WITH A DEFT HAND and skillful use of digital technology, Paul Pfeiffer transforms ordinary sports and entertainment footage into mesmerizing and thought-provoking works of art. Editing images, broadcasts, and film to isolate, emphasize, or camouflage their subjects, he disrupts our seamless consumption of his source material, with uncanny results. Although his forms can vary greatly from one series to the next, sustained viewing of his work reveals an abiding interest in the methods used by mass media to keep us under its spell.
I have been intrigued by Pfeiffer since his rise to prominence a couple of decades ago but had only experienced it in reproduction, so I was thrilled to learn it had arrived in Los Angeles for a mid-career retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art. In an era dominated by digital media, a large-scale presentation of his art here, at the epicenter of image production, is both fitting and provocative. Featuring photography, video, sculpture, and installation, the exhibition included work both familiar and new to me.
I had always been drawn to the critical edge in Pfeiffer’s work—how it deconstructs mass media to expose the ways our beliefs are shaped in a society that embraces spectacle. When I originally encountered it, I was focused solely on contemporary art discourse; now that I study and write on the intersection of theology and visual culture, experiencing the breadth of his work in person revealed new and often surprising layers of meaning across a diverse range of subject matter. Even in the exhibition’s title, Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom—drawn from a speech by Cecil B. DeMille introducing his epic The Ten Commandments—I sensed there was more to uncover. In particular, as I delved into the play of desire in Pfeiffer’s work, I began to perceive a persistent focus on the religious impulse at the core of the modern spectacle.

Paul Pfeiffer. Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (30), 2015. Digital C-print on Fujiflex 56¾ x 78¾ x 2¾ inches. All images © Paul Pfeiffer and courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.
Pfeiffer’s art critiques the spectacle’s impact on identity construction in a culture that makes the celebrity an icon. It engages with social, political, and cultural issues, including notions of race, nationhood, and the mass media’s blurring of reality. Additionally, his frequent allusions to the history of visual culture link the evolution of image production with changing forms of spectatorship. Critics often discuss his examination of mass media’s role in reconstructing history and fabricating personae, as well as his exploration of the overlap between spectacle and surveillance.
However, what strikes me most about Pfeiffer’s art is not just its consistently religious undertone—which critics have noted—but the profound implications that emerge if we permit this aspect of his work to propel us beyond ourselves. His titles contain numerous Christian references: Fragment of a Crucifixion (After Francis Bacon), John 3:16, Incarnator, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Morning After the Deluge, The Saints, and Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. Such biblical allusions have been interpreted by critics as Pfeiffer’s way of highlighting the way our society of the spectacle elicits devotion and reverence through communal ritual. Yet if we take seriously not just his titles but his religious symbols, themes, and conceptual framework, we can see Pfeiffer’s art exposing consumerism as a misguided search for God.
In Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, an ongoing series of monumental photographs begun in 2000, Pfeiffer digitally removes identifying details from images of pro basketball players caught mid-gesture on the court. The remaining figures are often lit with a halo-like glow that, along with the players’ monumental size and ecstatic postures, mimics religious iconography. Four Horsemen (30) features a player hovering above our line of sight in a cruciform position. This series uses contemporary symbolism to suggest a narrative of imminent reckoning and transformation. As the images draw a connection between professional sports and religion, Pfeiffer’s defamiliarizing edits complicate our habitual identification with these icons.
This approach is characteristic of the artist’s work. His interventions disrupt the illusion created by idealized images, countering the allure of mass media by exposing its mechanisms and revealing its underlying emptiness. His deliberate frustration of our expectations heightens our awareness of the disparity between those expectations and reality, forcing us to acknowledge our desire for the satisfactions of spectacle.
Because Pfeiffer’s manipulations refuse to resolve in familiar and coherent ways, as we watch them play out, we feel tension. They shatter the seamless façade of spectacle, leaving us to confront our previously overlooked desire in its raw form—as the drive toward an object of fulfillment. The mysterious power in the Four Horsemen images, for example, intensifies our curiosity about the details that were erased. We find ourselves grasping for the images’ original context, the identities of the players, or the significance of their actions on the court. The amplification of longing produced by the lack of resolution is critical here. It imbues Pfeiffer’s religious references with deeper significance than mere analogy.
Viewing his works comprehensively led me to consider what it means for desire to transcend objects and attachments. Considered spiritually, this is desire in its purest form, detached from materialistic cravings, with potential to lead toward deeper meaning, connection, even union with the divine.
