Paul Pfeiffer: Red Green Blue

Deploying an array of digital technologies, Paul Pfeiffer explores popular culture, including concerts, Hollywood films, and live sporting events. Red Green Blue stitches together audio and video recordings the artist made of the University of Georgia Redcoat Marching Band. Named for an image display system that responds to how the human eye perceives color, this immersive video installation layers sensory components to reproduce the experience of attending a college football game. Upending expectations, Pfeiffer shifts focus away from the competing teams to the student musicians, band conductors, and support staff who collaborate to execute such carefully-orchestrated performances.

Pfeiffer became interested in the location of the UGA stadium while teaching at the school from 2016 to 2019. Adjacent to the towering arena sits Oconee Hill Cemetery, a sprawling campus established in the mid-nineteenth century where those who died while enslaved are interred alongside Confederate soldiers. On gameday, the sounds of the pageantry within the stadium pierce the reverent silence of the cemetery. Pfeiffer highlights the startling juxtaposition of these two sites, while also subtly identifying a throughline from the origins of athletic competition in ancient Greece to bloody wars on American soil to legacies of violence enacted against communities of color. In Red Green Blue, the cemetery is both a repository of historical spectacle and an incidental witness to the contemporary spectacle playing out next door.

Pictured: Paul Pfeiffer (American, b. 1966), Red Green Blue, 2022, single channel video with surround sound, dimensions variable, running time: 31 minutes, 23 seconds. © Paul Pfeiffer. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.