When we think of the 1960s and 1970s, the word “counterculture” might spring to mind. It’s a period of modern history that is synonymous with cultural transformation, witnessing pivotal social and political shifts across the world. From second wave feminism and the civil rights movement to student protests, anti-apartheid activism and global decolonisation efforts, this moment in history marks huge milestones that still resonate today. It was a time when the definition of “progress” was being pushed and tested, with the Cold War, space race, moon landing and the development of computer systems shaking up what it meant to be human. Creative output responded in kind; this was an era of true experimentation, where avant-garde music and protest poetry blossomed as a response to these rapid global transformations.
Artworks became increasingly conceptual, minimalist, performance-based, technological, satirical or simply gargantuan-in-scale. Names like Marina Abramović and Yoko Ono, now so familiar, were explosive. Land Art emerged, as did Pop Art. The core theme threading them all was reinvention: the notion that you could take something you saw every day and bring it into sharp focus. Much like the problematic politics many were resisting, it was about turning mundane materials inside out and making them impossible to ignore.
Light was one such medium, and British artist Anthony McCall has long been its champion. His seminal work, Line Describing a Cone (1973), drew a new blueprint for what “sculpture” could be. Born in 1946, McCall trained in graphic design and photography at the Ravensbourne College of Art and Design in Kent during the mid-to-late 1960s. McCall remembers the absence of technology and the sense of distance that came with it; connections between cities took much longer and phone calls abroad were expensive. It was still, however, a time teeming with the undercurrents of change and innovation, and this was thrilling for a young artist starting out. “We were all following our noses and trying to make interesting work. I did a lot of performances, which usually involved photography. I would make sculptural events that would be composed through the lens of a 35mm camera.”
But what exactly is a “sculptural event”? “It goes back to 1972, when I made a large-scale performance called Landscape for Fire, which took place on a disused airfield in North Weald and involved a grid of very carefully organised fires. I decided I needed to make a film of that performance, otherwise it would disappear. It was the first film I made, but during the editing I became interested in the gap between the film of the performance and the performance itself.” This conundrum led McCall to ask himself: “Would it be possible to make a film that was a performance in itself, rather than being a record of another?” He went back to the drawing board, choosing to approach moving-image differently this time. Instead, he broached the avant-garde – stripping the medium down to its corseting and bones. His sources of influence were Andy Warhol’s Empire (1965), which comprises one shot of the Empire State Building from evening until 3am the next day, and Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967), a 45-minute zoom of a photograph on a wall. Studying works like these, alongside the glowing shaft of light that radiated from film projectors, led McCall to arrive at a turning point.He finally concluded: “If you want to make a film that’s really a film, and not anything else, you need to discard the image.”
This was how Line Describing a Cone, his 30-minute seminal work, came to fruition. A single white dot was projected onto a black surface, and, as time progressed, the line developed into a curve. It ever-so-gradually formed the circumference of a circle until it returned to its starting point, thereby completing a perfect ring. Plus, the beam of light between the projector and the wall had formed a cone in the process. “My idea was to suggest that, instead of looking at the screen, audiences should turn their back to it and face the projector.” McCall regards these works as occupying a place somewhere between sculpture, cinema and drawing: sculpture because the projected volumes can be explored by a moving spectator; cinema because these large-scale objects are not static, shifting and changing over time; and drawing, because the genesis of each installation is a two-dimensional line-drawing. McCall had done it: he had inverted the rules of filmmaking. Nothing quite like this had been seen before.
Though it first premiered in Stockholm in 1973, it was most often shown in various lofts in New York City, where McCall had moved with performance artist Carolee Schneemann. There were particular conditions for entry: guests had to arrive in a certain location and stay until the end. Wafts and whorls of dust and cigarette smoke would then appear, like solid mirages, within the cone of light, giving a new structure to the “sculpture.” McCall had expanded his medium to incorporate the everyday atmosphere; the very air we breathe. The approach was spellbinding in its simplicity, going on to influence major artists such as Richard Serra and Gordon Matta-Clark, amongst others. McCall had whittled a big question – “what is the foundation of film?” – down to what felt like the closest approximation of truth. In a 1974 artist statement written to the judges of the Fifth International Experimental Film Competition, he said: “Rather than treating the light beam as a mere carrier of coded information … the work deals with one of the irreducible, necessary conditions of film: projected light. It addresses this phenomenon directly, independently of other considerations. It is the first film to exist in real, three-dimensional space.” It was a breakthrough.