But let’s first assess how Pfeiffer’s art interferes with mass media’s seduction, exposing its underlying structure, frustrating the viewer’s attempts at identification, and promoting detachment. Three early looped digital projections—all silent—illustrate the way Pfeiffer defamiliarizes found material from popular culture to challenge our habits of image consumption.
The Pure Products Go Crazy (1998) features a brief snippet from the 1983 film Risky Business in which Tom Cruise’s character, after performing an energetic air guitar solo, has collapsed onto a couch in his underwear. In Pfeiffer’s piece, Cruise is shown face down, endlessly wriggling and writhing, his celebrity status obscured in the tiny projection. Fragment of a Crucifixion (After Francis Bacon) from 1999 presents the basketball player Larry Johnson as he exuberantly celebrates a triumph on the court. Pfeiffer has digitally erased the other players and all identifying marks from Johnson’s uniform. In the edited clip, Johnson paces forward and back in a jerky, strained manner as he emits a silent scream (mirroring Francis Bacon’s famous painting). Intermittent camera flashes explode in the stands behind him. In John 3:16 (2000) our eyes track a basketball swiftly traveling from one disembodied hand to another in a stream of quick cuts. Nearly devoid of human subjects, the video fixes our attention on the relentless zigzagging of the ball as it hurtles through space.

Paul Pfeiffer. Fragment of a Crucifixion (After Francis Bacon) (still), 1999. Video installation with projector and mounting arm. 20 x 5 x 20 inches.
Each of these early works inhibits the operating logic of mass media. Their repetitive sequences slow us down, prompting the contemplative attention we typically give to traditional art media like painting or sculpture. Our awareness of the experience of looking is heightened through our interaction with the technological apparatus—the projectors and small LCD monitors that Pfeiffer integrates into the form of these works. The size and placement of his videos encourages solitary viewing, whether he installs monitors above our heads at the end of extended metal armatures or on screens so tiny we’re forced to stand inches away to see their images. They will sometimes draw our gaze upward, evoking a sense of reverence. Other times, they require us to narrow our focus. This weakens the spectacle’s impact by redirecting our attention away from its usual stimuli and prompting us to engage in introspection and reflection. This shift allows us to distance ourselves from the image’s seduction and question its influence on our desires and perceptions.
We tend to associate desire with sexuality, and Pfeiffer addresses this as well, specifically the magnified sexualization of female bodies within the spectacle. Pfeiffer short-circuits the male gaze in the photographic series 24 Landscapes (2000). Here he has erased the figure of Marilyn Monroe from a group of publicity photos taken shortly before her death. We are left with only the seashore and other romantic landscapes that served as backdrops. In Self-Portrait as a Fountain (2000) (which pays homage to a Bruce Nauman photograph with the same title), the artist re-creates the famous shower in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho as a sculptural installation. As water streams from the showerhead, multiple cameras and a closed-circuit television reproduce shots from the film. We are placed in the scene, but Janet Leigh’s character is conspicuously absent. In both pieces, the removal of the Hollywood object of desire is keenly felt. All that remains is the mundane.
By deconstructing mass-media images and revealing the elements and techniques that contribute to their seductive appeal, Pfeiffer undermines their illusions. In the absence of idealized realities, we experience discomfort. Our desire intensifies as we search for something familiar and attractive that we can once again attach ourselves to. But for a brief period, our desire drifts aimlessly, with no object to anchor it.
What is the nature of desire absent an object? Could there be intrinsic value in desire itself? Pfeiffer’s religious allusions and Catholic background (he grew up mostly in the Philippines, where his parents were both church musicians and teachers; his father was an ethnomusicologist) encourage us to inquire as to how Christianity addresses such questions.
Christian writers through the ages have described religious feeling in terms of desire for God. Saint Augustine believed that our yearning for God is innate, that “our hearts are restless until they rest in [God]”; that desire is awakened through experiences of disappointment and disillusionment that prompt us to search for what will truly fulfill us. Prayer, he wrote, is not about the quantity of words but the depth of desire. For Augustine, genuine prayer is a resting in our desire for God.
Where Augustine saw desire as a force leading toward divine plenitude, mass media encourages our craving for superficial pleasures and fleeting gratification, trapping us in a cycle of consumption and dissatisfaction—a commodification of desire that Augustine would see as a grotesque distortion. The loops in Pfeiffer’s videos call attention to the consumerist cycles that leave us perpetually craving but unsatisfied.
