Rudie Berkhout “Planet Claire” 1979 Rainbow Hologram 8” x 10”. Image courtesy HoloCenter.
The lengthy and technically challenging journey to restore holography as an art form.
Kingston, NY has a population of about 24,000. Its municipal website lists 24 art and related galleries, most near the town’s rapidly gentrifying waterfront area along the Hudson River. It’s an aesthetically dense ratio, roughly the same as in Manhattan, about 90 miles due south, putatively the nation’s art capital (1,400 galleries and museums for about 1.7 million inhabitants there, if you want to do the math.) It makes Kingston a likely choice for the HoloCenter — The Center For Holographic Arts, which relocated there in 2023, from Manhattan, as has a steady stream of post-Covid urbanites seeking more than six feet of separation. It was home most recently to The Art of Holography – Past – Present, an extensive installation featuring works by Rudie Berkhout, Michael E. Crawford, Melissa Crenshaw, and others.
The Center’s journey covers far more than those 90 or so miles, and it parallels artistic holography’s own twisty narrative. The Museum of Holography, the genre’s first US home, shuttered its doors in 1992, 16 years after it opened in Manhattan’s SoHo district, the victim of funding shortages despite attracting a reported 100,000 visitors a year to its exhibitions and programs. At the time, the Museum’s management attributed much of the problem to a lack of corporate donations. That was ironic, considering that over the course of the venue’s existence holography had been wholeheartedly embraced by the security wing of the burgeoning financial sector, its trope the now-ubiquitous dove-taking-wing hologram on Visa cards (developed by holographic pioneer Ken Haines). What happened, says Linda Law, the current executive director of HoloCenter, which was founded as an artist-in-residence program by holographic artists Ana Maria Nicholson and Dan Schweitzer in 1998 and which first occupied several locations in New York City, was that holography’s industrial success took much of the wind out of its artistic sails. “For a long while, it stopped being art and became just a picture on a credit card, in people’s minds,” laments Law.
Materials Shortages & Identity Crises
Artistic holography absorbed a second punch in that era. The basic materials that artists used to fabricate holograms were becoming as ethereal as the holograms themselves: chemical manufacturers including Agfa, Kodak, Ilford, and Fuji began to cut back drastically on output of light-sensitive products such as silver-halide film — foundational for optical holography — as photo-resist technology, the technique used for the manufacture of CDs and DVDs, was applied to the mass manufacturing of holograms and lessened demand for the film. That was on top of the already-high cost of the large helium-neon gas lasers, capable of outputting 50 milliWatts of power at the 633-nanometer metric for red light, that were the workhorses of the genre at the time and not easily accessed by most artists.
It was, to invoke a certain novelist from England, where Law originally hails from, the best of times and the worst of times for holography, as its commercial applications gained steam but overshadowed its artistic ambitions. It was a condition that seemed to follow it into the 21st century, when immersiveness became a goal of those seeking experiences over stuff. Holography’s three-dimensionality seemed a perfect fit for that new landscape, but its very identity was undercut by incidents such as the “appearance” of Tupac Shakur at the 2012 Coachella music festival, an event widely and erroneously heralded as a new achievement in large-scale holography, instead of as the updating of a Victorian-era theatrical cheap thrill that it actually was. Even the holographic cover of National Geographic’s December, 1988 edition, which helped sell millions of copies of the magazine, contributed to holography’s commercialization. “It spawned this massive industry that had no need for silver halide,” she says. “Demand dried up, and so did the supply of that for holographic artists. It was enjoying a wonderful moment from an industrial perspective, but from an artistic perspective, it got the rug pulled out from under it.”
The implications were a ripple effect throughout the holographic-art world. The Musée de l’Holographie in Paris closed in the mid-1990s, a few years after New York’s Museum of Holography folded, while Chicago’s Museum of Holography held on until 2009, its assets now an itinerant, ad hoc exhibit.
Artistic Holography 2.0?
Law, who took the HoloCenter over in 2021 and brought it to the Kingston location, is the latest in a succession of holographic-art advocates who want to change that narrative, and to restore holography’s aesthetic aspirations. Thus, she stresses, HoloCenter isn’t simply a continuation of the erstwhile 1990s establishments but rather a technical agora that encourages visitors to get involved with and appreciate holography for the art form it is. In that way, she says, it still builds on the tenets established decades earlier by Museum of Holography founders and Jody Burns. “It was really Posy who took it on and evolved that,” she says. “And it became a really important place in terms of holography evolution as an art form, a meeting place, a place to see work, a place to meet artists, hear them speak about their work, and learn it.”
