Prologue to the Return of The Real

The postmodern condition of the image has reached its final stage, what Jean Baudrillard describes as the hyperreal. In his theory of simulation, Baudrillard outlines a progression in which the relationship between the sign and reality collapses. Initially, signs reflect reality; then, they distort it; later, they mask its absence; finally, they become self-sustaining, detached from any real referent. In this final stage, the hyperreal images no longer represent reality – they produce it.¹ Paul Pfeiffer’s work operates within this framework, interrogating the mechanisms of spectacle and media manipulation, exposing how images and sounds, even when revealed as fabrications, continue to evoke an intangible response. Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom at the Guggenheim Bilbao, the largest European survey exhibition of his work, brings together key works from Pfeiffer’s career to date to examine the aesthetics of sports, cinema, and mass media, exploring the unstable relationship between perception and reality.

The sound of spectators in a stadium is distinct, not easily conflated with that of other large/mass gatherings of people. Before turning the corner from a darkly lit room I hear the unmistakable charge of thousands upon thousands of fans. However, the vocal noises are not what I expect, they are not the chants and roars bursting with excitement at the anticipation of a goal. The unintelligible speech is united, providing a primal and hypnotic rhythm. The vibrations of the wooden floors, and the overwhelming crescendo of 90,000 spectators, pull me into a seemingly boundless, empty white space. The volume of the crowd increases with each step into the arena. It is the closest simulation of what it would be like to walk centre stage in a colosseum or a walkout to the ring, where suddenly you are the subject, the only silent participant, the one looking back at the crowd.

You enter the work in medias res, or ‘into the middle of things’. Our cultural literacy of the world, whether a sports fan or not, allows us to encounter this work with a perception of what is happening – a perception Pfeiffer looks to challenge. Walking deeper into this boundless space, a tiny screen finds me, a screen small enough to fit in the palm of my hand. A black and white match plays: the 1966 World Cup Final, an iconic match in which England beat West Germany. The rivalry between the nations was amplified by the broader historical context of World War II just two decades earlier, and gave the match an emotional weight. The victory became a moment of immense national pride for England, symbolising post-war recovery and a sense of unity and triumph. It was celebrated as a defining cultural moment in the country’s modern history, and a landmark moment of the swinging ‘60s. By proxy, anyone who encounters this work can feel a part of that iconic match, being right in the middle of it. The immersion and the energy of the crowds within this installation, appropriately titled The Saints (2007), is palpable, it is real. And yet, in truth, this work is an imitation. The audio heard in this installation, while it nearly brought me to tears, is a recreation of the crowds present at this historic match. Recorded halfway across the world in the Philippines, Pfeiffer orchestrated gatherings of more than one thousand people in theatres across Manila where they were instructed to mimic the cheers of the English and German fans. Importantly this ‘trick’ is not hidden from the viewer for very long. As you turn around the corner of the standing wall at the far back, you are shown side by side footage of both the 1966 match, and footage of the Filipinos whose voices created this work.

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"The perversion of the image is made evident"

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Pfeiffer’s work is invested in peeling, deconstructing and re-imagining the structures and elements of mass media and spectacle, not to shatter the illusion, but rather reveal something more fundamental. The artist’s work gained momentum at a pivotal point of technological advancement, the mid to late ‘90s, when personal computers and software like Photoshop and QuarkXPress were gaining increased accessibility and popularity. In the same way, Pfeiffer’s images are edited in a way in which their uncanny nature is not hidden, and the perversion of the image is made evident. The rise of mass media, digital technologies, and the internet profoundly reshaped how people communicate, create, and consume art. Today we find ourselves in medias res of the AI revolution. Our relationship with image, both in terms of our trust in and the influence and burden they have on us is becoming increasingly complex. In the 1990s and early ‘00s, digital manipulation tools like Photoshop became more widespread, but their alterations were often more transparent. The crudeness of early image editing meant that doctored images remained accessible as false—their seams, distortions, and anomalies were easier to detect. This clarity offered a degree of visual literacy, reducing the risk of mistaking fabrication for reality. Today, however, the opposite is true. AI-generated images seamlessly integrate into our visual culture, their edits imperceptible, eroding our ability to distinguish between the constructed and the real.

