“Recent Pulsed Stuff and Other Delights” was the title of a suite of eight holograms exhibited from August 9th to September 5th, 1986 at a hair salon cum art gallery in Chicago called Benny’s Casino after the owner, Benny Casino. The title of the show comes from a classic 1960’s Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass album, “Whipped Cream and Other Delights”, whose cover depicted a young lady completely covered with the sweet sticky stuff. Four laser lit 30 by 40 centimeter plates represented the “Pulsed Stuff”, and four white light transmission holograms were the “Other Delights.”
Two of the pulsed holograms were display in a massage room that was off the main gallery. This room is decorated as a cave, with sequined soft sculpture stalagmites and stalactites, day-glo flowers and plenty of black lights, done up by Melinda Harris, who also designed the show poster. Wooden cage bars were installed with the holograms cleverly attached to them so that the viewer had the impression of looking into a human zoo. The hologram on the right of the room, “Who Rattled My Cage,” showed a masked naked woman in a leather jacket with a whip looking like a Joel-Peter Witkin character fleshed out to three dimensions. The other captive, “The Batsman”, appeared at first glance to be a nude man hanging from the ceiling but upon closer inspection one realized that gravity wasn’t working properly on his private parts. In reality the hologram was reconstructed upside down, as the model, Jay Sebaceous, a colleague of Mr. Wesly’s, (they set up their first sandbox in his basement), whose life had been taking some turns for the worse in that day and age, thought he would give everyone a thrill by stripping down in the darkened laser studio so he would appear in the final hologram naked as a jaybird in flight. However, the laser went off before he could get off the ground. So instead of looking like he is squatting and relieving himself, the hologram was reconstucted so it looked like he was hanging from the ceiling.
In the main gallery the four white light transmission holograms hung side by side. All of them incorporate HOE’s – Holographic Optical Embellishments. They appear to be some sort of modulated diffraction gratings, with abstract color explosions that move around in space holokinetically.
In themselves they are quite pretty, but what the artist does with them is to collage them into various compositions. This body of work focuses on the female anatomy, and you can probably guess which one. For instance, “Tuesday”, the first of these piece, is his interpretation of a friend who had an interesting way of shaving her pubic hair for the summer. “The Transfiguration of Connie B.”, the only piece which had been shown publicly previously at the “Connie Show” (a show by and about Chicago’s reigning queen of bondage models), used a black and white transparency that some people might find objectionable (a bound but not gagged naked woman) as the core for a Constructivist composition. By extending the rope lines in the photo with Formaline graphic arts tape, the surrounding space is chopped up into geometric shapes which the artist judiciously fills with his rainbow projections. This one was a real show stopper, probably this artist’s Greatest Hit! But next to it, the similar “Connie II” did not have the impact of the first.
It is hard to believe that this mild-mannered holographic scholar would have a streak of misogyny in him, and it seems more than likely that he is egged on by the company he keeps. Two fights almost erupted at the Saturday night opening, which consumed > 2 kegs of beer. But when asked why he does things like this, he explains that it is fun to mix up something that is interesting to look at, the spectral patterns, with something taboo, that most people, men as well as women, might have an aversion to. A conflicting confrontation. Thumbing his nose at artists and critics who claim to be open-minded but are the most uptight and square. For instance, a folksinger from the suburbs refused to sing in front of the artwork at a benefit held at Benny’s the following week. Plus, he excuses himself for not taking the photographs the designs are based on. But he did choose to use them, plus he did take the pulsed holograms. His defense?
“I can hear it now, give a techie a big laser and then they’ll bring in the naked girls. But this was the opportunity of a lifetime. Somebody had to do it, just to say that it was ever done, and I was in a position to do it. Some of the more strident femi-Nazis may not approve, but who cares? Sometimes the artist has to do things just for the experience of it.”
“Imagine the adrenaline flow as we signed in at the security desk of the playground of the High-Energy Physicists. ‘This is Ms. Crankshaft. She’s doing an article on what we do here.’ ‘Do you work for the Batavia Clarion-Ledger?’ asked the guard, catching the “journalist” off-guard, whose shopping bags were packed not with reams of note paper and tape recorders but masks and whips and stockings. I filled him in that she was with the Chicago Reader, a weekly alternative paper. During the shoot, at any minute anybody with the keys could have walked into the devil's workshop.
The last white light piece, “HP-1000” had a graphic design which looked like a slice of pie in that purposely bad prepubescent art style that was popular for a short while. When queried of the significance of this one, the artist cunningly replied that HP didn’t stand for Hewlett-Packard but his favorite dessert.
At the end of this row was an installation of a peep show or the private movie booth, complete with sticky floor. “Homage to Johnny H.”, a memorial to a long lost friend who used to run around with him to seedy films and who once knocked a stripper on her rear trying to kiss her foot. One sat down, slipped their credit card into a slot for a timed peek at the same female model used throughout the show, Connie (Bondage) Crankshaft, this time without the leather jacket and mask.
Connie was the first person in Chicago to show Mr. Wesly’s artwork in Chicago, in an era before he was introduced to holography, doing things like the “Captain and Tennille Crucifixion”, “The Phi Sigs”, and the “Motor City Mythological Mobile and Poem”. (The gods of the ancient Greeks and Romans, die cast and chrome-plated for a glide on the hood of an ethereal Cadillac…”) Since she herself is an artist/model, he decided to sneak her into a place where he worked which had a rather large pulsed Ruby laser and have some fun.
The results of the shooting looked like they did, plus having put in a bit of homework. Hans Bjelkhagen says that the laser transmission plates look as good as anything that he’s seen by John Webster or Nick Phillips. Which is not surprising, since they all use the same lasers, JK/Lumonics, and the same film, Agfa 8E75HD. The holograms, as illuminated by 7 mW He-Ne’s showed scenes over 2 meters in depth, vertical parallax limited by the floor and ceiling of the laser room with almost 180 degrees field of view horizontally. In fact, Mr. Wesly is visible pushing the button of the laser directly to the right of the holographic plate in some of the shots.
The last of the “Pulsed Stuff” was the biggest ego trip of an already large ego trip, a self-portrait of the artist on his motorcycle, complete with a pool of oil underneath. The scene looks like it was taken in an alley, until one realizes that those aren’t junk refrigerators but the JK's power supply cabinets in the corner.
Certainly this show won’t be easily forgotten by anyone who saw it, as it was easily the most extraordinary holographic extravaganza ever in the Chicago area. It will undoubtedly remain a legend for years to come, and maybe even get him 15 minutes of fame in holographic history!