A biannual magazine exploring light in all its forms
Anthony McCall (born 1946) is a New York based artist known for his ‘solid-light’ installations, a series that he began in 1973. His cross-disciplinary practice put light and our experience of light at the center of his research. his work has influenced a whole generation of artists.
THE LIGHT OBSERVER : You are often introduced as the pioneer of immersive sculptural light installations. How would you describe your work as an artist? I read that you find “installation” too general a term.
ANTHONY MCCALL : The problem is that what I do takes place in a zone where cinema, sculpture, drawing, and possibly architecture, merge. There is no simple inclusive word like “film” that covers this hybrid. “Installation” as a descriptive term is useful because, even though quite vague, it does at least cover a variety of work that is space and media based.
Drawing is, I believe, where you start exploring the possibilities of a new idea. You are best known for the “solid-light works”, which can be seen as “projected line drawings”. What role does drawing play in your work?
Simple pencil drawing in my A6 notebook usually gets the ball rolling. My drawing takes many forms: architectural plans and sections, storyboards, perspectival drawing, sound scores of one kind or another, sequential renderings of the (solid light) forms in space, and so on. At some point this preparatory work may be transferred to a larger notebook for more detailed development, or it may lead to “instructional” drawings, which I prepare specifically for my programmer. Typically there are a dozens pages of notes and diagrams, which will include every detail about form, shape, sequence and speed. Eventually those structural ideas will come back to me as a variable interface where every element has a numerical value that I can project and alter in my studio.
You are particularly interested in geometric drawing. What attracts you to geometry?
Geometry is fundamental because any projection is a radiating form, whether a pyramid or a cone, with its apex at the projector lens, and its base at the screen. The geometry is a given. The other formal constraint is the need to keep the line drawing simple so that the pockets and spaces of the resulting volumetric form are legible. The basic syntax that I use to compose boils down to one of the following: a straight line, a circle/ellipse or a traveling wave.
What is at stake in the three-dimensional materialization of a drawing? How do you approach model making?
I would start by clarifying that the white line drawings are the “footprints” that are projected onto the wall or floor. Drawing never goes away. It is at the centre of any of my installations. When mist from a haze machine is introduced into the dark space, these drawn lines are transformed into a large-scale three-dimensional sculptural object. Any solid-light work is ultimately a spatial form, which gradually changes over time. Mostly I get to understand the forms by plotting the changes that occur over time and placing them in sequential order on the pages of one of my notebooks. I have usually found this process to be clarifying and sufficient. However, with Face to Face (2013) the technique fell short, largely because I had just introduced the “floating screen”: in fact, two floating double-sided and translucent screens placed in the middle of the exhibition space. To complicate matters, the projectors were facing opposite directions. This produced too many variables for me to envision or diagram in my notebook. That is when I began building a paper model of the installation. The model showed the radiating blades of the two projectors, the position of the double-sided screens, and the footprints on the screens. Finally, I made a group of separate paper models spaced at three-minute intervals. These quick-to-make, very simple three-dimensional diagrams, only about seven inches across, were hugely helpful in visualizing what was going on over time, and what the spectator would find while circumnavigating the actual installation.
You began as an artist in the 1960s, in London, where you participated in radical film groups. One of them was The London Film-makers’ Co-op inspired by Jonas Mekas’s The Film-Makers’ Cooperative in New York. What was the art scene like at the time and how would you say this has influenced the rest of your career?
I began making art in London in 1971. The audience for my work and many others working with performance or film was mostly other artists. There simply wasn’t a general public, nor were there many institutions that supported this kind of art. However, the (no-budget) works were argued over and theorized, and this undoubtedly created a certain intensity; and in the US, UK, Germany and Austria, Happenings and other performance art was already incorporating projections into their actions. I moved to New York in 1973. Though there was more support there than in the UK, it would still take the art world until the late 1980s before the galleries began to absorb the moving image, with video leading the way. The groundbreaking exhibition at the Whitney, “Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art 1964–1977”, which included works by nineteen artists, marked the start of general acceptance.
“Expanded cinema” was happening in the 1960s and early 1970s, a term first used by the American filmmaker Stan Van Der Beek, when artists and filmmakers started to challenge the conventions of spectatorship, creating participatory projections taking place in art galleries, warehouses or in the open air. When you moved to New York in 1973 you began to work on your first “solid light films”. Looking back, how do you think you pushed the boundaries of film? I’m asking since those films, as we may call them, are now considered classics and the art world is still, or particularly, interested in them today.
I began making films such as Landscape for Fire (1972) as a way of documenting my performances. It was soon after that that I began to think about the possibility of a film that was itself a performance, one that shared the present tense with its audience. I made my 30-minute film Line Describing a Cone in 1973. I suppose that the central idea of that first “solid-light” film was to propose that the audience should turn their backs to the screen, and instead face the opposite direction while exploring the emerging cone of light.
In a rather funny way, I heard your first works were 16mm films that came to life thanks to cigarette smoke and dust (SoHo lofts were pretty dusty back then I presume), to such an extent that the first installation in an art gallery did not work as expected, i.e. perceiving the projected light beam as well as the projected drawing. Your recent works are high-tech digital projections that require complete darkness and haze machines, which fill the space with a fine, thick mist. What has new technology allowed you to do and how has it affected your work?
