Signaling the closing moments of many classic Hollywood films, “The End” has become a phrase synonymous with storytelling and cinema. In Ed Ruscha’s The End, the artist takes these two words as his central subject matter in four horizontal holographic panels. Set upon shifting green, blue and violet tones, the black gothic-style typeface is placed at altering heights, varying in clarity and opacity. The End builds on an earlier collection of paintings from the early 1990s that present the same text in a variety of fonts against a range of backgrounds. During this period, Ruscha developed a fascination not only with the textual aspects, but also with the materiality of film itself. This interest is evident in both his paintings and the subsequent holographic works, where the scratches and dust spots on the film's celluloid surface become visible. In some instances, the composition is split by the border of the film frame, suggesting a malfunction that undermines the façade of Hollywood perfection. 

“What motivated me was memories of the cinema. Watching movies and watching scratches on the film, and those little pops that come here and there, and those little, what they call, “hairs in the gate,” always seemed real curious to me... Movie producers want to keep those scratches out of there. But I like them for what they are.” 

—Ed Ruscha 

Since 1956, Ruscha has lived and worked in Los Angeles, a city iconic for contributions to the American film industry. The influence of L.A. and its cinematic connections is evident in the present lot, with the four panels compositionally mimicking frames from a roll of film. The holographic form of The End brings a distinctive spin to the series, granting depth to the text and subverting the expectation of its two-dimensionality. With shifting iridescent tones against striking black text, the present lot captivatingly reimagines the familiarity of a film’s concluding moments, as "The End" flashes up on the screen and the final frame flickers. In fact, each hologram equals 24 frames (or one second) of film, able to be "played" by a viewer when moving their body and head from left to right. In isolating the words "The End", Ruscha underscores his career-spanning fascination with the aesthetic qualities of words and engages in an exploration of the cultural and emotional resonance embedded in certain phrases.

The ending title card for Lady Killer (1933), directed by John Cassavetes. 

Holography itself was made possible by the invention of laser technology in the 1960s and faced a mix of condescension and wonderment upon its entrance into the art world soon after – the same reaction photography received following its debut in the mid-19^th century. This critical response however did not stop twenty of the art world’s biggest names, including Ruscha, Baldessari, Lichtenstein, Turrell, Close, and Bourgeois from working in the esoteric medium through C Project in Miami, a holography workshop akin to a print workshop co-founded by master holography technician Matthew Schreiber in 1994. Schreiber created each hologram by hand, and Ruscha was highly involved in the physical process for the development of The End, manipulating the source 16mm film by painting layers of text, creating deliberate scratches, and animating the movement of hairs and pieces of dust within the film gate. 

Though C Project closed its doors in 2000, its contemporary legacy lives on. In the 2010s, Schreiber was approached by collectors Guy and Nora Barron to help reissue sixteen C Project holograms, and the current exhibition Sculpting with Light: Contemporary Artists and Holography at the Getty Center in Los Angeles highlights the creative potential of holography through the output of C Project artists like Ruscha, many of whom used the technology to blur the lines between reality and simulation, exploring luminosity and three-dimensionality. The holography medium itself, which involves a mystifyingly technical process of capturing interference patterns in light waves and recording them onto a glass plate, continues to enthrall viewers and artists alike: Schreiber, who has now spent upwards of thirty years working with holography to create these spatial illusions, has even concluded that he “still allows it to be magical.” 

Master holography technician and artist Matthew Schreiber explains how holograms are made for the Getty Museum, on the occasion of their exhibition Sculpting with Light: Contemporary Artists and Holography, on view through November 24, 2024.