Light Trap for Bruce Nauman: The Holographic Image and Expanded 3D Imaging

Abstract Scholars of the operational image have detailed how expanded 3D technologies are important to the ongoing transformation of images from representations to be looked at to prompts for action. Yet, to date, the status of the holographic image in this shift has yet to be fully explored. This article breaks new ground in the discourse of the operational image by investigating the position of the hologram in a genealogy of expanded 3D imaging. It focuses on the optical holograms made by the artist Bruce Nauman in the late 1960s. The article produces original visual analyses of Nauman's holograms, offers primary archival research into their reception, and uses these discussions to develop a theory of the holographic image in relation to the scholarship of Elsaesser, Crary, and de Bruyn. It makes the original claim that the holographic image is aligned with the operational image through its displacement of the body from the image's apparatus. It suggests the holographic imaginary solicited a conceptualization of the image as a spatial territory beyond the pictorial frame in which bodies might be situated. Its findings are significant for contemporary understandings of the operational image as an agent of remote action and reveal how the holographic imaginary anticipated aspects of the operational image.