The writings of sixteenth-century mystic John of the Cross are also instructive here. John believed that God is desire, and that human and divine desire are meant to be in union. For John, the journey of our longing must be a mystical ascent to God. His imagery of longing is shrouded in darkness and night, and his negative theology emphasizes the denial of finite objects of desire. He asserts that while our yearning for created things is natural, true desire ultimately lies in the soul’s capacity to seek God beyond tangible experience. For John, the soul’s inability to find satisfaction in earthly desires has transformative significance.
Other Christian mystics such as Meister Eckhart, Teresa of Ávila, Julian of Norwich, and Catherine of Siena have written extensively about desire as the force that urges us toward God to be transformed in love. Pfeiffer’s art draws attention to how, conversely, spectacle co-opts our natural yearning and redirects it toward itself. The transformative desire John speaks of is twisted by commodity culture into an insatiable need for consumption.
Pfeiffer’s art resonates with Augustine’s and John’s teachings because it challenges the shallow desires perpetuated by the mass media, prompting viewers to reexamine what they consume and the deeper longings that motivate those attachments. The spectacle presents itself as a stage for transcendence, drawing us in through our idolization and identification with celebrities. The basketball players in Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse enjoy an exalted status, yet the arena presents them as objects on display for an audience ravenous for the thrill of glory. We envy them because they embody our yearning to be recognized and acknowledged. They are emblems of contemporary idolatry. But they also reflect the cult of the self that has been intensified in our digital age through the widespread availability of tools for self-representation.
So how exactly does Pfeiffer’s work lead us to experience desire as a distinct entity? When a desire remains unfulfilled—when, for example, our viewing of a televised sporting event is interrupted—our frustration can create a sense of discomfort or longing, directing our focus toward the presence and intensity of desire itself. Confronted with the gap between what we yearn for and our current reality, we become more conscious of desire, its strength and influence on our thoughts and emotions. Pfeiffer’s project illuminates different facets of desire and its impact on our consciousness.
Desiderata (2004) addresses our desire for direct participation in the spectacle. This video piece transforms the set of The Price Is Right into a lonely, plastic space devoid of its usual elements—host, sound effects, prizes—emphasizing absence and deficiency. The title itself, meaning “desired things,” underscores this theme of lack. We watch the altered scenes on a portable screen, experiencing a silent and solitary suspense that prompts reflection on our own desires.

Paul Pfeiffer. The Long Count (Thrilla in Manila), 2001. Digital video loop with sound, LCD video monitor, metal armature, DVD player. 5¼ x 6⅛ x 36 inches.
In The Long Count (Rumble in the Jungle) from 2001, Muhammad Ali and George Foreman are replaced in their televised fight by shadow-like figures, while the crowd’s reactions take center stage. By removing expected focal points from familiar scenes, Pfeiffer challenges viewers’ desires and expectations shaped by media conditioning. Even in the absence of the primary subjects, our desire to find connections leads us to infer their presence. Pfeiffer’s strategy emphasizes how our unconscious yearnings influence our interpretation of visual media—and the pivotal role of desire in constructing meaning.
In his manipulation of images, Pfeiffer also exposes the emptiness and futility of our desires, particularly our pursuit of wealth and our obsession with mass-media narratives. By removing the objects of desire from footage of game shows and boxing matches, he highlights the frenzied emotions and behaviors that accompany our hungers. These subtractions confront viewers with the stark reality of their longing, devoid of the false promises of spectacle. In doing so, Pfeiffer’s work prompts us to face our own roles in consuming and perpetuating these illusions.
Pfeiffer’s disruption of the spectacle’s manufactured reality and deconstruction of the media’s symbolic order all frustrate our expectations. We are unable to achieve closure in our experience of the popular images he appropriates. As we interact with each piece, our expectation is that narrative or visual elements will be neatly tied together and devoid of ambiguity. When they are not, our minds strain to resolve the tension. Drawn to fill in the gaps and complete the images Pfeiffer deconstructs, we experience heightened awareness of the desire that’s intertwined with our habits of media consumption. Our desires are equally short-circuited when fantasies about our own role in the spectacle are no longer sustained. His defamiliarization of popular media produces a disturbance (as the artist himself calls it) that forces us to become aware of our ever-present longing for resolution.
As I made my way through the MOCA exhibition, each exploration into the mechanisms of desire heightened my awareness that desire is an independent force, existing beyond the occasion of the spectacle. I felt called to inquire into its nature. What is this force? And where might it take us if unshackled from the constraints of commodity culture?
Pfeiffer’s Christian motifs, together with the wisdom of the mystics, point to the divine. His use of erasure and camouflage might even evoke a transcendent power that extends beyond the physical realm depicted in the images—a power that might invite us to contemplate its presence within the creative process itself.
