Review: With Sports And Horror Movies As Canvas, An Artist Dissects The World's Digital Upheaval

Emotionally terrifying, intellectually disturbing, and very, very violent both aurally and visually, Paul Pfeiffer: Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom is a highly engaging examination of the artist's work in digital images, sculpture, and video. large installations or large format photos. He has worked there since the mid-1990s.

A new exhibition of more than 50 works in Little Tokyo at the Geffen Contemporary Museum of Contemporary Art is also timely and adds resonance. Lately we have been involved in many social and political spectacles, exacerbated by the plague of digital life that spreads images of state violence. Like a Ferrari-class driver with the explosions and ruptures of digital mass culture often represented by sweeping sports drama, Pfeiffer's art reflects power as an ongoing campaign between individual and audience.

Pfeiffer, 57, was born in Honolulu, a year before French theorist Guy Debord published “The Society of the Spectacle.” This small but influential volume reflects the social changes brought about by the expansion of the corporate mass cultural machine that developed alongside the digital revolution. Debord provides a new framework for compelling works like “Caryatide,” in which the Stanley Cup – the enormous, heavy and legendary silver trophy awarded annually to the National Hockey League playoff champion – floats, dances and moves in front of a rotating room. The public is excited to watch television

There's nothing holding him back. The Air Cup, the oldest victory won by a professional athlete in North America, seems to have a life of its own. He ran through the crowd like a whirlwind, cheerful but a little cruel.

In archive video of the event, Pfeiffer digitally erases the athlete holding the monumental trophy, a ritualized gesture of victory. It is the object of addiction and not the isolated player as an active factor in man's relationship with the world of sport.

What makes this work more than just a visual distraction from the past, a trick in TikTok editing, is the carefully edited display on the monitor. A 9-inch silver television, chrome-plated and clean as a rabbit by Jeff Koons, appears as an objective sign of winning power, housed discreetly in a Plexiglas case and raised on a pedestal. Digital corporate media is a dynamic player in the modern social experience, both playful and mischievous.

As the glittering Stanley Cup looms on bright television screens, viewers are compared to the digitally erased athletes in the “Caryatid” video – indispensable to the spectacle but missing. In ancient Greece, a culture in which male athletes were revered as heroic citizens, caryatids were robed female figures that served as architectural supports, rather than pillars. Caryatids are sometimes compared to invisible slaves who carry the burden of society.

Pfeiffer, of Filipino origin, moved to Manila with his family at the age of ten at the beginning of the Marcos dictatorship and has since returned to the archipelago several times to live and work. (Mostly in New York.) What's interesting is that the Philippines was colonized twice: first for over 300 years by Spain and its Christian religion, and then for half a century by the United States and its confusing culture of mass. Both occupy a prominent place in the artist's work.

An incredible photo from 2015 shows a black basketball player seen from below as he flies through the sky in the center of a large stadium, a large crowd gathered in the stands, and the bottom of an American flag hanging above our heads. There was no one else on the field.

A discovery? Digital manipulation of real moments? Remove elements to reveal something hidden but significant in our culture, in the tradition of Robert Rauschenberg erasing Willem De Kooning's images?

The player's arms are outstretched as if he were being crucified. With his face masked and a simple white uniform that showed neither team nor number, he was completely anonymous, as anonymous as the spectators watching in the stands. The force of the mass spectacle seemed to carry him into the air.

The photo is part of a group called “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” and refers to the prophecies of victory and defeat contained in the New Testament book of Revelation. Spectacle and spectator, cruelty and liberation merge in a scene on the brink of the final destiny of an individual soul. The same goes for the promise of the Second Coming, which is not necessarily comforting. B-ball's depiction of a black renaissance is at once celebratory, frightening, and moving.

Pfeiffer covers important topics. In “John 3:16” (2000), in the center of the image is a basketball, a talisman that takes up the entire screen and swings as it passes by a largely invisible player. Sometimes hands appear, sometimes the ball spins and bounces. The “Caratitide” Stanley Cup, created three years later, seems to float.

Read more: Move it, Barbie This is the year of 92-year-old Los Angeles artist Barbara T. Smith.

As in the case of “Caryatide”, monitors are important. It's a small 5 1/2-inch LCD screen mounted on the end of a three-foot-tall frame that extends from the wall to about seven to eight feet above the floor. Consider the aggressive intimacy that characterizes much of Pfeiffer's disturbing work. Here you see the photo, but it is impossible to examine it closely; it's just respect. The title of the Bible, “John 3:16,” identifies the digital revolution as the modern secret to eternal life. His only command: be careful.

Ancient mythology, sacred and secular, is represented throughout the Pfeiffer exhibition, curated by MOCA Chief Curator Clara Kim and Assistant Curator Paula Kroll. Climb an elaborate staircase to reach the top of the giant platform that fills the space of “Vitruvian Figure” (2008) and reach nosebleed height atop a giant hollowed-out model of a soccer field. Thousands of times you've seen places like this in person or on television: today's ruined versions of Rome's Colosseum, now corporate headquarters rather than imperial residences for public spectacles and gladiatorial combat. The stadium's concentric rings provide a hybrid form of gate and drainage.

