The condition of being under the watchful eye of the camera at all times is perhaps a defining experience of the 21st century. If, in 1967, the Parisian theorist Guy Debord opined that we live in “the society of the spectacle,” by now, we seem to have upped the ante, as we witness the blurring of spectacle into surveillance. This is the conceit behind Paul Pfeiffer’s provocative midcareer retrospective at MOCA entitled “Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom.” The show dramatizes the sensations of seeing and being seen. elangqq
The earliest work in the show lays out some stakes. In The Pure Products Go Crazy (1998), clips of Tom Cruise appropriated from Risky Business (1983) have the actor writhing on a couch in a continuous loop. Viewers become voyeurs of a bizarre suburban ritual. But Pfeiffer projects the scene on the wall at such close range that the image is mere inches in size, as if protecting Cruise or refusing to lull and seduce viewers. It’s an example of how the artist deftly manipulates scale, often to create a sense of dissonance. elangqq
