Paul Pfeiffer Unpacks Society's Obsession with Celebrity and Spectacle in Guggenheim Bilbao Survey

For American artist Paul Pfeiffer, an image is a door into the collective consciousness. Working across sculpture, video, photography and installation, Pfeiffer constructs his own visual vernacular of spectacle, returning to the question, “Is the image making us, or do we make images?” or put simply: “Who’s using who?”

The Guggenheim Bilbao Museum is currently hosting Pfeiffer’s largest survey exhibition in Europe, spotlighting over thirty works created over the last twenty-five years. After debuting at MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary in Los Angeles, Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom makes sense of our fixation on the spectacular, shining a light on the moments and images that make us.

Drawing a connection between religious icons and the contemporary cult of celebrity – pop stars, actors and athletes – Pfeiffer explores how a singular body comes to represent the global circulation and consumption of images. Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2000–), a photographic series of NBA players suspended in-air, emphasizes this link as their cruciformly-fixed bodies, captured against a dense sea of fans, act as figures of worship in our “media-based sanctification.”

Sports stadiums, concerts and films double as sites of collective memory, where societal fears and desires reveal themselves through cheers and ogling eyes: Mohammad Ali and George Foreman go ghostly in The Long Count (2000–2001) as Pfeiffer digitally removes. the fighters’ bodies out of their epic 1974 match. What’s left is an empty ring surrounded by a clamoring audience, proposing a magnetic, meta commentary on the myth of the spectacle.

Paul Pfeiffer: Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom is now on view through March 16.

Guggenheim Bilbao Museum
Abandoibarra Etorb., 2, Abando,
48009 Bilbo, Bizkaia, Spain