BILBAO .- The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao presents Paul Pfeiffer: Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom, the artist’s largest survey exhibition in Europe, with a selection of over thirty works spanning his entire career and establishing him as one of the most influential artists today. Born in 1966 in Honolulu (Hawaii) and living in New York, his multidisciplinary practice, which includes video, photography, sculpture, and installation, interrogates ideas of spectacle, belonging, and difference. Primarily known for his incisive videos with images taken from a media-saturated world, Pfeiffer examines how images shape the spectators who consume them, although, as he says: “The question always comes up: Who’s using who? Is the image making us, or do we make images?”
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Since the start of his career more than twenty-five years ago, Pfeiffer has used early desktop digital editing programs like Photoshop and Quark XPress to manipulate footage from sporting events, concerts, and Hollywood films. Through iterative acts of cutting, splicing, masking, and cloning, his works reveal the structures that shape collective memory and its repressed fears and desires, while also presaging the mass circulation of short video clips and GIF’s in the museum's digital area.
His mining of the perceptual and psychological dimensions of collective experience have led him to analyze how stadiums and stages, from antiquity to the present day, have served not only as platforms for grand spectacles but also as sites where the body politic (of a nation, of a community, of society) is defined and contested.
Global icons such as pop stars, film actors, and athletes are often the most familiar figures in Pfeiffer’s works, where their bodies are located at the intersections of veneration and objectification that undergird mass culture. This use of celebrity culture also speaks to the global circulation and consumption of images. His work elucidates how the mechanisms of viewership, from architectural spaces to the broadcasting or postproduction of images, shape our sense of self, of community, and at times of nationhood. By recreating or restaging communal experiences in which emotions are heightened and the individual is suspended, the artist demonstrates how these events drive feelings of belonging and identity and in turn underline the ever present questions of difference and otherness.
The scale changes that Pfeiffer imprints on his creations, with shifts from miniature to huge, destabilize the predetermined “natural” relationships between the viewer and the object, making us aware of our bodies in relation to the larger world and of the highly constructed nature of the information we consume. His era- defining early works in video and photography demand intimate, close viewing, while his latest experiments in sculpture and installation create grand, immersive encounters.
Inspired by the temporary architecture of a studio soundstage, the exhibition design is draws upon the artist’s interest in the highly fabricated and labor-intensive process of Hollywood filmmaking. Throughout his work, Pfeiffer references filmmaking and the apparatus of the camera, often recalling iconic scenes that are embedded in our collective memory. The exhibition title, Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom, is drawn from a critical moment in American media history: Cecil B. DeMille, the director of The Ten Commandments—the most expensive film ever made at the time of its release in 1956—giving opening remarks introducing his epic religious drama.
Pfeiffer’s own biography and life experience—he spent his childhood between the Philippines and the United States—gave him a broader, transnational perspective of American identity. Pfeiffer is deeply engaged with the Philippine context, with its unique amalgamation of racial, religious, and cultural traditions informed by the legacies of colonialism, as a former Spanish Captaincy General or province of New Spain and subsequently a territory of the United States, and by the movement of global labor in more recent times.
These layers of time and history have informed not only his work throughout his career but also his position on the diaspora and his ability to speak to and from a more complex construction of identity, to perceive a politics of visibility shaped by mass media and the mechanisms of image-making, by collective rituals of entertainment and spectacle, by popular culture, and by the commonality and difference that these processes generate.
TOUR OF THE EXHIBITION
Erasure and Editing
The exhibition opens with Pfeiffer’s signature video sculptures from the late 1990s and early 2000s that established him as a pioneer of video art in the digital era. Iconic basketball games are the starting point for Fragment of a Crucifixion (After Francis Bacon) (1999) and John 3:16 (2000), while Muhammed Ali’s most famous boxing matches are featured in the trilogy of works titled The Long Count (2000–01). Displayed on miniature LCD monitors and CPJ projectors that create a radical scale shift in how these images are usually seen, these works are emblematic of Pfeiffer’s meticulous editing of found footage, characterized by frame-by- frame manipulation erasing, camouflaging, and looping short clips. Made with newly introduced desktop editing software of that time, these early works retain traces of the artist’s hand as well as the ghostly presence of the central figures.
