ARTS
A 3D triumph for the future
Edward Lucie-Smith found paranoia as well as enthusiasm at a conference on holography Holography is a pariah art form perhaps, indeed, the only remaining pariah art form. Mention holograms to your aver- age curator of avant-garde exhibitions, or even your average critic (a much lower form of life), and they will immediately look down their noses at you. The trouble is, they'll tell you, is that the medium itself is irredeemably kitsch. This is ironic, grant- ed the fact that kitsch in other guises has become so abundantly respectable in the avant-garde art world — think of the huge- ly successful line of products put out by the American Neo-Pop artist Jeff Koons, rang- ing from life-sized portraits in ceramic of Michael Jackson to gigantic photographs of the artist himself in sexual congress with his (now) ex-wife, La Cicciolina. Cultivated sensibilities enjoy being raped — by anyone but a holographer, so it seems. I have just spent four days locked up with a bunch of artist-holographers at a four-day conference in Nottingham, and a very instructive experience it was too. It reminded me a little bit of the science fic- tion conferences put on long ago in con- nection with the Brighton Festival, in the days when Ballard and Aldiss were mere pulp fiction authors and the genre was only discussed seriously in smudgy mimeo- graphed fanzines. The same energy, the same enthusiasm, and — it must be said the same paranoia were all in evidence. The one thing missing was the caveman element which SF authors used to go in for. No one dragged a screaming girlfriend by the hair across the floor of our universi- ty lecture-theatre — something I remem- ber happening in the lounge of a Brighton conference hotel. In fact, since so many leading artist-holographers are Japanese, the atmosphere was outstandingly polite. Why is holography outside the loop, and what is likely to happen to it? The answers to these questions tell one something about holography but perhaps rather more about the current state of avant-garde art. Holog- raphy first made its mark in the early 1970s, when enormous crowds visited pio- neering shows like the one put on at the Royal Academy. Even then critics were rather sniffy. Op Art was just going out of fashion — and anything 'optical' was sus- pect. Three-dimensional holographic images were disturbingly there but not there. They hovered like ectoplasm both before and behind the transparent or reflective plates to which clear celluloid sheets bearing laser-generated interference patterns were attached. Sometimes, even in those days, two incompatible forms seemed to occupy precisely the same space. This conflicted with the philosophy of 'real objects in real space' sedulously propagat- ed by the champions of Minimal Art. These champions, some — like the late Donald Judd — leading artists in their own right, increasingly dominated the trend-setting American art magazines during the latter years of the decade, until their influence was overthrown in the early 1980s. A fasci- nating account of this power struggle appears in the long essay 'A Girl of the Zeitgeist', a pen-portrait of Ingrid Zischy, the current editor of ArtForum, the trendi- est publication of them all, which is repub- lished in Janet Malcolm's recent collection of essays The Purloined Clinic (Papermac, £12).
Mother problem with holography was quite simply that it was highly technologi- cal, and, its early manifestations at least, extremely expensive and difficult to do. Holographers who aspired to be artists boasted of the fact when they managed to produce six or seven small images a year. This was entirely contrary to one important trend in the art of the 1980s and 1990s, which valued scale (vast environmental works were and are the height of fashion), untrammelled spontaneity, and the use of so-called 'poor' materials. Arte Povera, as it came to be called, eventually saw off a number of other fashionable manifesta- tions, such as Neo-Expressionist painting, and established itself as the dominant mode of the day, especially among Euro- pean artists. To some extent, it still retains this position.
If one takes a level look at Arte Povera — something which seldom or never hap- pens within the contemporary art world itself — what leaps to the eye is that it is primarily an expression of technological guilt. The artist redeems the detritus of the industrial world, and turns it into some- thing which transcends the mess technology has created. Though primarily a product of developed societies, Arte Povera has now also spread to the Third World. It is, for example, a major artistic product of Cas- tro's Cuba. Here it serves three purposes: it allegorises the poverty imposed by the American economic blockade, it emphasis- es the democratic nature of the new mod- ernism (anyone can make art, anywhere, out of any materials, however unpromis- ing), and at the same time, paradoxically, it supplies a minor but reliable source of hard currency. Examples of the new Cuban art can most easily be inspected in that most cutting-edge of all European museums, sit- uated in the most capitalist of countries: the Ludwig Forum in Aachen. In an art world arranged in this fashion, holography is an embarrassment.
Despite this, four days at the Nottingham conference were more than enough to con- vince me that its triumph is probably cer- tain, though not always in the forms that present-day artist-holographers suppose. There is a compelling parallel with the his- tory of photography. Photography, when Louis Daguerre announced his new process to the world in 1839, was in no sense a sur- prising invention. A means of fixing the images created by the camera obscura had long been awaited. Similarly, the three- dimensional image, visible without a stereoscopic viewer, was something people envisaged long before the holographic pro- cess made it possible. The invention of photography created a popular furore, but also evoked a violently hostile reaction among many fine artists, who thought not merely that their livelihood was threatened, but that a photograph was a visual image somehow deprived of its soul. Gradually, over the years, several things happened. People discovered that photographs had a visual grammar of their own. Photographic cropping, and photographic tricks with scale began to affect fine art — Degas offers examples of the one, Georgia O'Keeffe of the other.
Meanwhile, however, photographers struggled to establish their medium as a separate means of visual expression, equal to more traditional ones. Under the leader- ship of Alfred Stieglitz and a number of his contemporaries, they very nearly succeed- ed. Yet this was not the direction the medi- um was finally to take. In the second half of our own century, photographs have gradually been absorbed into the main- stream of art. In the 1960s Pop Art canni- balised existing photographic images and incorporated them into paintings by the use of silkscreens. More recently, photographs have been presented unapologetically as art in their own right. The huge erotic self- portraits of Jeff Koons, mentioned above, are a case in point. Holography is likely to take the same route. Rather than being an enclosed speciality, it will become just one of the many means of expression available to an inventive artist.
There is one major difference, however, and this is the increasingly symbiotic rela- tionship between holography, or at least between the creation of convincingly three- dimensional images, and the computer. This became very clear from the presenta- tions made at the conference, and has been reinforced by the announcement just made in the press that computer-generated 3D television is now on our doorsteps. Accord- ing to the report, a viable imaging system already exists and television sets which use it will be marketed within four years. Kitsch or not kitsch, television is the most powerful visual medium of them all, and its availability in 3D will inevitably impose a new artistic grammar. I'm afraid a lot of today's avant-garde work will then begin to look — to coin a phrase — rather flat.
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