ART CITIES:Barcelona-Anthony McCall
Anthony McCall has a cross-disciplinary practice in which film, sculpture, installation, drawing and performance overlap. McCall was a key figure in the Avant-Garde London Film-makers Co-operative in the ‘70s and his earliest films are documents of outdoor performances that were notable for their minimal use of the elements, most notably fire.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Fundació Gasparis Archive
The first survey of the work of Anthony McCall in Spain, entitled “Lights and Performance” at Fundació Gasparis presents important film works alongside solid-light installations, including the premiere his new work “Coming About“ (2016) created especially for the exhibition. After moving to New York in 1973, McCall continued his fire performances and developed his “Solid Light” film series, conceiving the now-legendary “Line Describing a Cone” (1973). These works are simple projections that strikingly emphasize the sculptural qualities of a beam of light. In darkened, haze-filled rooms, the projections create an illusion of three-dimensional shapes, ellipses, waves and flat planes that gradually expand, contract or sweep through space. In these works, the artist sought to deconstruct cinema by reducing film to its principle components of time and light and removing the screen entirely as the prescribed surface for projection. The works also shift the relationship of the audience to film, as viewers become participants, their bodies intersecting and modifying the transitory forms. At the end of the ‘70s, McCall withdrew from making art. Over 20 years later, he acquired a new dynamic and started againhis “Solid Light series”. Works on display include “Landscape for Fire” (1972), a seven-minute film documenting the performance Landscape for Fire II in which figures clad in white enact a sculptural performance based on a grid of small fires, creating a synthesis of the grid – a conceptual focus for many artists of the era – and the natural landscape. Also featured in the exhibition is “Circulation Figures” (1972), a room-sized installation of a 1972 performance that took place in London, in which McCall invited a group of people to record their own presence within a mirrored space blanketed with crumpled newspapers. Hallucinatory video footage and still images contributed by the original participants were then edited into a looped film that is projected on to a suspended screen in the exhibition space; mirrors on the wall and newspapers on the gallery’s floor replicate the original environment. “Between You and I” (2006), uses a traditional narrative cinema device for scene transitions called ‘the wipe’ in conjunction with conical, three-dimensional projected light forms, are shown with new work “Coming About” (2016). The exhibition highlights the interactivity of the works as well as the artist’s use of space as a visual and plastic element rather than a neutral container. Also on view are drawings, studies, scores, photographs and documents, predominantly from the artist’s own archive, that offer an insight into his working practice.
Info: Curator: Gloria Moure, Fundació Gaspar, Montcada 25, Distrito Borne, Barcelona, Duration: 14/4-30/9/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri & Sun 10:00-20:00, Sat 10:00-21:30, www.fundaciogaspar.org
