With a focus on the artist’s Solid Light works, the exhibition Line Describing a Cone 2.0 sheds light on Anthony McCall’s art world, which moves between film, sculpture, and installation art. A moving line of light creates a conical form while slowly rotating in space, and this process emerges as an event generated in time, and not a fixed outcome.
Having begun working through a film-world project called ‘expanded cinema’ in the early 1970s, McCall presented Line Describing a Cone, a piece using cigarette smoke and a 16-millimeter projector, in 1973. A line drawing projected on a wall formed a giant conical shape in space, but it was difficult to continue such a project due to fixed notions and technical limitations of the time. After this, he paused his practice for some 20 years and met a turning point in the 2000s, when he converted his film projects into digital files.
The technological transition influenced not just the piece’s form, but also its philosophical depth. Gone is the white noise the film projector used to make, allowing the viewer to focus more on their body, senses, and inner world. The simple line animation evolved into a rhythmical drawing line, and cigarette smoke gave way to a haze machine, creating a clearer structure of light.
The most pronounced change in his works since the 2000s is that the viewer’s corporal intervention is more aggressively required. The viewer no longer remains in front of the screen but is led to enter the conical structure formed by light. The body that has encountered the work appears severed or divided by the light. The basic act itself of the viewer existing and moving in space becomes a part of the work. Light here operates no longer as an object to view, but as an experience the body recognizes while passing through.
Line Describing a Cone 2.0 is not an exhibition presenting completed forms. The exhibition allows viewers to face the process of light being drawn, position their bodies in it, and personally experience forms that are generated and disappear in time. The work, then, is finally formed not on a screen, but in the viewer’s body and senses, and the space of that moment.