Pfeiffer uses simple techniques to reveal critical but subtle features inherent to the production of images and to the construction of spectacles in sporting events. Pfeiffer continues to explore these themes in recent video works such as Caryatid (Mayweather) (2023) and in Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2000–ongoing), a series of photographs featuring NBA players suspended in uncanny gestures and isolated on the court, taking on an iconic presence in front of the crowd as figures of worship in our media-based sanctification. The exhibition also features large-scale video installations such as Morning After the Deluge (2003), which uses motion tracking software to reorient our one-point perspective of landscape and horizon, as well as the artist’s live-feed video works Cross Hall (2008) and Self-Portrait as a Fountain (2000), which consider the active yet often obfuscated role of the camera in constructed mediated viewing experiences.
Crowds and Power
Pfeiffer often deploys the artistic and conceptual strategy of transposing singular events and moments in popular culture and entertainment across the boundaries of time, geography, race, and gender. The Saints (2007) is an immersive audiovisual recreation of the 1966 World Cup Final between England and West Germany. Pfeiffer reimagined the iconic match in which England famously beat West Germany in overtime to win its first and only World Cup title in a captivating multi-channel sound and video installation. To recreate the soundscape of this epic football match, Pfeiffer orchestrated over 1,000 people in Manila who gathered in movie theaters to watch footage of the historic game.
For Pfeiffer, the acoustics of the crowd is one of the most significant components in the construction of a collective experience and sense of belonging, and by replacing the cheers of the German and British fans with the voices of a Filipino crowd, he explores how nationalism is performed in these memorable moments of sports history. This work also underscores Pfeiffer’s interest in the architecture of the stadium as a site of mass ritual, focusing on the history of London’s Wembley Stadium, the epicenter of English football which traces its origins to the British Empire Exhibition of the early 1920s. The stadium underwent a total reconstruction between 2001 and 2007 with the addition of high-tech speakers and screens, a radical shift which physically embeds the spectator into the action of the game and heightens the emotional experience of the crowd.
Pfeiffer’s Live from Neverland (2006) similarly features the acoustics of a hired crowd, this time a group of college students at Silliman University in the Philippines delivering a word-for-word recitation of a televised speech by Michael Jackson. Exaggerating the dissonance between the individual and the collective, Pfeiffer manipulated the movements of Jackson’s mouth to sync up with the timing of the students’ voices, replacing an individual voice with the harmonies and nuances of the chorus. This work continues Pfeiffer’s exploration of ventriloquism and mimicry, complicating simplistic attempts to construct or understand the notion of identity.
Incarnator
For this exhibition, Pfeiffer expanded his Incarnator series (2018–ongoing). The artist worked in collaboration with encarnadores (from the Latin word meaning “to make into flesh”), sculptors in Seville, Spain; Betis Pampanga, Philippines; and Tlaxcala, Mexico who are known for their production of santos, nearly-life-sized wood carvings of cultural and religious figures that are used in Catholic churches and private worship. These works were modelled after the face of Justin Bieber and transform the pop sta —who had recently declared himself a born-again Christian—into a contemporary embodiment of Jesus Christ. The production of these sculptures traces colonial trade routes that date back to the sixteenth century, illuminating the labor and artistry behind centuries-old religious traditions and their ties to the history of global networks that continue into the present day.
Production and Post-production
Pfeiffer is interested in the creation and manipulation of broadcast images, referencing the layers of post- production that all contemporary media is subjected to before reaching our screens. In Red Green Blue (2022), Pfeiffer explores the stadium in its capacity as a television or broadcasting studio, capturing the orchestration of a college football game (one of America’s most popular mass rituals) at the University of Georgia in Athens. Pfeiffer focuses on the role of the marching band as the live soundtrack and musical generator of crowd emotion during the game, examining the internal mechanics of their musical performances through close-up live footage. Pfeiffer’s editing foregrounds the complexity of a popular sport that relies heavily on racialized “otherness.”
Paul Pfeiffer was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, and spent his teenage years in the Philippines. He has lived and worked in New York City since 1990. He has had museum solo shows and projects at venues such as The Athenaeum, Athens, Georgia, 2023; Inhotim Institute, Minas Gerais, Brazil, 2018; Bellas Artes Outpost, Manila, 2018; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 2017; Honolulu Museum of Art, 2016; Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila, 2015; Artangel, London, 2014; Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, 2012; Sammlung Goetz, Munich, 2011; Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, Berlin, 2009; MUSAC León, Spain, 2008; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2005; MIT List Visual Arts Center and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 2003; and Whitney Museum of American Art, 2001.
He has presented his work in major international exhibitions, most recently the Performa Biennial and the Honolulu Biennial in 2019 and the Toronto Biennial and Seoul Mediacity Biennale in 2022. Pfeiffer’s work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; M+, Hong Kong; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Tate, among many others.
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