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Into The Light 		(spacer)
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Into The Light

Artists in the Exhibition


Anthony McCall (American, born England, 1946)
Line Describing a Cone, 1973

Line Describing a Cone demonstrates Anthony McCall's interest in creating an artwork from a single idea in its purest form. In the early 1970s, McCall made a group of films that engaged the space of the gallery by using the beam of light from a projector as pure sculptural form. A film showing a large circle being drawn is projected onto the wall of a darkened room.

A thin mist is introduced into the space, which makes the beam from the projector visible as it gradually develops from a line into a large cone as the drawn circle is completed. Viewers move through this space, looking toward the projector, and experience an ephemeral volume created by the cone of light and mist. The transparent volume encourages viewers to move throughits hollow cone, to lie under it, look into it, and stand inside it. The film beam becomes both a convex and concave sculptural shape, depending upon where the viewer is standing. The traditional relationship between viewer and film image is reversed, overturning the frontal perspective of cinema. In this way, Line Describing a Cone fuses the properties of film, sculpture, performance, and Conceptual art, in which the idea becomes the subject of the artwork.


About Anthony McCall
Born 1946, St. Paul's Cray, England
Lives in New York, New York

Anthony McCall began making performances and films in the UK in 1971, moving to New York in 1973. His films were shown widely in avant-garde film show places, galleries and museums, in both the US and Europe, including Documenta 6, The Museum of Modern Art, and the London Film-makers Co-op. Two of his works, "Long Film for Four Projectors" (1974) and "Four Projected Movements" (1975) were radical explorations of the interplay of duration, space and the attention of the spectator, as well as being early examples of time-based installation art. McCall also has a reputation as a designer of art publications and web sites.


Page 8 of 16 | On the next page: Dennis Oppenheim (American, born 1938)
Echo, 1973