For These Top Artists, Holograms Offer a New Dimension

A little company called Holographic Images invited some blue-chip artists down to Miami 30 years ago. They were wined and dined and given ample time to hit the beach. They were also asked to make the art of the future. They made holograms.

Holograms are strange, ghostly, 3-D images on glass or film. Until then, Holographic Images had mostly been producing the kind of garish, color holograms you might pick up in a poster shop. But the C-Project, as this new venture was called (“C” being the symbol for the speed of light), was going to elevate the medium. Or so the company hoped.

Funded by two of America’s leading art collectors — the Detroit real estate magnate Guy Barron and his wife, Nora, a longtime social worker — the C-Project ran for five years and managed to recruit 20 of the art world’s biggest stars to work in an esoteric medium that some thought cheesy. John Baldessari. Louise Bourgeois. Chuck Close. Roy Lichtenstein. Dorothea Rockburne. Ed Ruscha. James Turrell. Now the work that six of these 20 artists made is at the center of an exhibition that suggests just how significant holographic art has become. The show, called “Sculpting With Light: Contemporary Artists and Holography,” opens Aug. 20 at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

The show is an early entry in “PST Art: Art & Science Collide,” a seven-month series of exhibitions throughout Southern California that’s supported by $20.4 million in funding from the Getty. It includes early-stage, preparatory versions of holograms by Baldessari, Rockburne and Ann McCoy as well as fully realized holograms by Bourgeois, Close and Ruscha. Also featured are works by two artists who are making holograms now — Deana Lawson, the Los Angeles artist celebrated for her intimate photo-portraits of Black Americans, and Matthew Schreiber.

Without Schreiber, none of this would have happened. He’d worked at Holographic Images after getting a B.F.A. from the University of Florida, and then left to study holography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Royal College of Art in London. When he returned to Miami for the C-Project, his job was to become fully versed in each artist’s work, and to then guide them through the painstaking process of creation. Now 57, he continues to make holograms for himself and with others, Lawson included. “A lot of my work has to do with spectacle and novelty,” he said in a recent interview — key issues in any consideration of kitsch.

Holography has been dogged by accusations of tackiness from the start. The medium was still nascent in 1975 when Hilton Kramer, the chief art critic for The New York Times and a resolute guardian of high culture, slammed an early holography exhibition at the International Center of Photography. “The aesthetic naiveté of this show must really be seen to be believed,” Kramer declared. “Perhaps some genius is waiting in the wings to make something memorable of this combination of peep‐show realism and jukebox color, but he is nowhere in evidence here.”

It’s not the first time a new medium has been met with a mix of condescension and wonderment. In the 1840s and 1850s, when photography was new, people called it “the mirror with a memory.” Holograms are “windows with memories,” Virginia Heckert, curator of photographs at the Getty, said, as we sat in a wood-paneled study room in the museum’s West Los Angeles acropolis, looking at an eerily well-defined self-portrait by Close.

In early photo portraits, the subject seems to be staring back at you; in holograms, it’s as if you see the subject through glass. “They are absolutely three-dimensional, and they are not static,” Heckert said. “As you change your position, you see different things outside that window.” And because they can be seen only when lit by a laser or by highly focused incandescent light, she added, it’s as if “light actually sculpts the object into being.”

Holography is a highly technical medium that captures interference patterns in light waves with great precision, yet yields a result that appears strangely insubstantial. This is because a hologram, unlike a photo, is not, technically speaking, an image. It is a pattern of information that, as Schreiber has put it, contains the “whole message” of whatever is being recorded, much as our DNA contains all the data that gives rise to a human body. The word itself stems from the Greek “holos,” meaning whole, and “gramma,” or message. A single cell contains the entirety of our DNA; each slice of a hologram, no matter how small, contains all the information that’s in the whole.