His work also prompts contemplative focus on the present moment, which is one way art can offer a path to transcendence. Edited in ways that confound our experience of space and time, his videos can induce meditative states that free the mind. When our desire is liberated from mental concepts and illusions—when it is no longer bound to the finite—we enter the unknown.
Pfeiffer has also created installations that make use of overpowering sound, or that become visually immersive. Within the expansive, warehouse-like container of the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, a variety of distinct spaces were built to showcase different projects. As I wandered through the labyrinthine galleries, I was confronted by noises whose origins were initially elusive. Jarring cheers or loud thumps in one space would give way, upon rounding a corner, to ethereal voices in a room filled with the ambient glow of a large digital projection. Echoes of sound would often precede each installation, hinting at what lay ahead. And surprising shifts in scale forced me to continually readjust to the viewing demands of each piece. Standing before a film or digital projection, I would become acutely aware of the transience of time, only to be floored shortly afterward by the intense physicality of the handmade anatomical fragments of the Incarnator series.

Paul Pfeiffer. Justin Bieber Head, Torso, and Arms, 2003. Gmelina wood and paint. Installation view of Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom at Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. Courtesy of MOCA. Photo by Zak Kelley.
For this project, Pfeiffer worked with encarnadores, sculptors greatly loved in the Philippines for their lifelike wooden sculptures of Catholic icons. The series involves hyperrealistic carvings of pop star Justin Bieber, whose seminude body is fragmented into composite parts. Here the encarnadores’ skill in creating objects for mass adoration is applied to a global celebrity known for his conversion to evangelical Christianity. Rendered as relics akin to the mortal remains of saints, these sculptures interrogate the relationship between Christianity and capitalism from the perspective of colonialism. They also underscore the ways spectacle mimics the enactment of faith.
As I navigated the exhibition, my encounters with various works selectively heightened my senses, one work altering my perception of time, another influencing my spatial awareness. This also attuned me to the emergence of desire, my increased sensory awareness making it more palpable and conspicuous.
Through Pfeiffer’s work, I stumbled upon the inherent power of transcendent desire, but coupled with an invitation to embrace the richness of the everyday. This experience was magnified when I encountered Red, Green, Blue, an energy-charged video installation that deliberately steers attention away from the expected focal point—the progress of a University of Georgia football game—toward the complex interplay of the surrounding environment. As the video cuts from one fragment of the overall scene to another, it captures the vibrant energy of the crowd, the sudden halting and resumption of the music played by the band, and the action unfolding in the television control booth. Like much of his work, with its focus on the mechanics of spectacle, this installation makes clear how effortlessly our attention is manipulated by the language of mass media.

Paul Pfeiffer. Red Green Blue, 2022. Single-channel video with surround sound. 31:23 minutes. Video still.

Paul Pfeiffer. Red Green Blue, 2022. Single-channel video with surround sound. 31:23 minutes. Installation photo by Steven Probert at Paula Cooper Gallery.
Unlike his other pieces, Red, Green, Blue simulates the haphazard way our attention moves, leaping from one detail to another. Amid a cacophony of sound, the camera’s awkward framing captures elements in the stadium in a skewed way, reproducing the perceptual experience that occurs in a crowd when a specific detail unexpectedly grabs our attention. The video darts about, settling only briefly on faces and bodies, mirroring the stimulation of the overwhelmed spectator.
Then there are abrupt shifts from the boisterous stadium to the serene outdoors, where we hear the sounds of birds and see ordinary trees and foliage, incidentals of stadium architecture, and a nearby cemetery—things that would ordinarily remain at the periphery of our attention. Pfeiffer seems to be asking us what transpires when we disengage from the attractions of the spectacle.
The answer, it seems, is a reawakening, a liberation from superficial distractions that allows us to fully engage with the present moment in all its ordinariness. Our desire to find God must lead us to silence and stillness, to a refocusing of our attention on the sacredness hidden in our surroundings. Thus, desire in its raw, unfiltered essence is a force that spurs us to recognize the divine interconnectedness that permeates our existence.
Perhaps the exhibition’s title, Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom, alludes to liberated desire. In this context, “prologue”suggests that art can serve as a springboard to attaining the freedom of desire. Pfeiffer’s work encourages us to heed the call of a desire that transcends the individual egoic self. In doing so, we might discover ourselves on the path of the mystics.
Arthur Aghajanian is a Christian contemplative and essayist. His work has appeared in a variety of publications, and his podcast, Visually Sacred: Conversations on the Power of Images, explores how images influence our understanding of reality. www.imageandfaith.com