Rivalry, Retribution, and Religion: The Art of Paul Pfeiffer

Drawing on the work of literary critic René Girard, this paper considers the work of contemporary digital artist Paul Pfeiffer, arguing that his work establishes compelling parallels between various biblical narratives and aspects of contemporary-culture as defined (and dominated) by technology’s omniscient and all-seeing eyes. Fleshing out the comparison Pfeiffer seems to make between the vengeful eye of an all-seeing, Old Testament God and our own culture’s relentless surveillance by mass and new media, I suggest that Pfeiffer also aligns various biblical sacrifices—namely, the Old Testament sacrifice of the world by flood, and subsequently, in the New Testament, the sacrifice of Jesus by God—with the contemporary sacrifice of the world (or more accurately, reality) by new technologies that have radically restructured our relation to both time and space. Pfeiffer thereby reinterprets new media, treating it as if an enactment of dynamics at the very heart of the Judeo-Christian tradition, perhaps performed for the purpose of decatheting the primal trauma described therein. Moreover, although not expressly referenced by Pfeiffer, the Fall, as wrought by man’s rivalrous consumption of the apple in the Garden of Eden, is everywhere present in Pfeiffer’s oeuvre, whether in the form of athletic hubris or (see the sacrifice of Larry Johnson in Pfeiffer’s Fragment of a Crucifixion), or in the quintessential form of man’s desire to acquire information known only by an (announcer’s) authoritative and disembodied male voice (see Pfeiffer’s Desiderata, a work made with raw footage from the well-known game show The Price is Right). That these rivalries necessitate some form of compensatory sacrifice is a fact that brings together the various components of Pfeiffer’s work, comprised as it is of various rivalries alongside originary sacrifices and the rituals designed to recall their significant and, for Girard, palliative effects.