Anthony McCall: Solid Light at Tate Modern review

The Tate has been showing light as an artistic tool and in this vein McCall’s exhibition replaces Yayoi Kasama’s Infinity Room. He is well and truly back on the scene with four major shows, here at the Tate, the Guggenheim Bilbao, Sprüth Magers in London, and the Museum of Art Architecture and Design in Lisbon in the autumn.

Portrait of Anthony McCall at Tate Modern 2024. Photo © Tate (Josh Croll).

McCall is an influential artist who has upended the conventional passive viewing experience of cinema and pioneered a more immersive form of participation in his practice where the viewer becomes a collaborator.

For this exhibition the Tate dipped into their archives and used their 2005 purchase of his work Line Describing a Cone 1973 from which to mount this exhibition tracing McCall’s developing interest in film and space.

McCall entered the art scene in the early seventies as a pioneer of experimental cinema and installation art honing his skills during his involvement in London’s Independent film community then moving to New York in 1973 with his then love interest, performance artist Carolee Schneemann. At this time the American art scene was bubbling with ideas in the spheres of radical avantgarde film making and performance art by the likes of Andy Warhol, Michael Snow and Yoko Ono. But he pondered on his belief that performance art can only really becomes art if it is recorded.

Anthony McCall, installation view of Split Second (Mirror) I, 2018, Tate Modern, 2024. Photo © Tate (Josh Croll).

The exhibition starts with a room showing line drawings and the meticulous planning that goes into his solid light work. “At its heart every piece is a line drawing the drawings never go away and are embedded in the work and are what produce the 3 dimensions forms.” - Anthony McCall

The line drawings are followed by a room with his film Landscape for Fire performed to a small audience at dusk on 27 August 1972, on a disused airfield in North Weald. A carefully choreographed outdoor performance of participants in white uniforms lighting fires in a geometric grid formation against a soundtrack of foghorns, wind and burning.  It is hard to discern where this piece sits in the exhibition, except that it demonstrates early recorded performance art and highlights  McCall’s shift from conventional cinema to “art”.

His beams of light works were originally shown in old New York lofts previously used for light engineering, millinery, or sweatshops. All being places with enough dust in the air to catch the light as well as numerous people smoking, as was allowed back then.  The combination of the dust and smoke gave solidity to the projections hence did not lend itself well to being shown in clean slick galleries leading to the failure to reproduce the effect at an exhibition in Sweden. This combined with the realisation he needed to make a living led him to retreat from making art in the late 70s only to return to the practice in the new millennium enticed by the artistic potential of emerging technology. This explains the gap between his Line Describing a Cone piece (1973) and his next piece Doubling Back (2003).

The fun begins in the darkened main room beginning with his foundational work and three additional works of large-scale, immersive sculptural light installations. Upon entering you find yourself pondering the strong white lines drawn by projectors on black walls and realise the lines are slowly moving, then one notices the mist is making the beams of light solid and that gallery visitors are beginning to interact with the art. Each person is having their own unique experience and creating their own piece of “performance art”.

Anthony McCall installation view of Landscape for Fire, 1972, Tate Modern, 2024. Photo © Tate (Josh Croll).

Split-Second Mirror (2018), the most recent work on show, is the first time McCall has used an intervention using a wall sized mirror creating a double projection. When you are inside one of the cones you are looking at half of what is actually there, and the other half is virtual and you cannot tell with ease which is which.

There is an importance to the “slowness’ of his work. Everything moves intentionally slowly. If you make a sculpture form and it is moving fast the natural tendency is to stay stock still and watch it whereas if you make it move slowly it is almost as if you are looking at a sculpture that is not changing, and the visitor brings the movement to it.  As McCall said, “The spectator should be the fastest object in the room.”

There is no prescribed way to enjoy the art. It is the job of the spectator to find ways to engage with the work and bring their own meaning and experiences to it. Find what you want from it. Stay as long or as little as you wish, and that freedom is as it should be.

Date: 27 June 2024 – 27 April 2025. Location: Tate Modern, Bankside, London SE1 9TG. Price: £14 Under 12s & Members FREE. Book now.

Words by Natascha Milsom