At the beginning of 1973, light sculptor Anthony McCall was 26 years old and had caused havoc with his first work, Firescape. It was a film of a performance in which white-clad ghosts lit fires across a huge landscape, testing McCall’s belief that a performance isn’t a performance unless it’s documented in some way. “If it’s set in the middle of nowhere,” he says, “you need to record it.”
Half a century later, I met him at Tate Modern in London, which was about to open a major exhibition of immersive, 3D moving shapes. McCall speaks softly, even shyly; There is nothing exciting about his demeanor. Yet there is something almost supernatural in the way he created the enthusiasm, radicalism and explosive creativity of the bygone era.
His work needed smoke and dust, but the gallery was exceedingly clean. He smoked three cigarettes and was thrown out
McCall studied graphic design and photography at Ravensbourne College on the outskirts of London, but “specialized in other ways of using cinema.” “It was called experimental film, it was called expanded cinema, it was structural film, it was new American cinema.” All of this fed into Cone Defining Line, the first “solid light” work in which rays projected onto a screen appear to create a tangible object in the dark.
At the time, he was in love with performance artist Carolee Schneemann: “She had a distinctive form of event called kinetic theater, it was already working and working.” They met in London, but he wanted to return to the US, so they moved to New York together. There were many things McCall admired about the American art scene: the performance artists grouped loosely under the umbrella of streaming; Andy Warhol’s experimental filmmaking; Yoko Ono’s drop of water that you are invited to watch until it evaporates. “There was an unmistakable intensity about the world in New York at the time.”
It must have seemed like a golden time. “The same goes for a lot of people who weren’t there,” he says with a laugh. “But I can confirm that it is. All anyone wanted to do was talk about art in a completely low-key, casual way.” There was a crazy exchange of passion, skills and ideas: “I didn’t know how to do animation. I found a friend of a friend, we went to a bar and an hour later I had a plan. “I felt like these acts of openness and generosity were unique to New York.”
He and Schneemann were like the Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo of the city. Any artist who blew there would rally around them. “But they were actually Carolee’s friends,” he says. It was an extremely productive period for McCall: he came up with Cone Defining Line and made “three short neat films exploring different aspects of the idea.” Then I made a Feature Film for Four Projectors.”
This was a five-and-a-half-hour work that brought together four walls of intersecting light that visitors experienced from the inside. “The audience didn’t have to be there for five and a half hours! The whole point was that people came and went in their own time. There might be several dozen people there not just looking at the movie, but looking at each other while looking at the movie. “That looked pretty interesting.”
The series culminated in the Feature Film for Ambient Light, which was entirely conceptual, with no film or equipment, this time lasting 24 hours. “It was a good way to back yourself into a corner,” says McCall. “The windows were covered with white paper, limiting them as sources of light during the day and as reflective surfaces at night. Finally, there was a two-page statement on the wall: ‘Notes Concerning Duration’.”
After he turned 30, he began to realize that he needed to earn a living. “The kind of work I was doing,” he says, “galleries weren’t showing much.” Although unable to make a living, McCall had a significant international reputation and was invited to show the Cone Defining Line at Konsthall Lund, one of Sweden’s leading galleries.
When he arrived he was shocked. “To my horror I discovered that it was completely invisible. All I got was a line spinning on the screen. The appearance of solidity, which was the whole point, was missing. “It was supposed to be a volumetric object! In a moment of blinding brightness, I realized why: all along I was working with a medium I didn’t understand, and that was dust. Films were shot and shown in old lofts in New York, buildings formerly used for lighting engineering, haberdashery or sweatshops. If 10 people enter there, there will be enough dust in the air to catch the light. It is also likely that a quarter of people will be regular smokers. The combination of dust and smoke created an environment that I was unaware of that made this series possible.”
He ran to a tobacconist and returned smoking three cigarettes at the same time. However, he did not comply with Scandinavian hygiene and was thrown out by a guard. He tried everything to create “some particles in the air,” from dry ice to incense, but nothing worked. This led him into a wilderness environment where he lived for the next 20 years.
McCall returned to graphic design, where he studied from the late ’70s to the ’90s, and began running a studio. It was quite successful: They designed the books of metal sculptor Richard Serra. “I felt stymied when there was an art historian who only occasionally wanted to stop at the door and talk about solid light studies,” he says. After finishing these interviews, I would feel like I had betrayed everything and wasted my time.” It got so bad that he couldn’t bear to publish another book. “Sometime in the ’90s, I had the desire to do work again,” he recalls.
He returned to short cone films. “One of them was called the Variable Volume Cone. It was very simple, an exploratory film in which I tested the idea of a circle that would change its volume by expanding and contracting. It was at four different speeds; From frantic to so slow you can’t even see it moving. To my surprise, I noticed that he was doing something that I had never noticed before. “It was obvious he was breathing.”
He would never have seen this when he first did the work. “We were too naive.” It came as a thunderbolt to discover that these works had been describing bodily functions from the beginning. He thought he was dealing with concepts, but he created the appearance of an organism. “After that, I made a lot of films with titles like Between You and Me, Meeting You Halfway, The Skirt, You and Me Horizontal, all of which followed this idea of corporeality.”
These are mostly conical light sculptures that lean towards each other in eerie suggestions of human devotion. As for what they mean, he says: “I never believed that the person asking this had to be an artist. Works of art do not come with a label that says ‘meaning’. “That’s the audience’s job.” But it is never that simple. “These new ideas don’t flow evenly,” he says. “You can’t turn on a tap and get a few ounces of new ideas.”
McCall has been creating epic light sculptures since his 2004 exhibition at the Pompidou in Paris and has four major exhibitions this year. Besides the Tate, there is the Guggenheim Bilbao in London, Sprüth Magers and the Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in Lisbon in the autumn.
“It’s certainly welcomed,” he says, “but a big surprise. When you’re whistling in your desk, you don’t think, ‘I’m a pioneer.’ You’re just doing something. “You have no idea if it’s going to be okay or not.”
• Anthony McCall: Solid Light is at Tate Modern, London, from 27 June to 27 April