Line Light: The Geometric

Cinema of Anthony McCall*

PHILIPPE-ALAIN MICHAUD

Line Describing a Cone (1973), the first of Anthony McCall’s geometric films, has
recently reawakened keen interest. In 2001, it appeared in the Whitney Museum of
American Art’s exhibition Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art, 1964–1977,
curated by Chrissie Iles. In 2003, October published a group of texts on “The Projected
Image in American Art of the 1960s and 1970s,” including the lecture delivered by
McCall during the Whitney’s exhibition. Since then, discussion of this artist/film-
maker’s work has steadily increased.1 The revival of interest can be seen as the effect
of filmmaking’s migration toward the art world, a movement for which McCall’s film
stands as an emblematic prefiguration, indeed as a totemic one. Over the last three
decades, Line Describing a Cone has, in fact, been presented in contexts of both the art
scene and the filmic avant-garde, demonstrating that it has provided a bridge
between two worlds until then quite severed from each other.

Procedure
Line Describing a Cone, conceived in Januar y 1973, t wo days out of
Southampton during McCall’s journey by boat from England to the States, was
made in New York in August of that year for one hundred dollars. In 2002, during
a retrospective devoted to the history of the London Film-Makers’ Co-op, to
which his cinema has been closely linked, he stated:
Once I really started working with film and feeling I was making films,
making works of media, it seemed to me a completely natural thing to
come back and back and back, to come more away from a pro-filmic
event and into the process of filmmaking itself. And at the time it all
boiled down to some very simple questions. In my case, and perhaps in

* A version of this essay appeared in Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne 93 (Fall 2003),
pp. 78–89.
1. Anthony McCall, “Line Describing a Cone and Related Films,” October 103 (Winter 2003), pp.
42–62. See “The Projected Image in Contemporary Art,” a roundtable discussion with McCall, George
Baker, Matthew Buckingham, Hal Foster, Chrissie Iles, and Malcolm Turvey, in October 104 (Spring 2003),
pp. 71–96. See also Anthony McCall, Film Installations, exh. cat. (Warwick: Mead Gallery, 2004); and
Christopher Eamon, ed., The Solid Light Films and Related Works (Evanston: Northwestern University, 2005).

OCTOBER 137, Summer 2011, pp. 3–22. © 2011 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
4 OCTOBER

others, the question being something like “What would a film be if it

was only a film?” Carolee Schneemann and I sailed on the SS Canberra
from Southampton to New York in 1973, and when we embarked, all I
had was that question. When I disembarked I already had the plan for
Line Describing a Cone fully-fledged in my notebook. You could say it was
a mid-Atlantic film! It’s been the story of my life ever since, of course,
where I’m located, where my interests are, that business of “Am I
English or am I Amer ican?” So that was when I conceived Line
Describing a Cone and then I made it in the months that followed.2

For McCall, Line is a narrative film of conventional structure: a long progres-

sion toward a climax followed by a sudden denouement that coincides with the end
of the piece. Shot as an animation, one frame at a time, Line shows the gradual form-
ing of a white circle on a black background. The circle being photographed had
been drawn on a sheet of black paper using white gouache, ruling-pen, and com-
pass.3 The film is to be projected, not in a theater but in an exhibition space that is
closed off, homogeneous, non-hierarchized, and level, with no separation between
projection space and spectators, no rows of chairs, and, above all, no screen. An
essential point: mist is diffused throughout the projection, so that the image of the
circle projected on the screen’s surface is replaced by the projector’s light beam,
which takes on a material consistency.4 The film shows the formation of a geometri-
cal body in space caused by the projection of a simple light beam, and insofar as it
becomes a narrative, it is the visual narrative of this materialization.
According to McCall, the ideal length of the beam (the distance between pro-
jector and surface of projection, or between the light source and the beam’s plane of
intersection) is between thirty and fifty feet, with the diameter of the circle on the
wall being between seven and nine feet, and the base of the circle about twelve inches
from the ground. A spectator with raised arms, standing inside the cone and against
the wall on which the circle is projected, is unable to touch the surface of the cone. If
one walks towards the light source, the membrane of light gradually diminishes in size
until one emerges out of it. As one reaches the projector, it is possible to see the rib-
bon of filmstock passing behind the lens, and on it the circle’s tiny image, the
bi-dimensional image that is the source of the tri-dimensional one.5

