The Saints: Press Coverage
Harrow Times, 4 October 2007
Free Lions: The England Fanzine from the Football Supporters' Federation, September 2007:
"It's not often that Free Lions comes over all cultured, but we thought we'd bring to your attention a work of art celebrating the crowd at the 1966 World Cup final here at Wembley. [...]
"We understand that it's based around the crowd noise at that famous England World Cup triumph, with the songs from both sets of fans and the chanting of individual players' names, all played through a large constellation of speakers. Naturally, being art, there's a twist. The original crowd noise is supplemented by the reactions of another crowd especially convened to watch a video of the final - in Manila in the Philippines (where Pfeiffer himself was brought up)."
Time Out, 26 September 2007:
"The insalubrious surroundings of Wembley Retail Park and the nearby Carpet Right and Joysleep outlets don't prepare you for the aural barrage of fandom in 'The Saints'. The further into the empty space you walk, the louder the supporters' chants become. Then there is the snippet of a band going oompah, as they do at football matches, before the crowd's primordial hum slowly builds to a climactic, gut-wrenching bellow of release. The immediate sensation is one of complete disembodiment; especially as you are likely to be alone or nearly alone in the abandoned store, yet feel as though surrounded by the thousands of raucous white shirts regularly found in the arena across the road.
"A few minute's into the game's half-hour acoustic highlights, something sounds distinctly wrong. The familiar shouts of 'En-ger-land' come across more like 'Eng-y-land'. It turns out that Pfeiffer, subversive as he is with his manipulation of reference material, literally 'outsourced' the stand-in crowd to the Philippines, mainly because he was brought up there and knows that there is no tradition of football or direct link to England, as there would have been with India, for example." (Ossian Ward)
The Times, 6 October 2007:
"My pulse is still racing. I’ve just been to Wembley and watched probably the greatest football match played in my lifetime. The atmosphere was incredible: deafening crowd noise, amazing passion on the pitch, bizarre twists in the game. And the most astonishing thing? Apart from the man on the door, I was the only person there.
"Is he making a point about the bland globalisation of sporting passion? Or that great deeds echo down the generations, even when the heroes themselves are dead? Or that the 1966 Final was itself an echo of a world war that engulfed even remote imperial outposts such as the Philippines? Or that the whole Wembley site, built in the 1920s as a showcase for an Empire that was already doomed, now has a tragically empty feeling – all glory gone, all tradition stripped away?
"The meaning is left open-ended. Which is as it should be. Art, like England’s third goal, should always leave room for doubt." (Richard Morrison - read full article)
Whitehot Magazine, October 2007:
"Pfeiffer’s work is meticulous and amounts to a vivisection of both a heroic moment in a specific cultural heritage and its ongoing translation into a myth, which is apparently translatable, mutable into other, broader contexts. His work uncovers and displays a suggestion towards a cultural identity that is there and at the same time not there, represented yet absent, perpetually on the verge of mirroring itself and/or its surroundings, implicating alternate perspectives." (Wiebke Gronemeyer - read full article)