Emotionally frightening, intellectually disturbing, and very, very loud, whether audible or visual, “Paul Pfeiffer: Foreword to the Story of the Birth of Liberty” is an extremely compelling display of the artist’s paintings in virtual images, from video-integrated sculptures to large scale installation pieces, to large-format photographs. He has worked there since the mid-90s.
The new exhibition of more than 50 works at the Geffen Contemporary in Little Tokyo at the Museum of Contemporary Art is also timely and increases its resonance. Recently we have been embroiled in dramatic social and political upheaval, intensified by the depredations of virtual life that traffics in photographs of state violence. With the eruptions and disturbances of virtual mass culture as a Ferrari-level engine, represented through the roaring drama of sport, Pfeiffer’s art reflects on force as a continuous crusade undertaken between the individual and the multitude.
Pfeiffer, 57, was born in Honolulu the year before French theorist Guy Debord published “Society of the Spectacle.” That thin but influential volume meditates on social transformations wrought by the corporate expansion of mass culture machinery, which has metastasized with the digital revolution. Debord is an unseen scaffolding for a hypnotizing work like “Caryatid,” in which the Stanley Cup — that big, heavy, tiered silver trophy awarded annually to the National Hockey League playoff champion — floats, bobs and twirls in space before a cheering crowd on TV.
Nothing stops him. The aerial trophy, the oldest that can be won through professional athletes in North America, turns out to have a life of its own. It floats in front of the crowd like a soft, playful but vaguely malevolent drone.
Pfeiffer digitally erased the athlete holding aloft the monumental trophy in the event’s archival video, a ritualized gesture of triumphant victory. It is the hundred-year-old object, the player, who is isolated as something active in our human dating to the sporting realm. scene.
What makes the art more than just a passing visual diversion, a TikTok editing hack, is the carefully modified monitor on which it is displayed. A 9-inch silver television, chrome-plated and immaculate as a Jeff Koons rabbit, is shown as its own objectified gesture of triumphant power, discreetly encased in a plexiglass box and elevated to the most sensitive of a pedestal. Corporate virtual media are the dynamic agents of the fashionable social experience, inextricably playful and malevolent.
Just as the gleaming TV screen echoes the gleaming Stanley Cup, the viewer is compared to the athlete digitally removed from the “Caryatid” video, a must-have for the show, but erased from the show. In ancient Greece, a culture where male athletes were so prized as heroic citizens, a caryatid (a covered female figure used in the position of a column as an architectural support) was used. A caryatid has sometimes been compared to the invisible slave who bore the burdens of society.
Pfeiffer, who is of Filipino descent, moved with his family to Manila when he was 10 years old, at the beginning of the Marcos dictatorship, and has since returned to live and work in the archipelago several times. in New York City. ) In particular, the Philippines has been colonized twice: first for more than three hundred years through Spain and its Christian religion, and then for part of a century through the United States and its tumultuous mass culture. Position in the artist’s paintings.
A normal photograph from 2015 shows a black basketball player seen from below, flying into space in the middle of a large stadium, large crowds gathering in the stands, and the underside of an American flag hanging above his head. There’s no one else on the ground.
A production? A virtual manipulation of a genuine moment? An erasure of elements to reveal hidden but significant elements in our culture, in the culture of Robert Rauschenberg erasing a drawing through Willem De Kooning?
The player’s arms are extended like a crucifixion. His face obscured and his blank white uniform disclosing neither team nor number, he is resolutely anonymous — as anonymous as the throng ogling in the stands. He seems held aloft by the sheer force of a mass performance.
The photograph is part of an organization called the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” a reference to the prophecy of triumph and submission in the New Testament book of Revelation. Spectacle and spectator, cruelty and liberation are incorporated into a scene at the breaking point of an individual soul’s ultimate destiny. The same is true of the promise of a Second Coming, which is not necessarily comforting. The symbol of the resurrection of black people through b-ball is festive, terrifying and moving at the same time. .
Pfeiffer tackles big issues. In “John 3:16” (2000), the symbol centers on a basketball, a talisman that absolutely fills the screen and sways as it passes between largely invisible players. Sometimes the hands show up, other times it’s just the ball spinning. and bouncing. It resembles the levitating Stanley Cup in “Caryatid”, made three years later.
Like “Caryatid”, the monitor is important. In this case, it’s a small 51/2-inch LCD screen, fixed at the end of a one-meter frame protruding from the wall, about seven or eight feet off the ground. Think of the competitive intimacy that characterizes much of Pfeiffer’s haunting films. work. Here you are looking for the image, but careful examination is impossible; only deference is. The biblical title, “John 3:16,” identifies the virtual revolution as bringing about the fashionable mystery of eternal life. His only commandment: remain vigilant.
Ancient mythologies, sacred and profane, run throughout Pfeiffer’s exhibition, organized by MOCA chief curator Clara Kim and assistant Paula Kroll. Climb an elaborate circuit of stairs to reach the top of an enormous, room-filling platform, “Vitruvian Figure” (2008), and you arrive at the nosebleed level above a massive model of a huge football stadium hollowed out below. You’ve seen such a place in person or on TV a thousand times — today’s version of Rome’s ruined Colosseum, a now-corporate rather than imperial place for public spectacles and gladiatorial contests. The stadium’s concentric rings turn the form into something between a target and a drain.
