Traveling from the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), LA to the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Chicago, by way of the Guggenheim Bilbao, Paul Pfeiffer’s Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom spans over twenty-five years of photography, video, and sound sculpture, foreshadowing questions of representation in the age of AI. Pfeiffer’s sizable retrospective arrives at a moment where populism, nationalism, and digitally mediated beliefs dictate the shape of American life. Mapping his own biographical, social, and psychological histories through mass spectacle and celebrity culture, the artist interrupts the symbolic capital of professional sports and Hollywood. Coming of age in the 1980s and 1990s, utilizing early image editing tools like Adobe Photoshop and Premiere, Pfeiffer erases, camouflages, and redacts elements from televised video, posing a broad range of questions on religious subjectivity, spectatorial desire, and ritual worship in Western monotheist society.

Adopting the high arched ceilings of the MCA’s fourth floor, curators Bana Kattan and Iris Colburn initiate the body politic into an atmospheric sound installation, The Saints, 2007. A tsunami of chants emits from seventeen speakers arranged on either side of a long, tube-lit hallway. Densely layered tracks of thousands of fans cheering intermittently harmonize, articulating a sonic texture at the edge of mass hysteria and chaos. At the far end of the hall, a miniaturized LCD screen displays a single player isolated on a football field. In an adjoining room, a two-channel video projection reveals an ocean of faces illuminated by a large-screen projection. Black and white newsreel footage of the historic 1966 World Cup final between England and West Germany shows spectators images of players on the field, big brass bands, and coaches, animating soundscapes from the anterior. Pfeiffer hired thousands of Filipino extras over several days to reenact the fervor of nationalist sentiment at the historic final. What we witness is a crowd—not in England nor Germany, but in a former Spanish-American colony, cheering in languages foreign to their own. The affective language of gesture in the spectatorial-subject forms an anachronistic relationship with source material as a doubly displaced sense of coloniality indicates how social and political difference is constructed. The artist, who is native to both Hawaii and the Philippines, documents the manufactured illusion of mass following, amplifying a typically Western distinction between winners and losers.

Entering the labyrinthian southern wing, a triangulated presentation of early works begins our journey into Pfeiffer’s sense of the uncanny. Fragment of a Crucifixion (After Francis Bacon), 1999; John 3:16, 2000; and The Pure Products Go Crazy, (1998); digitally alter and loop fragments of found footage, redacting bodily and spatial referents. Exhibited on LCD screens and CPJ projectors at a time when large-scale immersive video installation proliferated contemporary art (amongst the likes of Bill Viola, Matthew Barney, Doug Aitken, and Isaac Julien), Pfeiffer’s pieces operate at an intimate scale and in direct relationship to their viewer. The Pure Products Go Crazy loops an instant where Tom Cruise lands face-down on an empty sofa in a scene from Risky Business (1983). In less than a second, Cruise’s faceless body transforms from exhausted to hysterical, hearkening back to Edison’s, Electrifying the Elephant, 1903. A precursor to the spectatorial fascination with on-screen death, unlike Topsy’s tragic end, Pfeiffer refuses to deliver a moment of finality. Compositionally arranging the faceless body to meet a likeness with Francis Bacon’s Figure at a Washbasin, 1976, Cruise transfigures into a “body without organs,” to borrow from Deleuze, “freed from structured physiological functioning to express sensation more exuberantly” (Continuum Publishing, 2002.16).

An overhead 5 1/2-inch monitor hangs at the approximate height of a basketball ring, in John 3:16, 2000. The image splices together thousands of video frames of a basketball being passed in the 1995 NBA finals. Chief curator and director of Curatorial Affairs, MOCA LA, Clara Kim, examines how the artist “desensationalizes and demythologizes” moments from popular culture by erasing the presence of hands that once shaped the enigmatic object. (MACK, London, 77–79). Deploying technical erasure as a strategic response to arguments of race and representation that followed the 1993 Whitney Biennial, Pfeiffer de-weaponizes the medium of broadcast sports, freeing the basketball from mechanisms of capital, transforming it into a sovereign animistic force.

Completing the triad, Fragment of a Crucifixion (After Francis Bacon), 1999, shows NBA star Larry Johnson crying out in victory. Balled fists pump down by his sides as his mouth cries open in elation—or is it pain or anguish? The icon of an open mouth turns us to Bacon’s unfinished namesake from 1950, where a screaming, centralized figure is seen at the center of the canvas. Replacing Bacon’s background stick-figures with anonymous crowds seated courtside, Pfeiffer heightens intensity by accentuating flashes of light surrounding Johnson. Reminded of the on-screen persecution of George Floyd, I reflect on the abbreviated breath of two Black men, and an infinite scream that no amount of research nor representation can provide solace to.

