summitt, and Naxos labels.

Dr. Isabelle Loring Wallace currently serves as Associate Director of Research and Graduate Studies at the Lamar Dodd School of Art. Her research focuses on a wide range of objects and images, ranging from mid-twentieth-century American painting to early twenty-first-century photography, video, and installation. She is the author of numerous articles and exhibition catalogue essays on artists such as Manet, Duchamp, Jenny Saville, Wim Delvoye, Christian Jankowski, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, and Paul Pfeiffer, and the co-editor of three anthologies that reflect her commitment to thinking about contemporary art within broad cultural and historical contexts: Contemporary Art and Classical Myth, co-edited with Jennie Hirsh (Ashgate/Routledge 2011); Contemporary Art About Architecture: A Strange Utility, co-edited with Nora Wendl (Ashgate/Routledge 2013); Ventriloquism, Performance and Contemporary Art, co-edited with Jennie Hirsh (Routledge 2023). In addition, Professor Wallace is also author of Jasper Johns (Phaidon 2014) and is currently completing a second book on Johns that considers his work in conjunction with contemporaneous developments in the fields of genetics and psychoanalysis.