Feeling into Paula Dawson’s Holograms

Abstract

This article discusses the Australian artist Paula Dawson’s (b. 1954) landmark work of art holography To Absent Friends (1989), a triptych of an empty bar, devoid of life except for streamers and abandoned champagne glasses cluttering the countertops. The largest analog holograms ever made, Dawson’s work pushes the limits of holography in both scale and subject matter. By attending to the experiential aspects of Dawson’s holograms––the interplay of looking, touching, and moving that they elicit––I situate holography within a longer history of art and aesthetic experience than is typically lent to this medium. By extension, I consider the relationship between the optic and haptic senses in both making and viewing holograms, which recall earlier artforms and theories of haptic viewing. I emphasize holography’s similarities to relief sculpture and trompe l’oeil painting and draw on ancient theories of extramission as well as nineteenth-century aesthetic empathy (Einfühlung, or feeling-into) to discuss the haptic sensation and somatic movement activated by these elusive images. I suggest that holographic images draw the beholder into a dynamic, bodily, and intersubjective relationship that happens in neither virtual nor real space-time but somewhere between the two. While viewers are denied physical entry into the virtual space of the holographic image, by feeling into the image and acting on their tactile impulse in real space, they effectively collapse the distinction between what is real and what is virtual. While Dawson’s holograms are not moving images, I suggest they are animated images that move their viewers, both physically and emotionally.