A chapel-like room replete with low wooden benches holds Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, 2002–18. A series of ten larger-than-life prints bears singular figures of basketball players on a digitally emptied basketball court. Five central elements construct vitality in each frame: the fetishist gaze upon Black athleticism, the use of the arena as ground, the suspension of filmic time into photographic instant, the posture of the defender, and the bespeckled presence of an attendant crowd. Captured at a low angle, lens flares blur faces, concealing defenders’ identities to recenter the force of spectacle. Pfeiffer levitates players, building a horizontal and vertical axis between figure and ground. Each momentary ascension releases their bodies from the narcissistic appetites of the crowd.

Caryatid (Pacquaio) and, Caryatid (Mayweather), 2023, exempts the bodies of boxers, Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquaio, from their six-hundred-million-dollar revenue-generating boxing match in 2015. Separated and represented on two CRT monitors, each boxer appears to joust with thin air. Punch after punch, their slow-motion pulverization disconnects them from all embodied nationalist signification. Pacquiao, a Filipino boxer turned senator, remains a symbol of national pride. By technically erasing his body, a space of colonial writing and authorship, and acknowledging his impact by resurfacing him on a separate screen, Pfeiffer spars with the day-to-day erasure of symbolic violence. If reduced to a space of nothingness, Caryatids takes a spiritual turn. The idea of “nothing” or shunyatā becomes a space of inception where the slow-motion spectral deformations of boxers remind us of how we are shaped, and consequently liberated by time alone. A stunning fifty-second precursor, Caryatid, 2003, floats a dazzling Stanley Cup on a silvered monitor. The metallic hybrid appears as both sacred and secular, devoid of the indexical presence of the hands of the victor.

In the exhibition catalog, essays by curators Clara Kim, Paula Kroll, film theorist Tom Gunning, and an interview from 2019 and 2023, by former MCA Marjorie Susman Curatorial Fellow Chanon Kenji Praepipatmongkol, provide deep insights into Pfeiffer’s oeuvre. Notably, a conversation between Lawrence Chua, Julie Mehretu, and the artist, concludes with questions on the body as a site of production in relation to diasporic identity, queerness, and national identity. In conversation with Kattan, she emphasizes Pfeiffer’s formative years “between two cultures” as the reason the artist is compelled to restructure filmic time through redaction. At a time of erasure en masse, of histories, indigenous peoples, and laws, the exhibition moves between conceptual formalism and theoretical/political critique, erasing the boundaries of Western rationale in between.

Challenging Eurocentric proclivities for the standardization of human labor, Pfeiffer engages living craft traditions in more recent works, Three Figures in a Room, 2015–18, and Incarnator, 2018–ongoing. Spending years studying the work of Foley artists, the artist traveled to Kantana Studios, Bangkok, to work with Thanasak Julakate, and Chat Mahapuchayakul, to recreate the sound effects for the Mayweather vs. Pacquiao boxing match. Two large-scale projections reveal the invisible labor of Foley sound, as artists bodily engage environmental materials to score the match, frame-by-frame. Once the sound effect is achieved, an instant replay of the match resumes in real-time on an adjacent screen. The artists are heard playfully chatting amongst each other inbetween silences. Placing viewers between temporal realities, Pfeiffer disrupts the panacea of continuity editing, moving us into the affective dimension of constructed fiction in televised events.

Pfeiffer dissects the enigmatic figure of Justin Bieber in Incarnator, 2018–ongoing. Tattooed fragments—three torsos, three heads, three left arms, two right arms, and a pair of legs to be exact—insert the born-again-Christian star into a historic slip stream of Santos craft guilds. Retracing the Acapulco-Manila trade route (1565–1815) by working with encarnadores (to make into flesh) craftsmen from Tlaxcala, Mexico, Seville, Spain, and Pampanga, Philippines, the artist creates a series of religious idols or santos to the likeness of Bieber, paralleling him with the figure of Santo Niño, to provide a critique on the dichotomous nature of innocence and power.

Critiquing the omnipresence of celebrity in contemporary culture through early mass media and the conditions that enfold individual subjectivity into herd mentality, Pfeiffer connects consumerism to forces of language that forge group ties. The assumed homogeneity of a target audience foregoes the imaginary of an outlier, a transnational citizen, as someone living between nation-states, signs, and slippages in belonging. Positing this borderline condition as a space of creative production, he disassociates his subjects from historically extractive definitions of consumer capitalist selfhood, disordering “the architecture of the self” through post-production techniques. Undoing enacted violences of representation, the artist subverts the politicization of the individuated hero, highlighting true freedom as one independent from the will and wants of others.