This artist casts sport and pop culture in an uncanny new light

Washington Post

3 days ago

CHICAGO — The artist Paul Pfeiffer, who grew up in the Philippines, was not raised as a sports fan. His family members were church musicians, with close links to a Protestant American university in the Philippines. But after Pfeiffer moved to New York and attended his first live sports spectacles, he became fascinated by how much of the work of making and maintaining the idea of America (in which the entire world has a stake, and to which his upbringing had acutely sensitized him) gets done at sports arenas.
Pfeiffer is the subject of a riveting survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. He became known in the 1990s for short videos that loop fragments of footage from high-profile sports events, with certain details edited out. One video, 'Caryatid,' shows the Stanley Cup moving around the hockey rink after a championship victory. The players carrying it aloft have been 'disappeared,' so the trophy appears to be floating over the ice like a miraculous icon in a religious procession.
Another video, titled 'John 3:16' after the biblical verse, keeps the spinning basketball at the center of the image as players move it around the court. A third, 'Fragment of a Crucifixion (After Francis Bacon),' shows a few seconds, reversed and looped, of a player stepping forward with arms flexed and mouth mid-roar, presumably after completing a great play. His wide-open mouth recalls Bacon's paintings of screaming popes (inspired by Diego Velázquez), prompting the questions: Why is he screaming? Because of what?
Pfeiffer invites us, against the grain, to see something humiliating in the basketballer's situation. In his condition of flexed extremity, which the title asks us to compare to the crucified Christ, this triumphal and fantastically well-paid figure (flashes pop behind him like winking stars) is at the center of the attention of thousands, if not millions, of people.
'Anything can be endured if all humanity is watching,' James Salter wrote in his novel 'Light Years.' 'The martyrs prove it. We live in the attention of others. We turn to it as flowers to the sun.'
But there is surely something deeply disturbing about this idea, which our attention economy has lately put on steroids. The player, Pfeiffer has suggested, is 'dissolving into the accumulation of capital until [he] becomes an image.'
This, he contends, is what happens in a culture of spectacle: The object of attention becomes a commodity, and the people paying attention are reduced to pure consumers, and the whole arrangement, though undergirded by the massive infrastructure of 21st-century image creation, is marked by acute precariousness.
Pfeiffer's art combines insight from the French semiotician Roland Barthes (how do myths get made? How are the premises of capitalism and nationalism 'naturalized' or obscured?) with aesthetic strategies indebted to Bertolt Brecht. Originating in the theater, Brecht's 'Verfremdungseffekt,' or alienation effect, was an effort at making taken-for-granted things seem strange again by blocking seduction, blasting away illusions, detonating insight.
But Pfeiffer's looped, low-definition videos (made before video was available on cellphones) can't be reduced to didactic, lecture hall critiques of the logic of capitalism. From the beginning, they've been stranger and wilder than that. They transform heavily mediated communal experiences into private, esoteric oddities.
Pfeiffer's breakthrough video, 'The Pure Products Go Crazy' (the title is borrowed from the first line of a William Carlos Williams poem), was a looping, less-than-one-second clip of Tom Cruise thrashing about in his underwear, face down on a couch, from the movie 'Risky Business.' Isolated and put on repeat, the footage, which could have come straight from a David Lynch movie, is deeply haunted.
Later works show edited footage from boxing rings so that we see, for instance, slowed-down images that reveal the atrocious impact on a boxer's face and body of his opponent's punches. The opponent himself is invisible. The rolling distortions — to face and body — again recall the injuries performed by Bacon on his hapless, isolated subjects in theatrical settings.
Pfeiffer thinks of himself as a 'poacher,' 'translator' or 'mediator' more than an author of original imagery. His sampling of found footage connects him with Christian Marclay, Martha Rosler and Arthur Jafa, while his uses of repetition, choreography, crowds and labor link him with such artists as Ragnar Kjartansson, Shirin Neshat and Francis Alÿs.
