Body art

Harriet Casdin-Silver strips us down

by Leon Nigrosh

HARRIET CASDIN-SILVER: THE ART OF HOLOGRAPHY At the DeCordova Museum,

51 Sandy Pond Road, Lincoln, through January 3, 1999.

By now we are all familiar with the world of holograms. We have only to turn on our television and visit a holodeck on Deep Space Nine, participate in a holonovel in Star Trek Voyager, or make use of the holobrothel on Babylon 5. But these are futuristic fantasies conceivable in some very distant time. Holography is a complex technology that, through distributing and reconstructing lightwaves, renders three-dimensional images on film or plates that are used chiefly in scientific endeavors. For the most part, commercial use of the medium has been relegated to the eyes of cheesy religious icons that follow us around the room or those comical changing faces on horror videocassette sleeves.

Enter Harriet Casdin-Silver. This artist had a successful career in radio and television before going into painting in the early 1960s. Dissatisfied with the passivity of the painted canvas, she began to create installations, first on a small scale, and later culminating in her 1968 Exhaust, which has been reassembled especially for her first retrospective exhibition at the DeCordova Museum. This stainless steel, walk-in room is packed with free-hanging auto exhaust pipes and flashing lights and filled with loud sounds and declarations. It was meant to stir the emotions and the senses. For the full effect, visitors are asked to wrap themselves in a mylar sheet, put coverlets over their shoes, step inside and close the door.

In 1968, when Casdin-Silver was invited to the American Optical laboratories in Framingham to experiment with its primitive holographic equipment, she saw the process as a possible addition to her ever-increasing stable of elements to be used in her installations. Her 1984 installation, Thresholds, also reassembled for this exhibit, best exemplifies this aspect of her work. In a darkened 10x13 foot room, a video projection splays images of a robotic hand and holographic forks across the back wall. Suspended within the room are actual holograms of her Equivocal Forks, which appear to advance and retreat in space. A video monitor repeats images of Casdin-Silver herself, while the audio plays and replays her voice leaving a message on different answering machines: "Hi, it's Harriet. Hey, I'm dying. Get back to me, will ya?" We get a self-portrait in real and imagined time as the artist grapples with her art, technology, and the uncertainty of life itself.

It was an uneasy but purposeful step away from the complexities of installation for Casdin-Silver to devote her energies into producing only holograms. The museum's Linde gallery has a chronological array of her works in both laser and white-light transmission and reflection holography. As you approach each work, you will notice that people -- and pretty soon you, too -- begin to do a little dance about the floor, bobbing and weaving, advancing and retreating, to get each angle and color of the images trapped within the flat holographic sheets. The semi-diffused blue-green face of Beth, the sensuous curve of the orange Kathryn I, and the dreamlike visage of Ian are a romantic contrast to the 3-D images 2 Male Nudes and 3 Asses. But these small images all play a part in Casdin-Silver's search for beauty in the everyday bodies of ordinary people.

It is the life-size holograms that are the most eye-catching, breathtaking, and controversial of all of Casdin-Silver's work to date. In one of four images in Specimens, the girl is so realistically rendered that it looks like she's been stuffed into a cubbyhole filled with formaldehyde cut right into the museum wall. After the initial confusion about what we're really looking at, we see the images of the hermaphrodite in The René Wall take on a strange sense of strength and emotional beauty. We are made to look at what we've only heard about, and what we see is the figure of a specific person who lives among us.

The most illusive and transfixing images Casdin-Silver has produced are Pink Corpse and Corpse with Tie. These nude self-portraits a morte make it seem as if the subject is actually encased in the wall in trance-like repose. The artist is also center stage in 70 + 1 + 2. A three-part holographic full-front view offers a greenish dream-like Casdin-Silver shown next to a three-part color photograph of her backside, warts and all. Like it or not, she offers us a dose of reality. Casdin-Silver's life-size holographic self-portraits are the essence of her search for true beauty -- beauty beyond the pages of Vogue or Playboy. As a lifelong feminist, Casdin-Silver wants to get the idea across that no matter what stage of life we are in, our bodies are beautiful.

For a 73-year-old woman to bare it all, not only takes guts, but it takes an extreme sense of self-worth and confidence. And as she says herself, "It looks damn good!"

The museum is open Tuesday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Call (781) 259-8355.