Paul Pfeiffer was recently in Los Angeles for the opening of “Olympia,” his latest solo show with Perrotin. When we met for dinner at a collector’s home in Historic Filipinotown, the artist, who’s been based in New York since the early ’90s, singled out seeing BTS at SoFI Stadium as a highlight of his trip. From the nosebleed seats, he told us, the K-pop supergroup appeared simultaneously miniscule on stage and gargantuan on screens—a strangely potent combination, “both intimate and monumental.” In perfect BTS parlance, Pfeiffer said his bias (favorite member) was either RM or Jimin, and his bias wrecker (the member he’d cheat on his bias with) was Jung Kook. But he didn’t consider himself ARMY, the fandom’s name for itself—he was instead an artist conducting anthropological research. As Pfeiffer later told me over the phone, “I’m trying to understand the nature of soft power.”
For close to three decades, packed arenas have played a starring role in Pfeiffer’s conceptual practice, an ongoing study in the optics and rituals of spectatorship. “The stadium is a good metaphor for the myriad ways in which individual subjects can be brought into group alignment,” he said, having just witnessed 70,000 BTS fans collectively lose their minds. “Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom,” an acclaimed 2023 survey of the artist that traveled from MOCA LA to the Guggenheim Bilbao and MCA Chicago, included such hits as Red Green Blue, 2022, a video installation that applies this inquiry to a Georgia State University football game. Ignoring the players, the piece focuses instead on the marching band’s command of the crowd. As the band director told Pfeiffer off camera before filming, “I know that I’ve done my job when I see people cry.”
Through his decades-long deconstruction of live entertainment, the artist’s recurring takeaway is that what we experience as a rush of feelings are often just the effects of meticulously constructed spectacle. “[We] are nothing if not manipulable,” he told me, a fact frequently exploited for commercial and political gain. At Perrotin, where “Olympia” is on view through Nov. 7, the artist’s new architectural drawing series “Vitruvian Figure (Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum)” reimagines the titular athletic venue with 1 million seats, which in aerial views blur into indistinguishable black lines—a visualization of online spectatorship, where fans are now infinite but largely invisible to one another.
Mounted high elsewhere in the gallery, a sculptural pair of legs bears the bleeding wounds of stigmata on its feet, and “Better At 70,” the inelegant poetry of a real Justin Bieber tattoo, scrawled onto its thigh. For the show, the artist unveiled a few new additions to his “Incarnator” series, 2018-present, in which he commissions encarnadores, Catholic woodworkers specialized in the hyperrealist depiction of Christ, to sculpt parts of the pop star’s dismembered body. Neither a believer nor a Belieber, Pfeiffer had the idea for the series during Bieber’s ill-fated Purpose tour in 2017, which, before its premature cancellation, had a stop scheduled at the Filipino megachurch Iglesia ni Cristo. (Pfeiffer was at a residency with Bellas Artes Projects in the Philippines at the time.) The pop star expressed his regrets for canceling on Instagram: “I want my career to be sustainable, but I also want my mind heart and soul to be sustainable.”
For Pfeiffer, churches are a lot like stadiums, ancient forerunners “in the R&D of mass communication.” His merged Jesus Biebers articulate uncanny parallels between two globally worshipped brands—two tragic sons who died (or went to rehab) in order to rise again. The likeness between the body of Christ and Bieber’s also planted a startling question in my ex-Catholic brain: Would people love Jesus less if he didn’t have abs?
Pfeiffer was born in Honolulu in 1966, and split his childhood between Hawaii and the Philippines. His parents were both singers in the church, and raised him in the non-pictorial Protestant tradition. I asked him whether their vocation had influenced his interest in spectacle. I also wondered whether Protestants, in their rejection of Catholic iconography, saw music as the primary medium for summoning the Holy Spirit. Pfeiffer explained that he sometimes goes to church for research, and despite his lack of faith, “when I hear the music, more often than not it actually moves me to tears.” Appreciating the sublime pleasure of the spectacle, and its momentary illusion of welcoming him inside something larger than himself, he added, “I don’t think it’s a contradiction to suspend my disbelief.”
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