Navigation

Holography has had a rich and widely popular history that spanned Cold War divisions, but as an art form it has not been taken seriously, even if figures as various as Louise Bourgeois and James Turrell continued to experiment with it long after the novelty wore off. In the 1960s and ’70s, critics largely dismissed holograms as gimmicks, denigrating their “special effects” as kitsch. In a 1975 New York Times review, Hilton Kramer compared their “rainbow hues” to the “cheapest kinds of picture postcards,” with their “combination of peep‐show realism and juke‐box color.”

Artists themselves, however, have built a rich alternative history of holography, serving as their own critics and archivists. Museums have recently begun acquiring works such as Bruce Nauman’s 1960s pulse-laser holographic portraits and Simone Forti’s integral holograms made with Lloyd Cross in the 1970s (recently displayed at LACMA and the Art Institute of Chicago), yet there has been little conservation research on preserving holograms. Aside from Sean Johnston’s pioneering scholarship, the history of early women innovators such as Margaret Benyon and Harriet Casdin-Silver and the international scope of holography have been largely neglected. The methodological challenges these static-yet-animated images pose to art history, too, have been sidestepped rather than tackled head-on.

Moving beyond a simplistic celebration of holography as art, this panel seeks a rich set of case studies on particular holographic histories and the stakes of holography as a medium, including recent questions of conservation and intersections between holography and video, photography, sculpture, virtual reality, etc.