Paul Pfeiffer at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

Paul Pfeiffer, Red Green Blue (installation view) (2022). Single-channel video with color and surround sound; 31 minutes and 23 seconds; dimensions variable. The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles, 2023–24. Image courtesy of the artist and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Photo: Zak Kelley.

A two-inch media player protrudes from the wall, affixed to a metal arm. The minuscule screen features one of Muhammad Ali’s most-watched fights of all time, but Ali and his opponent have been scrubbed from the scene. All that remains is the ring, the spectators, and the residue of the fighters’ obliteration in Paul Pfeiffer’s crude attempt to visually camouflage them by substituting background for foreground (The Long Count, 2000–01).

So begins Pfeiffer’s retrospective, Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom, with charmingly antiquated media players from the early 2000s that foreshadow the now ubiquitous recasting of heavily-edited, televised programs onto small, handheld screens. Unfolding throughout the entirety of The Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) and encompassing the artist’s 25-year career of work in video, photography, installation, and sculpture, the exhibition foregrounds the memory-making power of post-production as it progresses from these looped and augmented scenes of pop cultural touchstones to large-scale installations. The cultural phenomena through which Pfeiffer examines the spectacularization of the everyday unveils the shared mechanics by which the sports industrial complex, celebrity culture, and organized religion manufacture our idols and ideals.

Enhancing the oft-overlooked artifice of entertainment are the false walls of a stage set in which hang photographs from Pfeiffer’s series Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2000–present). By removing all but one basketball player from images found in the NBA press archive and erasing all identifying information from their jerseys and the court, Pfeiffer positions these figures—in a state akin to divine ecstasy, saintly apparition, Christ-like resurrection—surrounded by fans in a theatrical embodiment of the religiosity of athleticism.

From the divine to the sacrificial: arms, legs, torsos, and heads are displayed across two walls—an incomplete collection of body parts suggesting the existence of three life-size wooden sculptures of Justin Bieber (Incarnator, 2018–present). Rendered as a contemporary incarnation of Jesus Christ by traditional woodcarvers, Bieber is both sanctified and dismembered, true prophet and false prophet, millennial pop star and born-again Christian. In his likeness can be seen the stigmata born of celebrity, marking those anointed via mediagenic events and the insatiable, cannibalizing force of fandom to emblematize this thing we call culture.

As the exhibition progresses, Pfeiffer continually inverts expectations regarding subject and object, foreground and background, real-time and pre-recorded. The large-scale video installation with stadium-like seating, Red Green Blue (2022), takes as its subject a University of Georgia football game and their Redcoat Marching Band. Focusing on the producer of the event, who sits in a box overlooking the football stadium, and the band’s conductor, who weaves together a seemingly disparate range of songs to manipulate the emotional register of the spectators, Pfeiffer’s quasi-documentary not only unveils the affective actors that play upon our experiences but also the simple means by which to meaningfully control a crowd. Instead of a priest or prophet, here, a marching band instructs the masses when to stand, kneel, pray, and rejoice.

By way of high production value and emotionally coercive editing, Pfeiffer’s later works thus employ the very tools of their investigation. A spectacle within a spectacle, Red Green Blue embodies contemporary modes of entertainment to pose, like the exhibition, a sly take on the ways that we consume media and mediatize all of our experiences. 

Paul Pfeiffer: Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom runs from November 12, 2023–June 16, 2024 at the The Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (152 N. Central Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90012).

Paul Pfeiffer, The Long Count (Rumble in the Jungle) (2001). Standard-definition video (color, silent; 2 minutes and 51 seconds), painted 5.5-inch LCD monitor, and metal armature, 6 x 7 x 36 inches. © Paul Pfeiffer. Image courtesy of the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York; carlier | gebauer, Berlin/Madrid; Perrotin; and Thomas Dane Gallery, London. Photo: Luke A. Walker.

Paul Pfeiffer, Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom (installation view) (2023–24). The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles, 2023–24. Image courtesy of the artist and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Photo: Zak Kelley.

Paul Pfeiffer, Justin Bieber Head (2018). Gmelina wood and paint, 16.25 x 8 x 8.75 inches. © Paul Pfeiffer. Image courtesy of the artist and Thomas Dane Gallery, London. Photo: Ben Westoby.

Paul Pfeiffer, Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom (installation view) (2023–24). The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles, 2023–24. Image courtesy of the artist and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Photo: Zak Kelley.

Paul Pfeiffer, Vitruvian Figure (detail) (2008). Cast resin, aluminum, and acrylic, 110.25 x 322 x 320 inches. © Paul Pfeiffer. Image courtesy of the artist; Paula Cooper Gallery, New York; carlier | gebauer, Berlin/Madrid; Perrotin; and Thomas Dane Gallery, London. Photo: Christian Capurro.

Paul Pfeiffer, Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom (installation view) (2023–24). The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles, 2023–24. Image courtesy of the artist and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Photo: Zak Kelley.

Paul Pfeiffer, Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom (installation view) (2023–24). The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles, 2023–24. Image courtesy of the artist and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Photo: Zak Kelley.

Paul Pfeiffer, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (30) (2015). Fujiflex digital C-print, 48 x 70 inches. © Paul Pfeiffer. Image courtesy of the artist; Paula Cooper Gallery, New York; carlier | gebauer, Berlin/Madrid; Perrotin; and Thomas Dane Gallery, London.

Paul Pfeiffer, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (17) (2004–18). Matte C-print, 72 x 57.75 inches. © Paul Pfeiffer. Image courtesy of the artist; Paula Cooper Gallery, New York; carlier | gebauer, Berlin/Madrid; Perrotin; and Thomas Dane Gallery, London.

Hannah Sage Kay is an arts writer from New York, where she studied modern and contemporary art at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts and Bard College. Her writing has been featured in The Brooklyn Rail, Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art, and Voices in Contemporary Art, amongst other publications.

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