In early 1973, Anthony McCall, sculptor of light, was 26 years old and had made a splash with his first piece, Landscape for Fire. This was a film of a performance in which ghosts dressed in white ignite fires across a vast landscape, experimenting with McCall’s belief that a performance is not a performance unless it is documented in some way. “If it takes place in the middle of nowhere,” he says, “you have to record it.”
Half a century later, I meet him at Tate Modern in London, which is about to launch a major exhibition of his immersive, moving 3D forms. McCall speaks softly, even cautiously; there is nothing irritable in his manner. Yet there is something almost supernatural in the way he evokes the excitement, radicalism and explosive creativity of that bygone era.
His work needed smoke and dust, but the gallery was too clean. So he smoked three cigarettes – and got thrown out
McCall studied graphic design and photography at Ravensbourne College, on the outskirts of London, but became ‘steeped in other ways of using cinema. It was called experimental film, it was called extended cinema, structural film, new American cinema.” All this was incorporated into Line Describe a Cone, his first ‘solid light’ work, in which the rays projected onto a screen seem to create a tangible object in the darkness.
At the time, he was in love with performance artist Carolee Schneemann: “She had her own form of happenings, called kinetic theater, which was already active.” They had met in London, but she wanted to return to the US, so they moved to New York together. There were so many things McCall admired about the American art scene: the performance artists, loosely gathered under the umbrella fluxus; the experimental filmmaking of Andy Warhol; Yoko Ono’s water drop, which you had to watch until it evaporated. “There was an intensity in the world in New York at the time that was undeniable.”
It must have seemed like a golden age. “That applies to many people who were not there,” he says, laughing. “But I can confirm that it was. All everyone seemed to want was to talk about art – in a completely unpretentious, everyday way.” There was a frantic exchange of passion, skills and ideas: “I didn’t know how to make animation. I found a friend of a friend, we went to a bar and an hour later I had a plan. I felt that these acts of openness and generosity were unique to New York.
He and Schneemann were like the city’s Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. Every artist who walked in gathered around them. “But actually they would have been Carolee’s friends,” he says. It was an intensely productive time for McCall: he arrived with Line Describe a Cone and made “three short, clean films that explored different aspects of the idea. Then I made Long Film for Four Projectors.”
This was a five and a half hour piece that evoked four walls of intersecting light, which visitors experienced from within. “Not that the audience had to be there for five and a half hours! The whole point was that people would come and go on their own time. There might be a few dozen people there who are not only watching the movie, but also watching each other while they watch the movie. That seemed quite intriguing to me.”
The series culminated in Long Film for Ambient Light, without film and without equipment, all very conceptual, and this time 24 hours long. “It was a good way to paint yourself into a corner,” says McCall. “The windows were covered with white paper, providing no light source during the day and a reflective surface at night. Finally, there was a two-page statement on the wall, ‘Notes on Duration.’”
When he turned thirty, he began to realize that he had to earn a living. “The kind of work I was making,” he says, “the galleries weren’t really visible.” Although he may not have made a living, McCall had a considerable international reputation and was invited to show Line Describe a Cone at the Konsthall Lund, a leading Swedish gallery.
He got a shock when he arrived. “To my horror I discovered that it was completely invisible. All I had was a line going around on the screen. The appearance of solidity, which was precisely the point, was missing. “It was meant to be a volumetric object! In a blinding flash of brilliance, I realized why: I’d been working all along with a medium I hadn’t understood: fabric. The films were made and shown in old lofts in New York, buildings previously used for light engineering, millinery or sweatshops. If there are ten people in there, there is enough dust in the air to catch the light. Moreover, probably a quarter of people would smoke continuously. The combination of dust and smoke created a medium that made this series possible, but of which I was not aware.”
He ran to a tobacconist and came back smoking three cigarettes at a time. But he was no match for 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 brought him into a wilderness where he would live for the next twenty years.
From the late 1970s to the 1990s, McCall returned to what he had trained in: graphic design, and began running a studio. It was quite successful: they designed the books of metal sculptor Richard Serra. ‘I only felt thwarted,’ he says, ‘when every now and then an art historian showed up at the door wanting to talk about the solid light work. After finishing those interviews, I felt like I had betrayed everything and was wasting my time.” It got so bad that he couldn’t bear to publish another book. “Sometime in the 1990s,” he recalls, “I had the desire to make works again.”
He went back to the skittle shorts. “One of them was called Cone of Variable Volume. It was very simple, just an exploratory film where I tested the idea of a circle changing volume through expansion and contraction. It had four different speeds, from frantic to so slow you could barely see it move. To my surprise, I realized it was doing something I had never noticed before. It was definitely breathing.”
He could never have seen that when he first created the work. “We were far too purist.” The discovery that these works were describing bodily functions all along came as a bolt of lightning. He thought he was dealing in concepts, but he had created the appearance of an organism. “I made many films after that, all based on this idea of the physical, with titles like Between You and I, Meeting You Halfway, Skirt, You and I Horizontal.”
They are mainly cone-shaped light sculptures, often leaning towards each other in an eerie suggestion of human connection. As to what they meant, he says: “I never believed that the artist should be the person to ask that. Artwork does not come with a label that says ‘meaning’. That is the job of the public.” Yet it is never that simple. “These new ideas are not flowing evenly,” he says. “You don’t turn on the tap and get a few grams of new ideas.”
Since his 2004 show at the Pompidou in Paris, McCall has been creating epic light sculptures, culminating in four major shows this year. In addition to the Tate, there are Guggenheim Bilbao, Sprüth Magers in London and the Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in Lisbon in the fall.
“It was certainly welcome,” he says, “but it is a big surprise. While you’re whistling at your couch, you don’t think, “I’m pioneering.” You just make something. You have no idea if it will be any good.”
• Anthony McCall: Solid Light is at Tate Modern, London from June 27 to April 27