Jasper Sharp in conversation with Paul Pfeiffer

An excerpt, 2009
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Visitors to The Saints in 2007. Photograph by Thierry Bal

JS: I know what you mean. It is something that one very rarely experiences. So the work was first shown in London in the autumn of 2007. Were you completely satisfied with the space? I am thinking particularly of its size. How important a factor was this for you, and how important will it be to subsequent presentations of the piece?

PP: The vastness of the space in London was important in trying to reproduce the sonic intensity of a crowd in a stadium. At the same time, I believe that the critical relationship and counter-intuitive association-making between the story of the 1966 game and this contemporary crowd 60 years later in Manila, and the kind of disconnect that it represents, is very present in the video images and sound themselves. So while I think that experientially the enormity of the space and the projecting of sound within it was very important, there is something essential to the experiment on another level which is not so dependent on the space per se. It goes along with the idea that, short of actually showing this work in the stadium, there is no way to approximate the sound of a stadium. Even the huge London warehouse space still sounded like a warehouse. The viewer must imagine. In a smaller space it could still work, the imagination would simply have to work harder to conjure up the image of something immense, a mental space which is not actually physically present.

JS: A "phantom spectacle", as the Artangel press material described it.

PP: Exactly. The installation should be thoroughly un spectacular, precisely for that reason. But it must be loud, very loud, though not so loud as to be annoying. There are some very beautiful passages where it becomes quiet and you begin to hear individual sounds. At other moments you experience the extraordinarily visceral effect of one hundred thousand voices booing. The idea was to create this emotional intensity through sound. I think in the end that the space's size is less important than its emptiness, when you first encounter the sound.

JS: Many British people grew up with the tradition of ventriloquism, a much-loved part of old comedy programmes that played on television at the weekend. Its basic device, that of replacing one voice with another, seems to be central to the success of The Saints. Can you explain how you managed this?

PP: In some ways the whole piece is to me, production-wise, like an elaborate synching job. The images of the crowd are synched back to the sound of the original crowd from 1966, so you're watching the group in Manila but hearing the voices of the original British and German fans. It's synched so that what the fans are chanting appears to be coming out of the mouths of the cast in Manila, but it is in fact a big illusion. For me there is something important about this. Materially speaking, it is bringing home this connection. The sound installation is actually composed of two layers of sound: one inside the small theater where the videos are playing, and the other outside. The one outside is a 60-track, comprising the 1966 soundtrack which is used as a script, overlaid with sound from Manila. The model soundtrack is expanded into a sort of booming sound composed of some original sound but mostly the sound from Manila. The sound inside the video space is just the original sound, which was used as a script to structure the video and to create this sense of ventriloquism.

JS: I'm afraid we must wrap this up quite soon. To conclude, I'm curious to know how you perceive The Saints within the context of your previous work?

PP: On a personal level, I think that my work - like that of any artist - involves a desire to communicate something essential about personal experience. In my case, I think that my experience has something specific to do with American culture and the particular way that I experienced it growing up both in the United States and places like Hawaii and the Philippines, which are historically American colonies. I feel like there's a particular perspective that comes from a real lived experience of growing up in American culture in places with only a residue of that colonial culture. It is something that I experienced aesthetically in the architecture and language and these kind of forms, but also psychologically, in my relationships with my family and people in general. And later on as an adult, thinking about the particularity of exchanges and how they were different from those of other people that I eventually met as an adult. This question of what might be that particular experience of American culture, if you're living a sort of double experience being both inside and outside at the same time.

I was very influenced, for example, by writings about African-American artists, a very different context to my own but one with certain parallels, to this work and this history, with which I can identify. I've tried to reflect that in my work. In a similar way, at a certain point, looking at the work of Pop artists was very influential for me. Again, there's an aspect of objectifying and distancing American culture which happens in Pop art which reminds me of the experience of growing up and being both inside and outside at the same time. I like this kind of tangential, post-colonial reading of Pop Art. Not to labour the point, but I've been thinking of Warhol as a very peculiar and extreme sort of personality, who initiated the idea of an artist acting as a celebrity but at the same time insisting on being non-existent, like a void. In some strange way this reminds me of my own experience that I am trying to convey.

JS: Many thanks Paul. I appreciate your time.

PP: You're welcome. Thank you.

Excerpt from: Jasper Sharp in conversation with Paul Pfeiffer, in The Collection Book. Edited by Eva Ebersberger and Daniela Zyman / Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary. Cologne: Walther König, 2009. p. 314-319

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