Two-for-one tickets to live cinema broadcast of Lady Windermere’s Fan
To see goes at the Hepworth Wakefield to witness the artist’s ‘second coming’
Aged 71, Anthony McCall is having something of a second coming. Though, to be fair, few people really noticed his first coming. That happened in the Seventies with the works he refers to as his “solid light” films. These were immersive installations in dark rooms, featuring shafts of light from a film projector that created shapes on a facing wall. The shafts were given volume by dust particles and cigarette smoke in the air, and distorted by the silhouettes of human viewers in their way.
McCall’s ambition was nothing short of reinventing people’s understanding of film. Forget plot, forget characterisation. He was about breaking the medium down to its most basic components – light and time – and encouraging the public to roam about and be participants in the process.
Combining aspects of two movements that were then fashionable – performance art and minimalism – McCall made seven solid light films, all of which had a cult following but none of which made him a household name. He promptly disappeared for the next 25 years and stopped making art altogether, emigrating to New York to become a book designer.
Over the past decade, though, McCall seems to have found a new generation of fans. Something reflected by his current exhibition (of old and new work) at the Hepworth Wakefield, and by the Tate gallery’s purchase, in 2005, of his first solid light film, Line Describing a Cone. In 2012, he was invited to create an installation in Birkenhead, at the estuary of the River Mersey, as part of the Cultural Olympiad.
The Hepworth show begins with an array of McCall’s preparatory drawings for his films. These reveal the geometric way he ensures the light projections create the precise shapes he wants at the precise time he wants. Superficially, they’re storyboards that’ll appeal more to a physicist than the average art-lover. Look closely, though, and you’ll see how the shafts of light are rendered with the same sense of form as a sculptor might imagine marble or bronze. McCall’s works could accurately be called “sculptures of light”, which makes their showing at the Hepworth Wakefield entirely apt, given the institution’s reputation as a hub of contemporary sculpture.
Some may wish to avoid the drawings altogether and head to the three new solid light films – as where’s the fun in knowing a magician’s tricks? All of them broadly follow the old model – although, as a sign of changing times, the cigarette smoke has been replaced by a fog machine. In the case of Face to Face (II), McCall has also introduced a pair of screens into the middle of the room to enhance the play of light.
The experience is thrilling – especially the seeming sensation that one has the power to touch and even redirect light. Some have spoken of the films in terms of the quasi-spiritual, but words can’t really do them justice as our reaction is so highly subjective. They’re reflective of an artistic trend this century for “environments”. Which is to say, as rewarding as looking at a painting on a wall remains, we’re used to being part of an art work too, experiencing it rather than just seeing it. Think of Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, or James Turrell’s exploration of perception, light and colour.
In such a context, one can see why McCall is suddenly so popular. But he’s not resting on his laurels. Another recent solid light work, Between You and I – not on show, but represented by a photograph – saw McCall move his point of projection to the ceiling, meaning the shafts of light poured down on viewers, suggestive of a theatre spotlight or even a calling from the divine.
Elsewhere, a video tells the story of a different kind of light installation, 2013’s Crossing the Elbe, with which McCall illuminated the city of Hamburg each night for a year. Given the devastating Allied bombing of Hamburg (as part of 1943’s Operation Gomorrah, in which 40,000 died), the association with anti-aircraft searchlights is all but impossible to miss.
On this fine exhibition’s evidence, McCall seems, belatedly, to be having his artistic heyday. Who, in the current climate, can resist a little light amid the darkness?