A Look Into Paul Pfeiffer’s Digital Icons At MOCA

Johanna Burton, Director of MOCA, emphasized the significance of the show's location in a press statement, “Paul’s work has a global reach and gives us a profound sense of the technological landscape we live in. Yet, Los Angeles offers an ideal setting for this long-awaited, ambitious exhibition. Set in the entertainment capital of the world, a city singularly poised to create–and manipulate–dreams, symbols, and mythologies, this show will have deep resonance here.” And indeed it does. 

Pfeiffer is an artist who is interested in the pain-staking aspects of film production. This curiosity can be seen through his artistic process, in addition to his chosen subjects. The images and video work of meticulously edited stills and fragments normally undergo some kind of erasure or manipulation. 

This kind of treatment to the medium isolates symbolic details and defamiliarizes the viewer from scenes we’ve grown accustomed to. The artist’s hand is evident in the sense that one can typically recognize what has been removed or altered, but it is done so with a precision that makes it appear natural. 

This technique is what gives Pfeiffer’s pieces so much symbolic weight. Some of the most emblematic visual markers from the show emerge from a series of NBA freeze-frames, from 2000 to 2018, where contextual references of teams, ads, and other players have been wiped from the original image. What is left in the wake of excision are eerie figures, sometimes captured in religiously-leaning configurations surrounded by a packed stadium of spectators. 

The series, “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” puts the idea of bodily consumption into the foreground, not only in a religious light, but in a political one. The discourse of black bodies being offered up for removed and stake-less audiences is haunting, evocative, and deliberate. The nuanced choices Pfeiffer makes effortlessly communicates a narrative about modern rituals and fanaticism.  

Another ongoing series started in 2018, “Incarnator,” also delves into the questions of cultural devotion. Commissioned by MOCA for another iteration of the sculptures, Pfeiffer works with “encarnadores” who specialize in the creation of santos. These wooden carvings typically depict Jesus, The Mother Mary, or saints pertaining to specific churches and regions. 

The Catholic effigies that are most often found on altar pieces have been exported to the gallery’s white cube, but their re-contextualization is not the only transformation. The works, which physically connect to colonial projects and labor, are modeled in the appearance of Justin Bieber. Bieber’s body, depicted in a progression of three stages, has been dismembered. Three pairs of arms, torsos, and heads all stand apart from another, as a single assemblage of legs hang as sculptures with stigmata-type wounds. 

As the exhibition’s curator Clara Kim says, “Pfeiffer gets at the undercurrents of what holds contemporary society together— our collective desires, fears, and sense of belonging.” On view until June 16th, the New York-based artist’s survey show is a monument to cultural icons through an isolated lens. 

Be it through emotionally-probing installations, or a mixture of satire with commentary, Pfeiffer asks viewers to consider their relationship to the world of digital culture and how this has impacted or shaped the relationship an individual has with themselves.