Many things that are touted as holograms — the revivified Tupac Shakur that performed with Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre at Coachella in 2012, for example — are not holograms at all but variants on a 19th-century illusion. Making a hologram is considerably more complex. It requires capturing the interference pattern that’s formed when a laser beam aimed at a glass plate or a special film intersects another laser beam that has been reflected off the object you want to portray. This interference pattern is recorded, creating the spatial illusion that is a hologram. Extreme care must be taken to make sure the apparatus remains absolutely still. Schreiber has recorded a video for the Getty to detail how it works, but even he finds the process hard to articulate. “For years and years and years I have tried to come up with like, super easy ways to describe it, but it still blows my mind totally,” he said. So now, he added, “I allow it to be magical.”

Witness Baldessari’s hologram at the Getty, a work in progress titled “It’s Alive.” It depicts a brief, holographic close-up of Boris Karloff as the monster in the 1931 film “Frankenstein.” Schreiber, then around 30, traveled repeatedly to the artist’s studio in Santa Monica, Calif., where they watched old horror movies together. “He loved ‘Frankenstein,’” Schreiber recalled. “We talked a lot about the strangeness of holography, and trying to bring to life something that is dead.”

The eight holograms Bourgeois completed, also on view at the Getty, are entirely different. Intrigued as always by process and materials, she wanted to see what a series of miniature steel sculptures she’d made would look like as holograms. The results, cast in a lurid red, look as three-dimensional as the sculptures themselves, even oddly more so — intense, and yet at a distinct remove from reality.

But the C-Project had management issues that art could not address — overspending chief among them. A now-deceased partner in the enterprise, Larry Lieberman, claimed in a self-published book that expenses ballooned over time from $5,000 per month to $120,000. Whatever the details, it was unsustainable. In 1999, with tensions rising and the project still uncompleted, Guy Barron terminated its funding and the whole thing imploded.

“You can see how it got out of hand,” Heckert, the curator, said. Guy Barron did not respond to requests for comment.

The last artist Schreiber worked with before the C-Project shut down was James Turrell. Turrell had been treating light as a sculptural object for decades, so the abstract shards of light floating in space in his holograms were a natural progression. He continued to make holograms with Schreiber until 2013 and exhibited several that year in his sprawling retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Heckert recalled that around the time of the LACMA exhibition, Guy Barron contacted the Getty through a gallerist in Palm Desert: Would they be interested in the C-Project’s holographic plates? While the Getty’s curators debated the offer — would they get anything they could display? — Schreiber made numbered editions of the eight holograms Bourgeois had created and the four each by Close and Ruscha. Finally, in 2018, the Getty accepted a gift of 105 works: a complete set of the 16 newly reissued holograms, plus 89 plates by Baldessari and others. Some 38 boxes of documents were given to the Getty Research Institute.

After receiving the holograms from the C-Project, Heckert and her colleagues began to think about acquiring more. They’ve made two purchases to date, both of which will be in the show: “Boombox” and “Black Gold” by Lawson. Another hologram by Lawson, “Torus” — also in the show, on loan from the artist — is named after its ring-like geometric shape. “The math behind a torus was very interesting to her,” Schreiber said. “She started talking about the idea of the hologram as a talisman, like a shard of dark crystal — this magical, optical object.”

Of Schreiber’s contributions to “Sculpting With Light,” two series stand out. In “Lily Dale” and “Cassadaga,” he recorded his visits to two communities, a hamlet in upstate New York and a village in Central Florida, that since the late 1800s have drawn people who wish to commune with the dead. Mediums in Cassadaga took him to “vortexes,” special portals where the living and the dead can mingle. The holograms he made from these trips display a knowing take on the spooky surroundings. Hilton Kramer, ever alert for signs of vulgarity, would scarcely be surprised, though it’s unlikely he’d detect the irony.

This exhibition should demonstrate that for the art of holography, there were indeed geniuses waiting in the wings. But that’s actually been evident for some time. Another set of the Bourgeois holograms is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, donated by her foundation. Her holograms will be included in a retrospective that opens Sept. 24 at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo. Last January, Schreiber’s holograms were featured in a solo show at Marlborough in New York. In 2021, Deana Lawson’s “Torus” was the centerpiece of a show at the Guggenheim Museum that celebrated her winning the Hugo Boss Prize. Later the same year, a Turrell hologram sold at Sotheby’s for $189,000.

If Guy Barron ever thought he’d been taken for a ride by the guys who ran the C-Project, he should feel vindicated by now.