Alex Serbanescu: "Paul Pfeiffer: Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom"

Paul Pfeiffer’s Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago is the third iteration of his exhibition of work spanning several decades. Originally at the Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the exhibition contains digitally edited videos and photographs, live installations, and expansive sound art. The vast majority of these pieces are technically “found” media, but Pfeiffer meticulously edits each work to produce an uncanny effect that complicates the use of scenography in pop culture world-building and collective mythmaking. The scenography takes the form of theatrical flats, creating spaces that feel more like a soundstage than an exhibition.

Pfeiffer regularly references Anthony Vidler’s 1992 book The Architectural Uncanny, which describes the uncanny as the aesthetic mode of the familiar made unfamiliar. In 2016, Pfeiffer wrote an essay for ArtAsiaPacific entitled “Not at Home in the World,” a phrase found in Vidler’s book. He uses the expression to describe his personal (yet universally modern) experience of estrangement from the familiar. Pfeiffer challenges the popular culture central to the American Empire, continuing Vidler’s project of “against from within.”

A successful way in which Pfeiffer does this is by reversing background and foreground. In Caryatid (2003), he digitally replaces boxers in a ring with the audience and the ring itself. The surgical removal of the subject invites an unsettling focus on the construction of the event itself. In Notes on Writing Weird Fiction, H.P. Lovecraft describes how a narrative abnormality could be produced from the absence of something that should be there. Pfeiffer uses this subtractive method extensively in his video pieces, but it takes on a new valence when he, like Lovecraft, uses it as a tool for scenographic world-building. Self-Portrait as a Fountain (2000) is a faithful recreation of the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, sans actors and with the curtain closed. Clamps, microphone mounts, exposed plumbing, and more appendages embrace an operational shower: it’s everything but the action. The curtain is simultaneously scenography and subject: its act of concealing puts the viewer “out of place” and challenges them to consider framing. The curtain reappears in the exhibition’s eponymous piece: a video loop of Cecil B. DeMille suspended in perpetual entrance/exit from an ornate curtain. By flattening the moment of encounter, Pfeiffer highlights banal stage design and pulls the viewer into a strange occasion. This extends to the design of the exhibition itself. Rather than a pure white box, the viewer is behind-the-scenes: at one with the theatrical flatness of scenic production.

In the entry foyer sits a vitrine containing a diorama of a canvas tent in a forest clearing. Carefully lit and composed, the foliage obscures a small camera facing the tent. The punchline of the piece, titled Perspective Study (After Jeremy Bentham) (1998/2023), can be found several rooms away, halfway into the exhibition. A tightly framed live feed from the camera is projected onto a large wall: the diorama appears between real and artificial. People intermittently cast shadows on the scene but their presence is only perceived as a distant atmospheric shift. Beyond the immediate Foucauldian commentary, Pfeiffer demonstrates the ability of media displacement to produce the uncanny. The exhibition design itself is therefore a case study in scenographic detachment: curation as a way to dissolve the subject and give the viewer an uncomfortable autonomy in meaning-making.

To a similar effect, John 3:16 (2000) is displayed on 5.6-inch LCD screens suspended on metallic poles protruding from exhibition walls. These screens are typically used as monitors on camcorders or for quick playback. Pfeiffer highlights the arbitrariness of the constructed visual: the videos are precariously detached from the wall. Only one or two viewers can get close enough to understand the video’s subject matter, subverting its origin as a mass-consumption media phenomenon. The artificiality of the video piece was enhanced in its original space at MOCA Geffen in 2023–24. Architecture studio Büro Koray Duman designed the exhibition for galleries erected in the round using standard 2 by 6 wood frame construction. This explicitly references set design and allows the viewer to physically wander around the artificiality of the mediated event.

Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom is centered around the production of American ritual. It places an intense focus on the mechanisms, labor, and space behind popular culture. Pfeiffer melts all that is solid, he profanes all that is holy: he performs the modern condition as a conscious act of criticism.