Zsofi Valyi-Nagy

THIS PAST DECEMBER, pioneering computer artist Vera Molnar died at the age of ninety-nine. To celebrate her achievements—and to mark the opening of a major exhibition of her work at Centre Pompidou, Paris, now on view through August 26—Artforum invited artist and art historian Zsofi Valyi-Nagy to provide an overview of Molnar’s oeuvre. Here, Valyi-Nagy examines the artist’s work through a novel lens: that of media archaeology, resurrecting a vintage Tektronix microcomputer to “reenact” the process behind one of Molnar’s groundbreaking plotter drawings.

Love-Story (à l’Ordinateur) (1974), an artist’s book by Budapest-born, Paris-based artist Vera Molnar (b. 1924) uses black-and-white photographs to tell the story of two squares that twist and turn and converge and diverge. These images are, in fact, early “screenshots” ––photos of an early computer screen hooked up to a gargantuan mainframe computer. Though she often documented the screen while programming artworks, the artist rarely showed these photographs, preferring instead the crisp, machine-drawn lines of plotter drawings to these soft strokes of white light, erratically captured in the dark. These screenshots, however, point to a methodological shift in Molnar’s practice that was subtle but significant: the shift from “blind” to “interactive” computing that occurred in the early 1970s with the introduction of screen-based graphics. By examining these images in tandem with Molnar’s writing from this time, I suggest that Molnar’s idiosyncratic embrace of interactivity signaled a divergence from the algorithmic art practices to which she has been linked. Rather than trying to eliminate subjectivity from the artistic process like many of her peers working in generative computer graphics, Molnar used the computer and its terminals to rigorously investigate subjectivity and the role her own aesthetic decision-making played in her process. Her “cold” abstraction, made with “cold” machines, sought to bring us closer to understanding the fundamentally human aspects of art and creativity.

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.

Perhaps best known for her pulsed-laser portraits such as Tigirl (1985), Margaret Benyon (1940-2016) was a pioneer of art holography. Trained as a painter, she was one of the first artists to learn holography in 1968. Benyon's practice was highly experimental, combining holography with other artistic mediums and techniques, from sculpture to painting and photography. Her deceptively simple subject matter explored the physical properties of everyday matter-a loaf of bread, a steaming cup of coffee-and the fleeting physicality of the human body. This talk focuses on some of Benyon's lesser-known work: her Unclear World series (1979), made at the Royal Military College in Canberra, Australia, and Pushing Up the Daisies (1996), which I collectively call her anti-war holograms. Taking an art-historical approach, I read these works alongside other feminist art practices, including Martha Rosler's photomontages, and Benyon's writings in both holography journals and feminist publications. Benyon called for a more politically conscious adoption of holography, reminding artists of their power to shape the ways in which new technologies are used, and whether they help or harm the planet and its people. While Benyon may not have referred to herself as an activist, she used her voice to make an impact in both the international holography community and the greater art world, where she sought to bring wider recognition to the holographic arts. As we consider how to use the new imaging technologies at our disposal, I suggest we pause to revisit Benyon's images and words of caution.