Paul Pfei er Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles 12 November – 16 June
Paul Pfei er is not afraid of grandiosity. Neither was Hollywood director Cecil B. Demille, who, introducing a screening of his 1956 biblical epic, The Ten Commandments (which dramatised Moses leading the enslaved Jews out of Egypt), informed the audience that they were about to view ‘the story of the birth of freedom’. At first glance, the sweeping title may seem out of step with Pfei er’s multimedia artwork, which investigates mass culture – particularly spectator sports – and its subsequent mediation in film, television and advertising. But Pfei er’s artworks tell a tale of spiritual bondage, one both created and witnessed by the camera’s lens. In video, photography and sculpture, Pfei er reveals the eerie religiosity of contemporary media, unveiling the structures that sustain spectacular entertainment today.
Editing techniques lend Pfei er’s found footage a mystical air, resulting in artworks that both replicate and critique the thrall of mass culture. In Caryatid (2003), Pfei er alters a video of an Stanley Cup celebration by erasing the athlete holding the silver trophy aloft, so that the award defies gravity as it bobs in front of a crowd. The floating trophy matches the colour of Pfei er’s chosen display: a 23cm silver-plated television. The film series
The Long Count (2000–01) employs a similar trick, transforming the bodies of Muhammad Ali and three famous opponents – Sonny
Liston, George Foreman and Joe Frazier – into transparent plasmalike spectres that swirl within a boxing ring surrounded by a large audience. Pfei er presents these films on small screens that protrude on silver rods wallmounted just above head height, demanding that the viewer strain and bend to discern the action onscreen. Here, television subordinates its spectators and athletes: both must physically change in order to see – or be (partially) seen by – its screens.
Mechanisms of image reproduction are fateful devices, ones that simultaneously exalt and destroy their original subjects. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse photographic series (2001–18) shows solitary basketball players
in monumental form, their often-airborne bodies adopting the postures of worshippers ascending to meet the divine. The large colour photographs’ titling refers them to the New Testament’s Book of Revelations, making them both signifiers of oncoming death – the ‘horsemen’ – and faceless victims of its wrath. Media technology creates this apocalyptic scenario: Pfei er edits out the numbers and names on players’ jerseys, turning athletes into symbols of biblical proportion; monitors, flashbulbs and stadium lights further excise their individuality. In Four Horsemen of the
Apocalypse (07) (2002), a basketballer raises his hands as though receiving the Last Judgment – but where his face should be is only the blown-out brightness of an arena’s big screen.
Sporting events are also a global export, the product of an invisible system of labour and trade that fuels its power. The Saints (2007) explores this international supply chain: the 17-channel audio installation features the reactions of 1,000 Filipinos hired to watch a recording of England’s defeat of Germany in the 1966 World Cup final. The sound of their emphatic cheers echoes throughout the museum; when I arrived at the installation’s entryway, the noise was so loud I was halfexpecting to find a live match – instead, a huge empty room greets the visitor, wall-mounted white speakers projecting the audio across the vacant space. Pfei er, who was raised between the Philippines and the , uses The Saints to reveal the illusions associated with fandom: the homogeneity of team devotees, for example, and their nationalist investments in the World Cup. The emotionality of Pfei er’s audience shows both the unseen work behind mass cultural entertainment and how the drama of such events is – or can be – manufactured. Following the awe of the aural installation, Pfei er shows its secret source: in an adjacent space, a two-channel video projection displays the original game alongside the paid, roaring crowd, sitting inside a movie theatre in Manila.
What is absent from Pfei er’s work is often just as important as what is present. His remixed examinations of mass culture have that in common with other theological enquiries: these installations, films and photographs explore communal events that, with television’s help, adopt a near-religious character. In this context, the artist’s overlarge gestures – a title referencing biblical descriptions of Jesus’s birth, for example, for a video of an game edited to remove all players (John 3:16, 2000) – seem appropriate, not ironic. Pfei er’s dissections of entertainment illuminate the ways spectacles come to feel magical, a process that obscures or eliminates the people that form their images. When Pfei er pulls back the curtain, a camera lies in wait.