The HoloCenter’s current incarnation established it as a teaching lab offering workshops for the public as well as a gallery for holographic exhibitions. For instance, Iridescence, a survey exhibition of 11 artists in 2024 commissioned by the Hologram Foundation, included Michael Bleyenberg’s dual self-portrait Shaman and Betsy Connors’ Light Reef. (Any proceeds from the sale of these works went back into a fund that will at some point sponsor new work.) HoloCenter’s next installation, which runs from June 2024 through January of 2025, was more ambitious, and curated by Law. As its name suggests, The Art of Holography – Past – Present intended to chronicle a history of holographic techniques. Think chiaroscuro to cubism, but with lasers. Ranging from the sensual work of Ana Maria Nicholson to the nuts-and-bolts tangibility of Dora Tass and the modernity of August Muth, the exhibition also laid out holography’s technical as well as its aesthetic evolution.
Law says the show, divided into holographic technology’s past and present, reflects the change in holographic techniques, particularly the unavailability of silver halide formulations, but underscores the shift to more accessible modalities. The “past” section of the show has work from artists from the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, and some of Nicholson’s work that stretches into the early 2000s, she explains. “I wanted to highlight a very abundant past with all of the work [that] was occurring on silver halide, either with red-gas lasers, or if you were in a facility where they had an argon laser you did it in blue-green, or if you were working with a pulse laser,” Law enumerates. “And that whole period resulted in a lot of really important work.”
The “present” section displays holograms recorded on dichromated-gelatin emulsions, an approach pioneered by Muth through his “Light Foundry” studio in Santa Fe, where artists including Tass, Crawford and Joan Stango — who all have work in the show — have trained with him. Digitally printed holograms by Sally Weber reveal some of the new directions holography is taking. “We are also using a new self-developing photopolymer emulsion for our workshops, with tiny diode lasers and simple accessible systems,” she adds. “So now we have three non-silver-halide ways to record holograms, in dichromate (DCG), photopolymer, and digital printing, and we have a way forward for artists to create new work.”
The Gallery As Portal
These different techniques, she notes, underscore the variety of holography as an art form, but with The Art of Holography – Past – Present presented as both the result and the allure of the technology behind it, making holography’s often abstruse nature enjoyably accessible as it also demystifies it.
“There's a lot of misinformation out there about holography,” says Law, referencing the now-notorious Tupac incident. “Actually, it was a double-edged sword: on one hand, it caused a lot of confusion and made people think that that was a hologram, but it also brought a lot of attention to holography. So in the year or so we've had the gallery open, it’s been very interesting to observe people as they come into the gallery and then come back and do workshops with us. They enjoy learning about this because they had no idea what it really is.”
If the public can thus get a leg up on appreciation, can artists do the same? Law points to the Spectra-Physics 50-mW helium-neon laser. “The workhorse” of artistic holography, “six feet long, about a foot high, and it had a power supply the size of a big microwave,” as she describes it — a $30,000 behemoth unavailable to most artists. What could help holographic art is the same technology dynamic that has changed music production so dramatically in the last 40 years, as table-top and laptop-based processing has allowed highly sophisticated recordings to be done in spare bedrooms instead of costly high-end recording studios. “We now have 50-milliWatt diode lasers that are a tiny fraction of the size of those original gas lasers and cost 1/100th of the price, and we also now have single-beam recording and panchromatic photopolymer that is self-developing,” she notes, underscoring how much more accessible the art of holography has potentially become. “It was always an ongoing problem how an artist, a young artist in particular, got access to high-end equipment. Now, [holographic art] is way more accessible — no processing chemistry; it develops itself. It's the most extraordinary thing.”
The HoloCenter has announced its next show: New York Holographic Artists opens January 18, 2025. Law’s future plans for the venue include establishing an artist-in-residence and continued engagement with a public that can now, thanks to those refinements in holographic creation, leave the gallery with their own holograms, including underserved kids in the area through local arts grants. The venue will also be continuing its online program, HoloSeminars via Zoom to discuss different aspects of holographic art with leading guest artists and technologists. She’s further heartened by such as the one at the Würth Museum in Künzelsau, Germany, where holographic works by Stephen A. Benton, Margaret Benyon, and Rudie Berkhout hang next to works by other alternate-art notables including Andy Warhol, light artist François Morellet, and typographer Karl Gerstner, setting holography’s place in that broader pantheon. She’ll also continue efforts to reinforce the history of holographic art, which she feels its commercial success thwarted. “Holography is now getting acknowledgement as a creative medium by the larger art world,” she says, “and that's what it’s always struggled with.”