Nauman’s Body of Information: The Holographic Portrait c. 1970

Bruce Nauman’s foray into the holographic arts got off to a rocky start, as his initial pitch met with antipathy that nearly killed the project before it began. His 1968 application to LACMA’s Art & Technology program was summarily rejected: deemed an “uninteresting, too-literal approach to a technique which, by its very novelty and exoticism, presented pitfalls.” The prospect of holographic likenesses may have underwhelmed A&T, but Nauman forged ahead with the help of a sympathetic engineer, producing two sets of eerily lifelike portraits of his face and contorted body. These three-dimensional avatars largely befuddled critics but fared better among curators, appearing in numerous exhibitions including Information. Held at MoMA in 1970, this landmark show has been the subject of illuminating research by art historians—though the presence of Nauman’s pioneering holograms has never be discussed. Drawing on unpublished archival material, I ask what qualified holograms for inclusion under the aegis of “information,” examining fundamental aspects of the medium’s visual properties and its practical applications. If the hologram remains, in Eric de Bruyn’s estimation, “in essence an informational storage device,” there is ample evidence from the period that information storage was seen as a promising use for holographic technology. Nauman knew this, and took the provocative step of treating his own body as so much information to be stored. I argue that his wrenching, knotted poses register the toll this process takes on the human subject, dramatizing the clash between the corporeal and the virtual that marked the ‘Information Age.’