Or check out a series of 24 great beach photos created from publicity photos of Marilyn Monroe playing on the beach. She is our post-war Venus, goddess of love and beauty, emerging from the sea Botticelli-style.

Which wasn't safe. The beach photos were digitally removed by Marilyn, leaving only various coastlines. They are conceptually clever, but visually unappealing. The form does not always work.

Its Marilyn theme honors Pfeiffer's engagement with Andy Warhol's legacy in the 1960s (when Pfeiffer was born in 1966, Warhol's art was at the height of its power). “Sunset” is an unfinished film based on a quasi-abstract 19th century seascape. Painting by JMW Turner. The composite image of the “Great Flood” was taken in 1620 after the arrival of the Mayflower at Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and is a superposition of simultaneous sunrise and sunset over a bay opening into the “Atlantic Ocean.” This majestic wall projection is one of the few digital scenes photographed by the artist himself.

Erasure remains the central element: in digital fusion the stable horizon of the earth optically disappears. At the crucial moment when North American culture seemed to have left Europe behind, the bright sunlight disappeared. The changing, bright light floated above the ground without anchoring for more than 20 minutes. Pfeiffer gave the title a biblical allusion to the flood of Genesis, a desire for resurrection through cataclysm.

A wall text from "The Morning After the Flood" says that the artist identified the horizon - now missing in his projection - as the location of the vanishing point, an original idea in the use of single-point perspective in traditional art. Renaissance Fixed trajectories where all directions of gaze converge refer to the viewer who moves in time and space and stands in front of the image. The video composition is a moving metaphor for the turbulent transition from the analogue to the digital world that has been going on for decades.

Perhaps widening the divide between analog and digital, the exhibition's intelligent installations focus entirely on bold materiality. The rooms were built in the museum's large warehouse and feature rough construction of 2x4s, metal supports and drywall. No expense was spared, which perhaps explains the duration of the exhibition - it ended in June, after seven months - and the catalog unfortunately postponed until March. (There's also an $10 to $18 entrance fee.) Museum galleries have always been a stage for theatrical performances, but this exhibit should be unforgettable.

In one room is "Live From Neverland" (2006), a haunting video projection showing 84 Filipino children, half boys and half girls, all wearing traditional white Barong Tagalog shirts and long white terno dresses, lined up in the stands . I'm in the stands. Church choir or school assembly. They suddenly recited the covert monologue that Michael Jackson read on national television in 1993 to refute allegations of sexual assault, a speech that was simultaneously broadcast on floor monitors. Jackson's image was blood red and later became a television test model as children moved around the world.

Until you encounter Self-Portrait in a Fountain (2000), an intricate sculpture whose composition of a real bathtub, lights, microphones, cameras and recycled water accurately recreates the death bath scene from Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. “You could be forgiven for immediately thinking of Donald J. Trump. Like “Live From Neverland,” the repetition of media fiction creates reality. Later, the former president did the same, gleefully reciting unattributed dialogue from the political satire Legally Blonde at classes at Liberty University, a college founded by a fundamentalist televangelist, or even spewing Nazi rhetoric on social media that was revealed the last week, he said. From “My Struggle”.

Another work, “The Saints” (2007), extends the chill of media indoctrination to an enormous room, painted dazzling white and seemingly empty, except for a dozen vertical white speakers surrounding the room. The invisible roar of the crowd rang out, a deafening sound that rose and fell among the surrounding waves. On a freestanding wall at the back of the room is a small LCD screen where we see a player wandering around the soccer field, just like you would in a large room. Behind the wall are two side-by-side video projections, one showing a football match and another showing an excited and argumentative audience.

“The Saints” depicts the public reaction to the controversial 1966 FIFA World Cup final at London's imposing Wembley Stadium. Pfeiffer recruited 1,000 Filipinos to fill Manila's movie theaters, who supported the event's original films and audio as winners and losers competed against each other. Featuring 17 channels of meticulous audio enhancement, The Saints is a portrait of the feverish human voice, an electrifying digital installation.

Your eyes may start to water, your head may start to pound, and the headlines of the day may flood your mind. “Fascism sees its salvation in giving the masses not the right, but the opportunity to express themselves,” wrote Walter Benjamin in his thinly veiled propaganda broadcast before the cameras in 1935, as authoritarianism made its death march through the Europe. With skill and judgment, Pfeiffer's art explores today's extraordinary aesthetics, empowered by the digital revolution.

Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, 152 S. Central Ave., Little Tokyo, (213) 621-2766, through June 16; Closed on Mondays. moca.org

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This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.

A truly crazy stunt that unfortunately people can't survive