The Pure Products Go Crazy

Drawn to the layering and image-making possibilities of early desktop digital-editing programs such as Adobe Premiere, Photoshop, and QuarkXPress, Paul Pfeiffer took up appropriation as a strategy and experimenting to make his earliest video works. The Pure Products Go Crazy was created from a scene in the film Risky Business (1983), which the artist meticulously dissected and re-edited frame by frame. As he states: ‘‘I actually think of what I’ve been doing as an extension of my background in printmaking. What I liked about it was the repetition and degradation of successive iterations of images, the mechanical process. So taking a pre-existing image and putting it in a different context to mean something else—that kind of layering of meaning and image is something I’ve been interested in from the start.’’ By playing these images on miniature LCD monitors and projectors, Pfeiffer created a radical scale shift from how they were normally seen on television screens.