contemporary art

Installation view of “Breath: The Vertical Works” at Hangar Bicocca, Milan, Italy 2009

Anthony McCall is a key figure in the history of avant-garde cinema. He has carved a unique position in contemporary art by bridging the gaps between the cinematic, the sculptural and the pictorial by means of his extraordinary ‘solid light’ films, which manifest as immersive installations made by drawing in real space with projected light. McCall creates “solid light” works – digital videos of meticulously choreographed intersecting lines and curves which are projected in darkened haze-filled rooms, creating three-dimensional sculptural forms constructed from light. When the viewer moves in and out of the projected light beams, they are forced to reconcile their perceived sense of a three dimensional object in space with the actual reality of the mutable properties of light.

[A solid light film] exists only in the present: the moment of projection. It refers to nothing beyond this real time. It contains no illusion. It is a primary experience, not secondary: i.e., the space is real, not referential; the time is real, not referential. No longer is one viewing position as good as any other…every viewing position presents a different aspect. The viewer therefore has a participatory role in apprehending the event: he or she can, indeed needs, to move around relative to the slowly emerging light form. Anthony McCall, 1974

McCall’sHis films and installations from the seventies such as Line Describing a Cone, Long Film for Four Projectors, and Four Projected Movements, represent an extraordinarily corporeal and sensuous meditation on the medium of film and the politics of the audience’s physical and conceptual relationship to it. All of these works took as their starting point the irreducible, necessary conditions of cinema: projected light, and real, three-dimensional space.

Coupling, 2009
video projector, computer, QuickTime Movie file, haze machine
one cycle: 16 minutes in four parts