With sports and horror movies as canvas, an artist dissects the world’s digital upheaval

Emotionally creepy, intellectually disturbing and very, very loud, both audibly and visually, “Paul Pfeiffer: Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom” is an extraordinarily compelling survey of the artist’s work in digital imagery, whether sculptures that incorporate video, room-size installations or large-format photographs. He’s been at it since the mid-1990s.

The newly opened exhibition of more than 50 works at Little Tokyo’s Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art is also timely, which adds to its resonance. We have lately been swallowed up in spectacular social and political upheaval, intensified by the depredations of digital life that traffics in images of state violence. With the eruptions and disruptions of digital mass culture as its Ferrari-level engine, often represented by the roaring drama of sport, Pfeiffer’s art cogitates on power as an ongoing campaign waged between the individual and the crowd.

Pfeiffer, 57, was born in Honolulu the year before French theorist Guy Debord published “Society of the Spectacle.” That thin but influential volume meditates on social transformations wrought by the corporate expansion of mass culture machinery, which has metastasized with the digital revolution. Debord is an unseen scaffolding for a hypnotizing work like “Caryatid,” in which the Stanley Cup — that big, heavy, tiered silver trophy awarded annually to the National Hockey League playoff champion — floats, bobs and twirls in space before a cheering crowd on TV.

Nothing is holding it up. The airborne trophy — the oldest that can be won by professional athletes in North America — appears to have a life of its own. It hovers before the throng like a preening drone, playful yet vaguely malevolent.

Pfeiffer digitally erased the athlete holding the monumental trophy aloft in stock video of the event, a ritualized gesture of triumphal victory. The century-old object, not the player, is isolated as the active factor in our human relationship to the sporting scene.

What makes the work more than a passing visual amusement, a TikTok trick of editing, is the carefully altered monitor on which it is shown. A silver 9-inch television, chrome-plated and as pristine as a Jeff Koons bunny, is revealed as its own objectified gesture of triumphal power, discreetly encased in a Plexiglas box and elevated atop a pedestal. Corporate digital media are the dynamic agents in modern social experience, inseparably playful and malevolent.

Just as the shiny television monitor echoes the glittery Stanley Cup, so a viewer is likened to the athlete digitally deleted from the “Caryatid” video — essential to, but erased from, the spectacle. In ancient Greece, the culture where male athletes were so highly prized as heroic citizens, a caryatid was a draped female figure used instead of a column as an architectural support. Sometimes a caryatid has been compared to the unseen slave who carried society’s burdens.

Pfeiffer, who is Filipino American, moved with his family to Manila when he was 10, early in the Marcos dictatorship, and he has since returned to live and work in the archipelago several times. (Mostly he’s based in New York.) Notably, the Philippines has been twice colonized — first for over 300 years by Spain and its Christian religion, then for half a century by the United States and its tumultuous mass culture. Both come into prominent play in the artist’s work.

An extraordinary 2015 photograph shows a Black basketball player seen from below, hovering in space in the middle of a vast stadium, enormous crowds packed into the stands and the lower portion of an American flag glimpsed hanging high overhead. No one else is on the court.

A fabrication? A digital manipulation of an actual moment? An erasure of elements to reveal something hidden but meaningful in our culture, in the tradition of Robert Rauschenberg famously erasing a Willem De Kooning drawing?

The player’s arms are extended like a crucifixion. His face obscured and his blank white uniform disclosing neither team nor number, he is resolutely anonymous — as anonymous as the throng ogling in the stands. He seems held aloft by the sheer force of a mass performance.

The photograph is one in a group titled “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” a reference to the prophecy of triumph and submission from the New Testament Book of Revelation. Spectacle and spectatorship, cruelty and liberation are embedded in a scene poised on the brink of an individual soul’s ultimate destiny. So is the promise of a second coming, which is not necessarily consoling. The image of Black resurrection through b-ball is at once celebratory, chilling and poignant.

Pfeiffer takes on big themes. In “John 3:16” (2000), the image focuses on a basketball, a talisman that completely fills the screen and bobs around as it is being passed between largely unseen players. Sometimes hands come into view, at other times there is only the spinning, ricocheting ball. It’s akin to the levitating Stanley Cup in “Caryatid,” made three years later.