ABSTRACT
In the three videos that constitute his Long Count series (2000-2001)— The Long Count (I Shook Up the World) , The Long Count (Rumble in the Jungle) , and The Long Count (Thrilla in Manila) —artist Paul Pfeiffer (b. 1966) withdraws an iconic scene from the fi eld of vision. With this withdrawal, which prevents his viewers from looking at scenes of three historic boxing matches they would otherwise be able to see, Pfeiffer creates an unconventional, and highly interventionist, set of images that exposes and explores two key issues: fi rst, visual schemas and perceptions of race, especially as they circulate in mass media contexts, and second, the predominance of vision and looking in such contexts, as well as in the larger sense of what Guy Debord has termed “the society of the spectacle.” 1 Above all, Pfeiffer’s Long Count series reformulates spectacular scenes to produce counter-spectacular effects, confi guring an alternative mode of perception that shuttles between looking and not looking.