But then, suddenly, it came to an end. An exhibition at Documenta 6 in 1977 would be McCall’s last for two-and-a half decades. The artist came to a realisation: the original atmosphere of these works could not be re-created in pristine, white cube gallery spaces. McCall had shown Line Describing a Cone at Konsthallen in Lund, Sweden. But in place of the hazy New York fog, there was only aggressively clean, near-sterile museum air. The sculpture no longer breathed but lay motionless and cold. A recent profile in The Guardian reported that McCall, aghast, rushed out and returned with three cigarettes burning at once in his mouth in an attempt to revive the work, but was escorted off the premises. He tried other things – like dry ice and frankincense – but fell into a “wilderness” with the sudden lack of belief in his own medium. Utterly shaken, McCall returned to his graphic design roots and instead made artist books for Richard Serra and the like for over 20 years. He made no art during this hiatus. Then, at the dawn of the new millennium, the itch got unbearable.
Doubling Back (2003) was McCall’s 21st century reimagining of the solid light concept. The artist had been attracted back into the fold by the artistic potential of emerging technologies: haze machines could improve visibility by adding mist to the air, giving solid light works a more tactile quality, whilst digital projectors offered new possibilities. McCall continued to develop his practice on the back of the new artistic language in Line Describing a Cone. “When I returned, we were in the digital realm. There was the question of how to start again. I discovered things in the early work that I hadn’t seen before. Like how the projected forms almost seemed alive in an kind of biological way, which I’d never noticed … I wanted to find ways to use these solid light works as a means of describing the body or relationships within the body,” he says. Major institutional shows poured in, where dust and cigarettes were traded in for artificial fog, as did accolades, critical texts and monographs. McCall’s list of exhibitions reads like a who’s who of major art destinations: Centre Pompidou, Museum of Modern Art, Serpentine Galleries, Tate Modern, The Whitney Museum of Art, In 2016, he won a prestigious Arts and Letters Award. “I’d like to think I got better at it,” McCall says about the work he made in those career peaks.
Now, Doubling Back is part of Solid Light, a new retrospective at London’s Tate Modern comprising five chronological installations spanning 1972 – 2018. Landscape of Fire is the opener, leading to a smaller room of drawings and wall text, before unfurling into the cavernous, dark space of McCall’s iconic as well as post-hiatus light works. At first glance, the room is intimidating. Until one realises how much fun everybody is having. Families dive in and out of beams of light, gape, sit, hold each other, twirl their fingers across projections and dip their thumbs into shadows as if in search of candy in a jar. This is McCall’s first major show for the Tate in 50 years. Children come and sit in his old and new pools of light, awestruck at what becomes visible in these touchable cascades. McCall’s practice is finding new nuances amidst the racing pulse of technological development, whilst retaining a solidity and verve that had been silent for so many years. “Things are changing again. I’ve got one piece in the Tate show, which uses a mirror to deflect the beam of light. That’s a very important shift,” he shares. “I’m also exploring sound.” Going forward, the artist wants to work outdoors and delve into architecture, all of which are major departures from light work. “Maybe they won’t even involve projections.”
Solid Light arrives at the Tate on the heels of an impressively long run of Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms and, shortly after, the opening of the recent mammoth Yoko Ono retrospective Music of the Mind on a different floor. There is an eagerness right now to harness some of the oddball energy bounced around by experimental artists in the seventies, many of whom are now well established within the canon. Perhaps this interest in the avant-garde is an attempt to make sense of, or mirror, the turbulence of our own current moment. This is especially poignant when considering the emergence of artificial intelligence, where progress has, once again, become synonymous with ideas of destruction.
When asked about what the future might hold, McCall has “absolutely no idea where things are going. Technology is changing rapidly, sometimes it’s a bit of a blind alley, sometimes it’s very suggestive. My rule of thumb basically is to be receptive, but at the same time remain utterly sceptical. And that’s kept me out of trouble so far. Well, maybe it hasn’t – but I think it has.” McCall has concurrent exhibitions at both Tate Modern and Guggenheim Bilbao this summer. This is a massive achievement that speaks to a continued public interest in these most enigmatic and genre-defying of artworks.
Anthony McCall: Solid Light | Tate Modern, London | Until 27 April
tate.org.uk
Words: Vamika Sinha
Image credits:
1. Anthony McCall, Breath II, (2004), Installation view, Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan. Image by courtesy of Giulio Buono – Studio Blu.
2. Installation view of Anthony McCall: Solid Light Works at Pioneer Works, 12 January – 11 March 2018. Courtesy of the artist and Pioneer Works. Photo by Dan Bradic.
3. Anthony McCall, Solid Light Films and Other Works, (1971-2014). Installation view Eye Film Museum, Amsterdam (2014). Courtesy of the artist, Sprüth Magers, and Sean Kelly, New York /Los Angeles. Photo by Hans Wilschut.
4. Anthony McCall, installation view of Face to Face, Sean Kelly, New York, (2013). Courtesy of the artist, Sprüth Magers, and Sean Kelly, New York/Los Angeles. Photo by Jason Wyche, New York.
5. Anthony McCall, Breath II, (2004), Installation view, Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan. Image by courtesy of Giulio Buono – Studio Blu.
