Visual artist Paul Pfeiffer, born in 1966 in Honolulu (Hawaii, USA), manipulates images to better demonstrate how images often manipulate us. The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (Biscay, Spain) is organizing his largest exhibition to date in Europe.
Do we make the image, or does the image make us? Pfeiffer uses daily broadcasts of sports shows, televised entertainment, and gigantic concerts, re-editing them after modifying or removing certain elements. The scenes we are presented with flirt with surrealism or the absurd. They highlight a different perception of the world and the power of images to transform the viewer into a consumer.
For over twenty years, Pfeiffer has used traditional photo editing and montage tools, cutting, joining, and masking parts of images or films, thus revealing the systems that influence and guide collective memory.
“Even though society tells us that production must be channeled to perpetuate its institutions, we know that the power of creativity that drives us does not need to be controlled by society’s institutions.”
In the works presented, we find Pop Culture figures—music stars, movie stars, and famous athletes—as symbols of mass culture, whose bodies and faces are admired to the point of veneration. Crowd experiences lead to emotional reactions that neglect the individual by relegating them to a grouping, and resulting in an artificial sense of belonging. But with Pfeiffer, the usual relationship with the audience is subverted.
First, through the diffusion techniques, the artist makes changes in scale using mini screens perched high up, or on the contrary, immense formats. Miniaturization allows the viewer to be aware of their own presence and the incongruity of the spectacle thus minimized. Conversely, the series The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse is made up of giant photo prints, representing NBA players, isolated, almost levitating under basketball hoops, without a ball and without other players on the court.
Their gestures thus become abstract choreographies, and their attitudes resemble icons displayed to the crowd. Pfeiffer seeks to analyze how spectator-consumers are shaped by the images that saturate our contemporary world. Throughout the visitors’ path, the devices that project photos and films are visible, even highlighted as devices, as if to defuse the attraction that images produce on our brains.
Jean-Jacques Ader
“Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom” by Paul Pfeiffer, at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao from 11/30/24 to 03/16/25 – Curators: Clara Kim and Paula Kroll (L.A.) with Marta Blàvia (Bilbao) Info: https://www.guggenheim-bilbao.eus/fr
Publication of the catalog “Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom” by Mack Books and MOCA (L.A.).