2. McCall, interview with Mark Webber, 2001, quoted in “Shoot, Shoot, Shoot: The First
Decade of the London Film-Makers’ Cooperative and British Avant-Garde Film, 1966–1976,” unpub-
lished broadsheet, 2002, distributed by London Film-Makers’ Cooperative in conjunction with the
eponymous exhibition that opened at Tate Modern in May 2002.
3. The prints for projection, which display the same relation of black background and white
line, are inter-negatives.
4. From 1972 to 1974, McCall created a series of pyrotechnic pieces, starting with Landscape for
Fire I, presented in England, the United States, and Sweden. Line is their luminescent extension. These
were outdoor installations based on grids defined by small containers of inflammable liquid. Following
a precise score, the fires were lit in a specific order to create shifting configurations within the grid.
5. One finds the same concern with the volumetric display of projection in Take Measure (made
in 1973, the same year as Line) by William Raban, a major figure in the British school of Structural
work. The filmstrip, whose length coincides exactly with that of the projection space, is unwound
Anthony McCall. Line Describing a Cone. 1973.
Installation view during the twenty-fourth minute,
the Whitney Museum of American Art, 2002.
Photograph by Hank Graber.
McCall. Line Describing a Cone. 1973.
Installation view during the twenty-fourth minute,
the Whitney Museum of American Art, 2002.
Photograph by Hank Graber.
Line Light 7

The spectator turns from the screen to catch sight of the light source; this turn
is prefigured in a slide work of 1972, Miniature in Black & White, in which a series of
slides pass repeatedly before a projector lens, showing tiny plants pasted between two
pieces of transparent glass in alternation with sections of black leader, lines,
scratches, and sprocket holes. The slides are projected onto a tiny screen immediately
in front of the projector lens. The spectator is invited to stand close to the screen, in
effect looking directly into the light, thereby experiencing projection optically in its
pure state, an experience of which Line will be both the expansion and the reversal.
Although the film’s construction is wholly the product of calculation, one para-
meter of an aleatoric kind does persist in projection. In 1974, during a joint screening
by New York’s Collective for Living Cinema and Film Forum in a high-ceilinged
100–by–50 foot space, for approximately 120 spectators and with a projector
equipped with a very powerful xenon bulb, the circle produced was about three
meters high and McCall says he had the impression of seeing the film for the first
time. “It had nothing to do with the work I’d conceived.”7 For the first projections,
McCall counted on the dust-filled air of New York lofts, and he mentions projections
of Line organized with simple incense sticks or in the presence of cigarette-smoking
spectators. With the rising cult of the clean and healthy, dust disappeared from lofts
along with the art lovers’ tobacco. Projections of Line are now done with theatrical
mist machines. Having seen this as a distortion of the initial project, McCall came to
consider the set-up as a possible non-narrative version of the film, with neither begin-
ning nor end, thus transforming the course of action into a formal statement.

Geometry
In a note written for the Knokke-le-Zoute Festival of 1974, McCall wrote, “Line
Describing a Cone is what I term a solid light film. It deals with the projected light beam
itself, rather than treating the light beam as a mere carrier of coded information,
which is decoded when it strikes a flat surface.”8 With McCall’s film, the space of con-
ventional cinema—which is based on the traditional theater’s separation of spectator
from performance and constructed according to an ideal, single, fixed point of
view—comes apart. That configuration, the traditional design of the theater domi-
nant throughout the t went ieth centur y, depends on the forgett ing of the
phenomenon of projection: the screen functions as a window within which an illu-
sionist spatial perspective—a fictive space—is reconstituted. For the perspectival
space of conventional cinema, McCall substitutes a projective space. The wall no
longer opens out as a transparent window, but appears as an opaque surface and as a
limit. Line even develops as the inversion of the perspectival set-up insofar as the

between the screen and the projector. When the latter starts up, the film reel leaves the screen’s sur-
face, to be restored, by an inverse symmetrical movement, in a luminous form.
6. In reminiscence of Stan Brakhage’s Mothlight, made in 1963.
7. Scott MacDonald, A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers (Berkeley:
University of California, 1992), p. 162.
8. McCall, “Line Describing a Cone and Related Films,” p. 43.
8 OCTOBER