Or look at a set of 24 large-scale photographs of the coast, taken from existing exhibition photographs of Marilyn Monroe frolicking on the beach. She is our post-war Venus, goddess of love and beauty, emerging from the sea in the manner of Botticelli. .
Except she’s not there. The beach photos digitally erased Marilyn to leave only the varied coastlines in view. They’re conceptually smart, but visually uninteresting. The form isn’t always successful.
His subject Marilyn acknowledges Pfeiffer’s commitment to Andy Warhol’s legacy in the 1960s. (When Pfeiffer was born in 1966, Warhol’s art was at the height of its power. )The same goes for “Morning After the Deluge” (2003), which echoes Warhol’s unfinished film, “Sunset,” and is based on a nearly abridged 19th-century seascape. Taken in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, the site of the Mayflower’s arrival in 1620, the composite symbol “Flood” is a superposition of the sun rising in dazzling colors over a bay that opens to the Atlantic Ocean. The beautiful wall projection is one of the few virtual scenes that the artist photographed himself.
Erasure remains a key element: in virtual fusion, the Earth’s solid horizon visually disappears. At the crucial point at which American culture supposedly left Europe behind, the bright sun floats adrift, dreaming. minutes without a land anchor. Pfeiffer titled the paintings with a biblical reference to the flood in Genesis, eager to be reborn through epic disaster.
In a mural text from “Tomorrow After the Flood”, the artist is quoted as identifying the horizon (now disappeared in his projection) as the location of the vanishing point in the use of a point in classical art, an original concept of the Renaissance. The constant vanishing point, where all the lines of sight converge, corresponds to a condition of spectator in front of the image, immobile in time and space. His video composition is a sharp metaphor for the disorienting transition from an analog to a virtual world, a deluge that has been underway for several tumultuous decades.
Perhaps to magnify the difference between analogue and digital, the exhibition’s clever installation is based entirely on emphatic materiality. The rooms were built inside the museum’s giant warehouse, with its crude 2 x 4 structure, with steel brackets and drywall blatantly exposed. It has not been saved, which may explain the absurdly long duration of the exhibition (it ends in June, after seven months) and a catalogue unfortunately delayed until March. (There’s also a $10 to $18 access bonus. )Museum galleries are backdrops for theatrical art exhibitions, but this exhibition insists on keeping that in mind.
One room hosts “Live From Neverland” (2006), a terrifying video projection in which 84 young Filipinos, part boys and part girls, all dressed in classic white Tagalog barong shirts and long white robes, line up in rows in the stands as if they were in the stands, in a church choir or at a school assembly. They recite in unison the covert monologue Michael Jackson read on national television to deny the pedophilia allegations in 1993, a speech that is broadcast on a floor monitor. Jackson’s symbol glows a blood-red color, then transforms into a TV paycheck style as the young people parade around the world.
By the time you come upon “Self-Portrait as a Fountain” (2000), an elaborate sculpture whose composition of an actual bathtub, lights, microphones, cameras and recycling water carefully re-creates the murderous shot-by-shot shower scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho,” you’ll be forgiven for thinking immediately of Donald J. Trump. Like “Live From Neverland,” repetition of a media fiction creates reality. The former president later did as much, blithely reciting to a graduating class at Liberty University, a school founded by a fundamentalist televangelist, unattributed dialogue from the political satire “Legally Blonde,” or just last week spurting Nazi rhetoric on social media, cribbed from “Mein Kampf.”
Another work, “The Saints” (2007), extinguishes this chill of media indoctrination in a gigantic room, painted blindingly white and probably empty, for a dozen vertical white speakers playing in the area. You hear the roar of an invisible crowd, a deafening noise that rises and falls in enveloping waves. On a freestanding wall at the end of the room is a small LCD screen on which we see a lone player wandering around a football box, much like what is done in the giant room. Behind the wall are two video projections, facing each other: one shows the fit footballer and the other a frenetic and belligerent crowd.
“The Saints” recreates the public’s reaction to the arguable 1966 FIFA World Cup final between West Germany and England at London’s gigantic Wembley Stadium, which is still being discussed today among fervent enthusiasts. Pfeiffer hired 1,000 Filipinos to fill a movie theater in Manila, where they applauded along with the original films and sound of the event, whose winner and loser were in dispute. With its stunning 17-channel audio enhancement, “The Saints” is a portrait of feverish human sound, an installation that removes the virtual onion.
Your eyes might begin to water, your head to throb and headlines in today’s newspapers to overwhelm your thoughts. “Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves,” wrote Walter Benjamin of the surreptitious propaganda power of camera reproduction in 1935, as authoritarianism made its lethal march across Europe. With skill and discernment, Pfeiffer’s art probes the formidable aesthetic now, amplified by the digital revolution.
Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, 152 S. Central Ave. , Little Tokyo, (213) 621-2766, June 16; Closed lunes. moca. org
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Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism (he was a finalist for the prize in 1991, 2001, and 2007). In 2020, he also won the Rabkin Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award in Art Journalism.
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