‘It refers to nothing beyond this real time.
The form of attention that is required on the
part of the viewer is unprecedented’
Edinburgh Festival and back down to London; on
the return journey McCall improvised a performance
he called Darkness, which involved turning off the
lights, one carriage at a time, until the whole train was
blacked out. He had crossed a border. At a screening
of the fire performance he realised that the audience
was only aware of the secondary event, the film; the
performance itself was lodged in the past. ‘I wondered
if it would be possible to make a film that existed
only at the moment of projection,’ he says, ‘within a
continuous present tense shared with the audience’.
His first attempt at this was a series of installations
using a carousel projector that ran continuously.
The audience was invited to face into the beam; the
resulting swarm of retinal after-images and the clacking
of the slide-changer were part of the experience. With
Line Describing a Cone (1973), though, he made his
definitive move into expanded cinema and structural
film. It used mist to diffuse a circle of light from a
projector, cast horizontally, as in a movie theatre,
creating a conical, ethereal, sculptural form. Frame
by frame, a narrow arcing line gradually extended
until it formed a circle, taking 31 minutes to describe
the circumference and to complete a cone about
as wide as a (Vitruvian) man’s outstretched arms,
and with a ‘height’ or throw about three times that
distance. As the American conceptual artist Jonathon
Keats described it, the image was ‘viscerally three-
dimensional, with the third dimension revealing the
mechanism for making a two-dimensional illusion.’
The combination of light and time was crucial. When
the image – or volume – changes quickly, at 24 frames
a second, say – the audience stays still, but when
movement is almost at a stop, viewers are inclined to
change position and point of view. The work ‘exists
only in the present: the moment of projection,’ McCall
wrote. ‘It refers to nothing beyond this real time. The
form of attention required on the part of the viewer is
unprecedented. No longer is one viewing position as
good as any other. For this film every viewing position
presents a different aspect. The view therefore has a
participatory role in apprehending the event: he or she
can – indeed needs – to move around, relative to the
emerging light-form.’
Making the viewer a participant – coupled with a
similar fixation on geometry with that of Walter de
Maria, Sol LeWitt, and Fred Sandback – brought
McCall a cult following. McCall moved to New York
in August 1973, where he exhibited Line Describing
a Cone at avant-garde venues such as the Millennium
Film Workshop in Brooklyn, and Artists Space, then
in Tribeca, and began to experiment with different
shapes, modular progression and multiple projections.
Other immersive solid light works followed. The five-
and-a-half-hour Long Film for Four Projectors called
for a reel change every 35 minutes as visitors roamed
the dark, cutting through four interpenetrating planes
of light and churning the airborne particles that gave
each sculpture its tactility.
In Conical Solid, 1974, a flat blade of light rotated
from a fixed central axis at eight different speeds over
the course of 10 minutes. Cone of Variable Volume
from the same year projected a cone that repeatedly
expanded and contracted at four speeds from very
slow to very fast – something that would shape later
works. Partial Cone (1974) created a half-cone whose
membranous surface changed, glimmering, blinking,
and flashing for 15 minutes.
The last of this series of Solid Light works was Four
Projected Movements in 1975, a 75-minute installation
that explored the role of the projector in altering the
light’s orientation and direction of movement. Then,
also in 1975, there was the site-specific Long Film for
Ambient Light which dispensed with film equipment,
using paper-covered windows, ambient dust and a
single electric lamp to create an altered space, and
Notes on Duration, a chart on the wall, to express time.
At the end of the 1970s, McCall withdrew from making
art, as such, and set up a graphic design business, which
he ran for 20 years. ‘There was no possibility of gallery
representation and I began designing and editing art
books and catalogues for a living,’ he explains. Then, in
the early 2000s he made a comeback, to the Rip Van
Opposite: Leaving (with Two-Minute Silence, 2006/8. Pair of working
drawings in a set of 24. Pencil on paper, each 28cm x 35cm
Overleaf: Small notebook number 11, 2005, on display at the Hepworth ▼