cone’s apex no longer coincides with the vanishing point on the horizon line behind
the screen but rather with the source of the light beam formed in the projector’s
lens.9 In overturning the fictive depth beyond the screen and directing it toward the
real depth that unfolds beyond it, Line opens filmic experience to tri-dimensional-
ity.10 From now on, film is no longer that projected image hollowing out a semblance
of depth within the wall’s surface but a field truly formed by and merged with the
projection itself. In this way, the light beams inscribed within McCall’s mist develop
film’s real plastic properties, crossing the frontiers of film history. In so doing, they
emerge, like Dan Flavin’s color fields or Fred Sandback’s colored strings of cotton,
stretched out through space, as modulations of the space within which they fan out.
In 1974, with the base provided by Line, McCall conceived and executed a series
of filmic variations on the geometrical figure of the cone—Partial Cone, Conical Solid,
and Cone of a Variable Volume—in which the deconstruction of cinematic expression
initiated by Line was extended. Partial Cone explores the textural modulations of the
light beam—of solid to glimmering, flickering, and flashing—obtained by the inser-
tion of an increased number of black frames between the areas of pure light. In
Conical Solid, a flat light beam revolves around a fixed central axis. Cone of a Variable
Volume is the registration of the conical module phenomenon of accelerating expan-
sion and concentration. For the latter film, the circle was drawn prior to filming, with
the animation obtained by the camera’s withdrawal from and approach to the previ-
ously drawn circle.
The three Cone films revisit, in simple form, a specific property of the original
cone of which they form the analytic decomposition. The following geometrical films
will, on the other hand, represent an enlargement of the set-up. Long Film for Four
Projectors (1974), later shown at Documenta 6 (1977), thus seems like an expansion of
Line. The installation is composed of four projectors. Spectators circulate within a
vast, mist-filled, rectangular space with four intersecting light beams forming arcs of
ninety degrees; the presentation of the volumetric object (Line’s cone) is trans-
formed into an environment. The spectator is now inside the film, no longer
conceived as a circumscribed form within a predefined space but as the very field
within which the experience takes shape. The film, with a running time of six hours,
is composed of forty-five-minute modules in eight permutations, so as to include all
possible combinations of the four movements. In 1975, McCall made Four Projected
Movements, which, like Line’s three geometrical sequels, appears as the analytic
decomposition of Long Film for Four Projectors. This is a piece for a single projector

9. This reversal coincides with antiquity’s construction of the visual cone of geometrical perspec-
tive. According to this hypothesis of Pythagorean origin, the visual beam cast by the eye travels in a straight
line to strike the object of the gaze. “This model made it possible to trace a visual cone with its summit at
the eye’s center and its base at the pupil, to determine the visual field and to draw the angle at which the
object was seen.” Gérard Simon, Archéologie de la vision: L’optique, le corps, la peinture (Paris: Seuil, 2003), p. 18.
10. The techniques of 3-D that develop in the commercial cinema from the 1950s onward are
based, however, on a fictive dissolving of the boundary between what is within the screen and what is
beyond it.
Line Light 9

installed in a corner of a rectangular space. A fifteen-minute reel emits a beam of

light that describes an arc of ninety degrees. The film (16mm with double perfora-
tion) is loaded four times in the projector: from beginning to end, from end to
beginning, from beginning to end and backwards, and from end to beginning and
backwards. The effect as planned is the sensation of four successive displacements:
from wall to floor, from ceiling to wall, from wall to floor, and from ceiling to wall. The
Four Projected Movements do not, however, form a closed deductive system any more so
than Sol LeWitt’s 122 Variations of Incomplete Open Cubes (1974) are reducible to a
demonstration of a logical sort. In McCall’s piece, the accent is no longer on the pro-
jected image, nor even on the phenomenon of projection, but on the gesture of
projection and, as in 122 Variations, on the exhaustion of possibilities.11

11. In this connection, see Rosalind Krauss’s description of the LeWitt piece in terms of the
parable of the pebbles developed by Samuel Beckett in Molloy, “LeWitt in Progress,” in The Originality of
the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985). On the Beckett-like
combinatorial see “The Exhausted,” in Gilles Deleuze: Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith
and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 18.

