“Paul Pfeiffer: Red Green Blue” Opening Reception

Join us as we celebrate the opening of Paul Pfeiffer’s Red Green Blue, a new film installation that features the Redcoat Marching Band. 

The sports stadium is a site imbued with the potential to fortify national, regional, or community-based models of identity. Bombarded with carefully orchestrated stimuli, the spectator is immersed in a multi-sensory experience intended to incite an emotional response. In Red Green Blue, Paul Pfeiffer edits audio and visual recordings of the UGA Redcoat Marching Band performing the live musical soundtrack to a football game, examining the mechanics of the performance through close-up footage of band members and their directors during and between periods of play.

Pfeiffer lived in Athens, GA and taught at the University of Georgia from 2016 to 2019. While broadly questioning the definition of reality in the age of social media, Pfeiffer also engages the specific circumstances of the Georgia Bulldogs stadium. Just beyond the stadium walls is a cemetery, where the roar of the crowd and the band echo eerily among tombstones, mixing with birdsong. The contrast between these sites introduces a temporal and architectural disparity that recalls the ancient Greek origins of the stadium as a locus of mass ritual, as well as the institutions of slavery and segregation enshrined in the monuments of the past.

In Red Green Blue the football players are seen only at moments between play or through the viewfinder of a broadcasting video camera. Thus, Pfeiffer pivots away from the hero in the spotlight, and through innovative manipulation persuades the viewer to focus instead on the language of spectacle.

Paul Pfeiffer (b. 1966 Honolulu) lives and works in New York. Pfeiffer has had one-person exhibitions at the 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); the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2009) and Sammlung Goetz, Munich, Germany (2011). Pfeiffer has presented work in major international exhibitions in recent years, including 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; Inhotim Museu de Arte Contemporanea, Inhotim, Brazil; the Pinault Collection; and Kunst Werke, Berlin, among others.