Pfeiffer’s ongoing series Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2000 - present) sees the artist select and manipulate existing images in which athletes are captured performing near-superhuman feats of skill, their bodies frozen in moments of intense physicality and grace. By digitally erasing the surrounding context—such as other players, court markings, and even parts of the athletes themselves—Pfeiffer isolates these figures in an ambiguous space, emphasising the near-mythological qualities of their movements, while simultaneously questioning the commodification and representation of athletic performance. Often, a bright light would shine through the images, as if the presence of a higher power were punctuating the moment and image. These images are also deceiving although at first glance their manipulation is not obvious. As with The Saints, the illusion unravels over time, revealing the subtle traces of its own artifice and reinforcing Pfeiffer’s interrogation of how images shape our perception of reality. It is only when closely examined that the absence of the player’s jersey number, a basketball, or any opponents on the court are noticed that these images become unnatural. However, the true uncanny nature of these images is how familiar they still ring. The real is destabilised but not erased. Yet again, the real is complicated further. More urgently, this body of work, which has been developing for over twenty years, consists of meticulous manipulations of existing Getty Images (formally the NBA archive)—images that are themselves already distortions, highly edited reflections of reality. As Baudrillard articulates, this represents an absence of reality—a simulation that pretends to reference something real but ultimately has no grounding in any external reality.

In Baudrillard’s hyperreality, where representations become more real than reality itself, even when the anatomy of the trick is revealed, through Pfeiffer’s work, the effect still remains. I still feel a swelling of emotion immersed in the white, airy, heavenly installation of The Saints as thousands of voices crescendo around me, and I still find familiarity in the heavily edited images of basketball games, regardless of whether I consume them as sports events in the first place. Pfeiffer’s works highlight and exploit the fluidity and instability of meaning, allowing for skepticism and suspension of disbelief simultaneously. 

Not only does Pfeiffer highlight the manipulations present in media and spectacle but he also comments on the means, or the medium, through which we engage with such events. The Pure Products Go Crazy (1998) is one example of how the medium itself becomes integral to how we experience the work. This work features a scene from the film Risky Business (1983), in which Tom Cruise’s character thrashes face-down on a couch, looped endlessly. By isolating this moment and projecting it on a small, portable long armed projector, which is itself both a sculpture and a means to show the work, Pfeiffer subverts the actor's celebrity status, rendering him anonymous and reducing his performance to an abstracted gesture.

This choice of medium disrupts our traditional expectations of film as a grand, immersive, collective, experience, where equipment is hidden or minimised, often projected large or (at the time) viewed on clunky ‘90s-era televisions. Instead, Pfeiffer's handheld and intimate presentation reduces the scene to a perpetual, infinite loop, which are so small they can only be viewed by one individual at a time, the soft whirring of which can similarly only be heard up close. The 15-second scene also emphasises the repetitive nature of media consumption. The fleeting cinematic moment becomes small, fragmented, and contained, inviting viewers to reconsider the monumental status of both the celebrity and the spectacle.

"Even when we know something is a simulation, we still experience it as real"

Pfeiffer's practice offers a poignant reflection on the hyperreal, and while Baudrillard would argue that we are trapped in simulation, my optimistic reading of Pfeiffer’s work suggests that by making the construction of media explicit, we might regain some agency in understanding it. His work does not destroy the illusion; instead, it reveals it in a way that fosters both skepticism and emotional investment. This tension—between exposing artifice and allowing it to function—aligns with Baudrillard’s paradox: even when we know something is a simulation, we still experience it as real. Pfeiffer's practice invites us to confront the mechanics of media and spectacle while acknowledging the power these representations continue to hold. By exposing the constructed nature of images, he encourages a more critical engagement with the realities we encounter daily, suggesting that perhaps there is a way to navigate the hyperreal with a renewed awareness of its artifices. Ultimately, Pfeiffer’s work embodies the paradox of hyperreality: the more we understand its mechanisms, the more deeply we are enmeshed in its effect.