McCall. Installation drawing for

Long Film for Four Projectors. 1977.
McCall. Installation drawings for
Four Projected Movements. 1975.
12 OCTOBER

Long Film for Ambient Light, the last of McCall’s geometrical films, created in
June 1975 at the Idea Warehouse, is the most radical as well. Its running time is
twenty-four hours. The gallery’s windows are covered with white paper, through
which daylight can pass; at night, the light from a bulb hanging from the ceiling is
refracted on the sheets of paper, which are thereby transformed into screens.12 The
spectators are free to come and go and, above all, to return, so as to take account of
the slow changes of light that represent the entire filmic event. All elements of the
filmic spectacle (projector, screen, film strip, and even spectator) have disappeared;
light and duration remain.

Astronomy
At the beginning of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant, in describing the rever-
sal of perspective involved in the critical method, uses the term “Copernican
Revolution”; this is directed at substituting, for the immediacy of the object within
the process of knowledge, the examination of those faculties of the subject by
which that process is conditioned. Line and its sequels present, similarly, a critical
reversal of film’s progress from projected image to the projective mechanism
itself.13 The discovery of Line’s principle mid-Atlantic, in the middle of nowhere,

12. In 1966, Malcolm Le Grice had offered in Castle 1 the same type of deconstruction of the
cinematic experience by hanging, along the screen’s side, a lightbulb that flashed on and off during
the projection.
13. Noël Burch refers to a projection setup at the beginning of Japanese cinema in which the
spectators’ benches were placed not facing the screen but along the ray of light. McCall’s piece would
thus present a trace of this original fascination with the projective event as such, with the projected
image as merely its residual trace. See Noël Burch, “To the Distant Observer: Towards a Theory of
Japanese Film,” October 1 (Spring 1976), p. 36.

McCall. Long Film for

Ambient Light. 1975.
Installation view, Idea
Warehouse, New York.
Line Light 13

McCall. Announcement for Line

Describing a Cone. 1974.

thus appears as a kind of dramatization of the account in the Transcendental

Aesthetic in which Kant describes the a priori forms of the sensible that condi-
tion the subject’s apprehension of phenomena: a reduction of the cinematic to
its ultimate spatio-temporal elements. Line Describing a Cone is not, however, a
Copernican Revolution merely in Kant’s metaphorical sense, an inversion of the
filmic experience for the elucidation of its formal properties; it is a literal repro-
duction, as well. We know that Copernicus’s publication of De revolutionibus
orbium caelestium (Venice, 1543) marked heliocentrism’s replacement of geocen-
trism, which would end with Galileo and the mathematization of physics. The
result was a series of epistemological reversals, such as the following:
—The finite, concrete space of medieval physics becomes an abstract space,
homogeneous, potentially infinite.
—The cosmos conceived as a hierarchized space is dissolved.
—Man’s place in the universe is relativized.
—Finally, in pre-Galilean physics, movement is defined not from the point and
instant of departure and the speed of the moving object but rather from the
place of arrival and the end toward which the object is directed by a sort
of “appetite.” From now on, end product no longer counts as the cause and
explanatory principle of movement. It is precisely this that transpires in
McCall’s film, on the reduced scale of the cosmos formed by the gallery’s white
cube transformed into a black box. The displacement of emphasis from the
projected image toward the projection phenomenon results in the following:
The geometricization of space: the gallery’s homogeneous and omnidi-
rectional space replaces the cinema’s heterogeneous space, formed as it is by
different, qualitatively distinct places (screen, theater, projection booth).
The relativization of the spectator, who is now deprived of a fixed, stable
14 OCTOBER