Digital technology has allowed me to introduce more complexity into my animations. For instance, around 2004 I was reminded of an almost archaic cinematic transition called a “wipe”. This was essentially a type of soft cut, where an incoming shot took a second or so to cover the outgoing shot. I adopted the Wipe but extended it to around 15 minutes, so that the two different footprints engaged in a wipe-like transition, became the entire film. The Wipe enabled me to introduce greater complexity to the projected forms and I used the device on many subsequent works, both horizontal and vertical. For instance, you can find it in the horizontal You and I, Horizontal (2005) and in the vertical Between You and I (2006). I needed digital animation to realize this kind of transition. And the new haze machines, which could easily fill a large space with haze, offered me the opportunity to increase the scale of the works. One of the big changes was in animation technique. Film animation for me began with a line drawn by a ruling pen and white gouache on black paper. This was placed under the vertically mounted camera and shot frame by frame, following a carefully organized and precise shooting score, which laid out the rules that would produce the illusion of movement. Digital animation on the other hand, is based on scripting and algorithms, giving me a field of variables that I can project and change in the studio.
Has the greater precision provided by digital projection led to a formal evolution?
Perhaps the most noticeable change for me came from the difference between a film projector and a digital projector. A film projector was made of gears, gates, reels and lenses. They were designed to be solidly near to the ground, operating horizontally. If you turned a film projector 90 degrees and mounted it on a ceiling, pointing it downwards to the floor, it would not work; and in all probability the reels would fall off. On the other hand, the solid-state digital projector can easily be mounted on a ceiling so that it can project downwards onto the floor. Hence, I was able to expand my installation orientation to include not just the horizontal, but also the vertical. My first vertical work, Breath was made in 2004. Since then, I have made many others, and continue to work with both orientations. The projector beam “throw” for horizontals, between the lens of the projector and the screen, is 10 meters, and the “throw” for verticals is identical, 10 meters from ceiling to floor.
Can you explain your concept of the “travelling wave”?
This is one of the three forms that make up my small repertoire. It is basically an abstraction of an ocean wave. Diagrammatically, you see a semicircle making a peak giving way to a semicircle making a trough. The sequence goes “peak, trough, peak, trough, etc. etc. A “travelling” wave simply means that the wavy line is animated to move slowly sideways. What you see is a question of scale, and the limits set by the rectangular frame. Your first “solid-light films” began with a line drawing using a ruling pen, white gouache and a compass. This drawing was then filmed frame-by-frame, with all the movements being carefully controlled manually.
As we said, the technology involved in your installations has radically changed, yet how do you keep a manual approach in creating these works?
I have found that digital animation is closer to the hand than traditional film animation. To give an example, with film production, after the laborious animation process was complete (with all those manual changes), the exposed film would be taken to the lab to be processed and a work print struck from it. This reel would then be reviewed on a Steenbeck or projected onto a screen. It was only at this moment that the filmmaker would discover the mistakes. These may cost a complete, hugely laborious re-shoot. With digital animation all stages are provisional, and adjustments and corrections can be made at almost any stage. With this digitally informed, open-ended fluidity I would say that my hand has greater control.
The images you project are line drawings, drawings that move over time. I’m wondering if you are interested in animation, and especially the precursors of the animated cartoon, such as Emile Cohl?
Looking back on my first solid-light film, I began with the idea of a three-dimensional cone of light coming into being. I worked backwards from there towards what I needed to do to create the cone. The answer was to create a two-dimensional line drawing coming into being. At the time, I didn’t use the term “animation” and, apart from the cartoons we saw in the cinema or on television, I did not know too much about animators. However, it was the animation filmmaker Hart Perry, who helped me devise my production process for the Line Describing a Cone animation; and it was another animator, George Griffin, who generously gave me access to his Bell & Howell animation stand to make two of the subsequent 1970s films. Albert Einstein solved the mystery of light’s essence in 1905 through wave-particle duality: light is both an electromagnetic wave and a current of particles. These discoveries and understanding have changed everyone’s perception of light, and yours first and foremost, I’m sure. Yet it feels like you work with light in a very practical way, based on human perceptions and interactions more than on a concept, is that right?
Yes, a solid-light work is just a three-dimensional projected form that is created to be viewed and explored. This is similar to sculpture except for the fact that these membranes of light change slowly over time; plus, of course, they take place in the dark.
As an artist, what kind of material is light? What did you learn by working with light?
I work with light in very specific ways, causing it, paradoxically, to appear “solid”. But let’s imagine a large projected form, composed of membranes of light, exactly like one of my projections, except for the fact that the projection is absolutely static. I believe that the form would be explored only for a relatively short time before the onlooker, having grasped what was there, would simply move on. Now, restore to this static projection the gradual mutation of the form over time, a slow disclosure of changes that can be anticipated and noted, then you will see onlookers being drawn in, becoming absorbed by the continuous transitioning, some staying for long periods of time, and describing later what they saw, and the emotional effect it had on them. The question this raises is: what is my major medium? Is it light or is it duration? Obviously, it is both but I’m inclined to say that this example shows that time is the major actor.
