Anthony McCall - Line Describing a Cone

Anthony McCall blurs the boundaries between film, sculpture and drawing, here the audience is invited to move through and interact with the work, challenging idea of a motionless spectator.

The projected beam slowly arcs until in a 30 minute cycle a cone is created, mist from a smoke machine gives the beam form, allowing it to carve a tangible path through its environment. The work is large scale and can be adapted to the environment in which it is exhibited. The traditional narrative concerns of filmic work is deminished, film is reduced to a basic measure of time. To my mind the work functions more like sculpture and invites comparison with the work of constructivist artists such as Naum Gabo.

McCall provides instructions of how the work is presented:

The proportions of this projection vary, but the scale is large. The base of the cone, an emerging circle of light projected onto the wall, is tall enough, at between eight and eleven feet, to fully incorporate several spectators, and the length of the beam may be anything from thirty to sixty feet. This three-dimensional object, like sculpture, calls for a mobile, participating spectator, and, like film, it takes time. To fully see the emerging form it is necessary to move around and through it, to look at it from the inside and from the outside.

(McCall 2004)

I look to continue experimenting with ways of  presenting my work so that the boundary between image and spectator may come progressively blurred.

Link to Line Describing a Cone
https://vimeo.com/29428835


Line Describing a Cone 1973

Other works include:
Face to face 2013
Installation hanger Bicocco 2009
Long film for four projectors 1974