point of reference, the reappraisal of the unidirectional point of view and of

the monodirectional point of view.
The reappraisal of finality in the cinematographic experience; it is no
longer the image projected onscreen (in other words, the final cause) that
defines cinema but the projection phenomenon, whose reception surface
only marks the end.14
In an interview by Scott McDonald, published in 1992, McCall stated: “I had
begun to think about the possibility of making a film that would be only film.
What were its irreducible elements? My interest in the question was certainly
awakened by Peter Gidal’s texts on Andy Warhol. Most questions during the 1970s
revolved around the notion of process and the medium’s possibilities as such.”15
Line Describing a Cone seems, at first glance, to conform to the principles of
Greenbergian essentialism:
—It returns cinema to the clarification of its own elements (the projection
phenomenon).
—It has a performative dimension, which is explicit in its title: the descrip-
tion of the cone is immediately identical with its realization, so that the aes-
thetic and theoretical spaces converge; it is this convergence that produces
the film’s specific perceptual effect.
—The film in question is strictly anti-illusionist, replacing or substituting an
effect of real spatialization for a fictive depth.
—Process replaces exposition of the completed form, and completion of the
form thus indicates completion of the piece.
—The film, self-referential, devoid of incident, is based on a simple geomet-
ric progression; it is wholly calculable, since the process is merely the realiza-
tion of its premises.
—It is based on a principle of economy (a minimum of means for maxi-
mum effect).
—Finally, it is wholly devoid of reflexivity, its effective source disappearing,
replaced by the exposition of process.
The film does nevertheless retain something indefinable or nonspecific in
its very structure, and McCall has stated that he sees in Line an intermediate
state between film and sculpture. The light’s lack of consistency and quality, the
presence of movement, and the unfolding of the spectacle in the dark are all
closely related to cinema. The tri-dimensionality and spatialization, on the
other hand, suggest the sculptural. Now, this ambiguity between film and sculp-
ture is the effect of two displacements, the first of which is evident and the other

14. Paul Sharits compares the “definalization” induced by projection of films on a wall with no
screen to Carl Andre’s gesture. See “UR(i)N(ul)LS . . . ,” in Film Culture 65/66 (1978), p. 11.
15. McCall, quoted in MacDonald, A Critical Cinema 2, p. 160.
Line Light 15

more discreet. They show that Line is not reducible to the elucidation of its for-
mal properties. They demonstrate that even through an attempt to reach its
limit—reduced, as it were, to it s irreducible element s— the nature of the
medium does not change as a result of what Aristotle calls “generic alteration”
(metabasis eis allo genos). As evidence, there is the light cone’s appearance condi-
tioned by the diffusion of the smoke; in other words, the cone’s appearance is
only a reaction to the surroundings; seen thus, the thin beam of light becomes a
kind of blade that gradually cuts into the opaque mass of smoke. And when, in
1975, at 27–29, rue Beaubourg, Gordon Matta-Clark, in Conical Intersect, a piece
conceived in tribute to McCall’s film, makes, on the site of the future Pompidou
Center, a gigantic cut into a building marked for demolition, he will incidentally
reveal the sculptural properties of the filmmaker’s piece.16
However, this first operation masks a second, more discrete one; the film’s vol-
umetric effect is conditioned by the light’s persistence. Each light event—that is,
each stage of progression along the circle’s curve—is retained, as against the effect
of classical projection in which the emission of light is diachronic and ephemeral
(the images replace each other). We can therefore form the following hypothesis:
when succession is returned to simultaneity, the film changes into sculpture.
Paul Sharits’s investigations of the shutter’s optical materialization, as dis-
played in the installation Shutter Interface (1975), cast new light on the activation
of the cone employed in Line. On the wall of a gallery plunged into darkness, a
horizontal band of seven partially superimposed rectangles of pure color flash
on and off in arithmetically determined combinations. The illusion of the per-
ception of the shutter (that is, the mechanical operation that determines the
perception of movement) is obtained through the insertion of a black frame
between the areas of color formed by film frames from two to ten in number.
Each area of color, followed by black, is perceived as separate, as if it consisted of
only one frame. For Sharits, just as for McCall, the point is not to produce the
mechanical phenomenon of the shutter’s action but to dramatize it; it is not
about the phenomenological reduction of the cinematic projection, but its
reconstruction. And since Line reconstructs rather than deconstructs the projec-
tion phenomenon, it opens onto a new form of theatricality.17

16. In 1998, Pierre Huyghe, in Light Conical Intersect, will cover Matta-Clark’s film with McCall’s
by projecting on the wall of the building in the neighborhood of the Clock (the site of Matta-Clark’s
intervention) an image of Conical Intersect taken at the moment of the light’s permeation of the conical
cavity made in the façade; in a perfect visual coincidence, the architectural system is resolved into
light, thus returning to its origin.
17. McCall claims to have recognized a precedent for his geometric films in HPSCHD (1968), an
installation by John Cage in which seven harpsichordists, seated in a circle, play different scores. The
sonic chaos is transformed and decomposes in response to the auditors’ movement around the musi-
cians. Talking of HPSCHD, Cage stated, “In each case it’s a question of developing a form of theater
without depending on a text,” For the Birds: John Cage in Conversation with Daniel Charles (Boston: Marion
Boyars, 1981), p. 166; cited by McCall in October 103, p. 60.
16 OCTOBER

This page: Bruce Nauman.

