In 1973, Anthony McCall pointed a 16mm projector into a dark, hazy room and showed a film consisting of a single line slowly drawing a circle. What the audience looked at was not the wall. Over thirty minutes, the beam thickened into a cone of visible light you could stand inside, put your hand through, and walk around.
Line Describing a Cone invented a form — McCall calls it solid light — that sits, in his words, where cinema, sculpture and drawing overlap. Everything since in projected-light installation, including a great deal of what gets built with lasers and haze at festivals every year, is downstream of it.
Solid Light, 1973, 2020, 2026 is at Sean Kelly, New York, until October 31. It’s his seventh solo show with the gallery, and it puts three works fifty-three years apart in one place.
The three works
Line Describing a Cone (1973) — 16mm projected installation, 30 minutes. The origin. A line traces a circle; the room’s haze makes the beam a solid object.
Skylight (2020) — a vertical single projection running 16 minutes on a loop, with an original score by David Grubbs. Media player, digital projector, speakers, haze machine. A slowly shifting cone of light with a soundscape evoking a distant thunderstorm.
Swarm (2026) — premiering here. Two conical light volumes rotating slowly in opposite directions, one clockwise and one counterclockwise, over fifteen minutes, with a Grubbs soundtrack that gradually intensifies and includes site recordings of trombone. McCall has said it draws on the rising presence of drones in daily life.
Why the 1973-to-2026 span is the exhibition
Seeing them together makes two things legible that a single work wouldn’t.
The technology changed and the idea didn’t. 16mm film became a media player and a digital projector. The haze that made the 1973 piece possible was, at the time, dust and cigarette smoke in a loft; now it’s a machine. None of that altered the proposition, which is that a beam of light is a physical object if you can see the air.
Sound arrived late and changed the work. The early solid-light films were silent — the only sound was the projector. The collaboration with Grubbs, running through Skylight and now Swarm, adds a second sculptural material. That’s a substantial revision for an artist fifty years into a practice, and the two later works are where you can hear what it does.
Swarm is also the first of these that is about something topical rather than purely about the medium. Two counter-rotating volumes of light, a soundtrack that builds, drones as the reference point: the form that has always been serene is being asked to carry menace.
Related Reading
- Anthony McCall: Solid Light, 1973, 2020, 2026 — Sean Kelly
- Anthony McCall — artist page, Sean Kelly
- Sean Kelly presents Anthony McCall solo exhibition — artdaily
- Why Pioneering Light Artist Anthony McCall Is Transforming His Works With Sound — Artnet
- Anthony McCall – Line Describing a Cone — TateShots (YouTube)