What would a basketball game be like without the ebb and flow of two teams, without the roar of the crowd? Like Paul Pfeiffer’s videos. The multimedia artist, whose first career survey in the United States is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) through June 16, began with a suite of videos in which the whole seething, popping commotion has been removed from found live footage, leaving the central monumental figure of an athlete.

In “Fragment of a Crucifixion (After Francis Bacon),” from 1999, the Charlotte Hornets’ star power forward Larry Johnson rocks back and forth, alone on the court, screaming in victory or agony. In “Race Riot,” hands reach in to brace a fallen Michael Jordan — his iconic jersey, number 23, is blank.

“The work has no sound,” Pfeiffer said on a snowy afternoon last month in East Harlem, his spoon poised above a bowl of soup in a Mexican cafe near his studio. “As much as I’m interested in the crowd, I’m trying to figure out ways to create an experience that aren’t just merely deafening.” Both works are displayed on tiny screens in MOCA’s “Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom”: “Crucifixion” loops on a portable projector mounted close to the wall at the height of a religious icon; “Race Riot” on the foldout screen of a camcorder in a vitrine. They’re small, they’re silent — and they’re just for you, an intimate confrontation with extravaganzas meant for millions.

Pfeiffer, 58, is one of a handful of major contemporary artists to treat sports with such reverence. By stripping away the pageantry he’s isolating the pain and contradiction that draw people in. His work, which ranges from poster-like photographic prints of lone sports stars to Christlike wood carvings of a shirtless Justin Bieber, resides in collections at the Museum of Modern Art and the Tate, among others. In a way, he admits, it’s a provocation to seriously consider facets of mainstream entertainment that might seem antithetical to fine art. He called his nods to religious themes, particularly in his titles, “unorthodox” in a secular art milieu. But it’s not really sports, or religion, or pop music that interest him — it’s the faith of the crowd.

Religion and sports stay at the cutting edge of broadcast media, he told me. “It’s where you see concerted efforts to experiment around what forms of messaging will reach the crowd most effectively, in the megachurches and in the stadiums.”