Preparatory drawing for
Cones/Cojones. 1974. © 2001
Bruce Nauman / Artists Rights
Society (ARS), New York.
Next page: Sandro Botticelli.
Map of Hell. 1480–90.

Cosmology
In 1975, Bruce Nauman showed Cones/Cojones at the Castelli Gallery.18 A
series of concentric circles made of adhesive tape, applied to the gallery’s floor,
suggested a cut in large interlocking cones running vertically downward ad
infinitum. Spectators standing in the drawing’s center found themselves sucked
into a negative structure recalling that of Dante’s Inferno, which Botticelli, in a
series of illustrations for The Divine Comedy, represented as an inverse cone.
McCall’s cone, unlike Nauman’s, does not refer to a metaphysical experi-
ence but to a geometrical-astronomical theme of Platonic origin: the circle’s
derivation from the line and that of the cone from the circle. Circular move-
ment is more perfect than rectilinear movement, which has no end. The simple
body that changes into a circle is thus a perfect body. Within the nonspecific
exhibition space, McCall organizes the construction of a body that is simultane-
ously geometrical and astral, redefining the conditions of classical projection to
reset it, with its archaic connotations drawn from the physics of antiquity.
Nevertheless, on noticing the space taken by the light’s inscription, one realizes
that Line’s construction is impure. First, because some points of light are omit-

18. Chrissie Iles cites Nauman’s work without, however, referring to McCall’s in the exhibition
catalogue for Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art, 1964–1977 (New York: Whitney Museum
of American Art, 2001), p. 65.
Line Light 17

ted within the circle as its tracing progresses, and second, because at the film’s
end, at the point where the circle’s two halves join, they don’t quite fit together.
This imperfection of the tracing (due, according to McCall, only to strictly
material conditions), although not essential to the intended purpose, has at least
the effect of inscribing the circle within perception, of realizing it. Beyond its geo-
metrical-cosmic construction, Line makes visible the real inscription of a form
within matter. Solid Light means that the experience of light is an experience of a
material sort, similar to those described by Lucretius on observing the movement
of dust particles within a sun ray:
Observe whenever the rays are let in and pour the sunlight through
the dark chambers of houses; you will see many minute bodies in
many ways through the apparent void mingle in the midst of the
light of the rays, and as in never-ending conflict, skirmish and give
battle, combating in troops and never halting, driven about in fre-
quent meetings and partings . . . so that you may guess from this what
it is for first beginnings of things to be ever tossing about in the
18 OCTOBER

great void . . . a small thing may give an illustration of great things

and put you on the track of knowledge.19

The experience of projection is a physical, tactile one, in which the body, not
only the gaze, is involved. Solicited to pass through the light ray and to remain within
it, the spectator is activated; she becomes an actor. Through the physical experience
of the light, she is transformed into fiction—into vision, as Plotinus would have it. In
the Enneads, V.8 (On Intelligible Beauty), in his description of “the beauty (over) there”
or “(in) the land of souls and of the gods,” Plotinus writes:
For all there sheds radiance, and floods those that have found their way
thither so that they too become beautiful: thus it will often happen that
men climbing heights where the soil has taken a yellow glow will them-
selves appear so, borrowing color from the place on which they move.20

On entering the light ray, with his body suddenly snatched from the dark,
the spectator’s faculties of viewing, vision, and the visible are conjoined, and this
penetration of the silky, golden-brown web is not wholly without sensual connota-
tions. In “On Leaving the Movie Theater” (1975), Roland Barthes stressed the
erotic properties of the projection’s light ray, and one has the impression of reen-
countering, in his description of an ordinary film screening, the experience
McCall tried to arouse in Line.
In that opaque cube, one light: the film, the screen? Yes, of course.
But also (especially?), visible and unperceived, that dancing cone which
pierces the darkness like a laser beam. This beam is minted, according
to the rotation of its particles, into changing figures; we turn our face
toward the currency of a gleaming vibration whose imperious jet brush-
es our skull, glancing off someone’s hair, someone’s face. As in the old
hypnotic experiments, we are fascinated—without seeing it head-on—
by this site, motionless and dancing.21
But why the eruption, in Barthes’ text, of this strange monetary metaphor, as
seemingly incongruous as the cojones attached to Nauman’s cones? Probably because
the light ray bathes the bodies and faces of the spectators, which are otherwise
plunged in shadow, like Titian’s shower of gold falling upon Danae’s body in a lumi-
nous shaft.
McCall’s film thus offers a singular response to the questions of matter, fixa-
tion, and transcription of light that traverse the history of art. The analytic

19. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things: De Rerum Natura, ed. and trans. Anthony M. Eselen
(Baltimore: John Hopkins University, 1995), p. 60.
20. Plotinus, The Enneads, V.8, trans. Stephen MacKenna (New York: Larson Publications, 1992),
p. 494.
21. Roland Barthes, “Leaving the Movie Theater,” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard
Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986), p. 347; cited by Chrissie Iles, Into the Light, p. 45. The same
erotic metaphor of projection appears in the opening pages of Jean Genet’s Pompes funèbres (1947).
Line Light 19

reduction to its basic components of the cinematic setup in Line Describing a Cone
is a fictive one; in the last analysis, it opens onto a mythological scenario.

Apostil
At the turn of the century, after twenty years of silence, when presenta-
tions of Solid Light Films were increasingly frequent in both the United States
and in Europe, Anthony McCall inaugurated a new series of works produced
not on film but digitally, since the computer facilitated the tracing of complex
lines and the exploration of the plastic properties of curves. While the geomet-
ric pieces of the 1970s were based on a principle of equivalence between line
and plane, from 2000 on, the post-geometric pieces played on the forms’
reversibility, on exchanges between interior and exterior, and the equivalence
of horizontal and vertical vectors. At the same time, the adoption, from 2000
on, of mist-producing machines generated a texture both uniform and larger-
scaled, so that McCall was able to increase the scale of his pieces, conceived
from then on as installations and projected in continuous cycles.

McCall. Doubling Back. 2003.

Installation view, Musée de Rochechouart.
20 OCTOBER

McCall. Doubling Back. 2003.

Installation drawings.

Doubling Back (2003), the first of this new series of films, based on a princi-
ple of equivalence between inner and outer surfaces, is made of two waves that
slowly fuse and separate, in fifteen-minute cycles. Turning Under (2004) links the
interaction of a wave and a plane of light to a rotary movement of ninety
degrees. Between You and I (2006)—along with its variation, You and I, Horizontal,
McCall’s most complex and monumental piece at that point—is composed of
two adjacent vertical forms of solid light, each thirty feet high projected from
ceiling to ground, and each formed from a traveling wave passing through a
rotating plane of light and an elliptical cone in slow contraction and expansion.
Gradually, each of the two light sculptures inverts its formal qualities so that it is
transformed into the other. The transformation is realized using the “Wipe,” a
conventional technique in feature films, no longer in frequent use, but given a
new formal application in this work. However, the Wipe is ordinarily used for
transitions from one sequence or shot to another and lasts only one or two sec-
onds. In Between You and I, inordinately slowed down, it lasts sixteen minutes.
The two shapes are never wholly visible in any given instant, but during the
Wipe, that which is invisible within one form becomes visible in the other, so
that at any given moment, everything is wholly present.
In the chapter of The Analysis of Beauty that is devoted to line, William
Hogarth proposed a consideration of the surfaces of objects “as so many shells
composed of lines closely stuck together.” Such is the precise effect of Anthony
 McCall. Between You and I. 2006.
Installation view at Peer/The Round Chapel, London.
22 OCTOBER

McCall. Between You and I. 2006.

McCall’s first geometric films: a production of surfaces through an arrange-

ment of lines developing in time. When dealing with the waving line—also
called the “line of beauty” or “serpentine line”—that appears to be formed by
“two contrasting curves,” Hogarth says that because of its complexity, it can’t be
reproduced on paper “without the assistance of the imagination or the help of
a figure,” and he chooses to represent it in the form of a “fine wire properly
twisted around the elegant and varied form of a cone.”22
In his recent installations, with digital calculation replacing the work of the
imagination, Anthony McCall intuitively rediscovers Hogarth’s lesson; his digitally
drawn complex curves are logically deduced from his films of solid light done in
the 1970s, just as, according to the eighteenth-century painter and theoretician,
the serpentine line derives from the form of the cone.

—Translated from the French by Annette Michelson

22. William Hogarth, “Of Lines,” in The Analysis of Beauty (London: Oxford University Press,
1955), p. 55.