As interesting to Pfeiffer as the content of the imagery he repurposes are the presentation and properties of his materials, which are constantly being shunted into redundancy by technological upgrades. His videos are most often displayed on tiny screens that jut out from the wall or else projected onto the wall by cheap, portable devices. Either way, you have to lean in to see them. More than a perverse quirk, this mode of display is Pfeiffer's quiet rebuke to the idea of the 'immersive experience' — the antithesis of the Jumbotron sensibility.
Pfeiffer's survey, which came to Chicago from Los Angeles and then Bilbao, Spain, feels unintentionally perfect for now, when we are all — no matter our political leanings — struggling with the feeling that we are being massively manipulated by algorithms and social media feeds, not to mention the opaque interests of multinational corporations, pundits corrupted by the attention economy and politicians perverted by proximity to power. His work asks (as he puts it): 'Who's using who? Is the image making us, or do we make images?'
If the image is making us, we're in disturbing territory, and Pfeiffer doesn't shy away from the implications. 'Red Green Blue,' for instance, is a 31-minute video splicing together footage taken at a college football game in Georgia (where Pfeiffer had recently been teaching). Instead of showing the game, he films the marching band, homing in on how they respond to and anticipate events in the game. The band members, as well as the cheerleaders, the camera operators and the crowd itself, are all doing the labor of choreographing a spectacle, which is itself forging and finessing America's idea of itself.
Even as Pfeiffer reveals the culture's pentimenti, its invisible viscera, his best work takes us toward something deeper and, oddly, more provoking. One work, which conjures more memories of Lynch, shows Cecil B. DeMille in the prologue to the 1956 remake of his epic film 'The Ten Commandments.' He is walking through the curtain of a Hollywood theater to present the movie, which he describes as 'the story of the birth of freedom.' But Pfeiffer homes in on the brief moment when he appears through the curtain, reversing the footage and looping it, trapping DeMille (and his idea?) in an endless limbo or threshold state. The footage hurts the brain, like the idea of a baby stuck in a birth canal.
Part of the show's purpose is to remind us that there's more to Pfeiffer than his oblique, oddly beautiful riffs on sport. One work, 'Live From Neverland,' shows a chorus of male and female college students dressed angelically in white. They file onto a stage and instead of singing, they begin to recite a statement made by Michael Jackson on Dec. 22, 1993, at a crucial point in the saga of the child-sexual-abuse allegations against him.
The chorus's recitation, projected on a large screen, exactly matches the timing of Jackson's words in the filmed statement, which Pfeiffer presents on a smaller monitor nearby. The effect is electrifying — and, again, deeply strange, in ways that call to mind Gillian Wearing's videos of adults reciting the words of children and vice versa.
As you traverse the sequence of galleries you cannot escape the background sound of a huge crowd at what sounds like a sports event. You arrive, finally, in a long, vault-like gallery that's empty apart from slender speakers placed at intervals along both walls. What you are hearing, you soon discover, is the sound of a crowd of Filipinos.
Pfeiffer himself had assembled them before a large, outdoor screen in Manila. The screen showed archival, black-and-white footage of the 1966 soccer World Cup final between England and West Germany, and Pfeiffer asked the crowd to emulate the chants and cheers of attendees at that decades-old game.
It's not until you walk through the gallery and into an adjacent room that you see footage of the Filipino reenactors alongside footage of the 1966 soccer match. Having entered the gallery in a state of heightened anticipation, you leave disarmed, undone, disabused.
America is not the only place, obviously, where sporting spectacles are intimately involved in forging ideas of who we are and what we stand for. The phenomenon is ubiquitous. As a soccer fan myself, I'll acknowledge that it's silly, fun, seductive, thrilling. It also turns us — at somebody else's behest — both into something we are not (if we ever considered ourselves autonomous individuals) and back into something we perhaps always were: part of a crowd. Any crowd that will have us.
Paul Pfeiffer: Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom Through Aug. 31 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. mcachicago.org