In advance of the big King's Cross move, drop by Afterall's offices in the Greek Street Annex of Central Saint Martins (Charing Cross Road) to take advantage of our back issue clear-out sale! Happening
this week and next (23 March – 1 April).
All back issues of Afterall journal from issue 10 onwards will be £2, exclusive to UAL students and staff!
Also pick up our most recent issue, themed on education, and looking at Jean-Luc Godard, Catherine Sullivan, Group Material, Lina Bo Bardi and others, for the cover price.
For more on Afterall and for the contents of our back issues, follow this link:
http://www.afterall.org/journal/
We are also offering special student offers on subscription 20% off the journal cost (please come by or email us to get this offer).
Please email contact@afterall.org with any questions.
Afterall is a research and publishing organisation based in London, focusing on contemporary art and its relation to a wider artistic, theoretical and social context. Afterall journal offers in-depth analysis of artists’ work, along with essays that broaden the context in which to understand it. It is published three times a year, in collaboration with M HKA (Antwerp) and UNIA arteypensamiento (Seville), and in association with The University of Chicago Press.
Artists have been obsessed with transcribing the effects of light for centuries. In the past 50 years, though, people such as Dan Flavin, James Turrell and the British artist Anthony McCall have started producing art made out of light itself.
The idea of sculpture fashioned out of photons sounds impossible — and yet that is the best way to think of McCall’s ambiguous output. His paradoxical forms of “solid light”, to borrow his own oxymoronic phrase, seem to defy physics — and yet there they are, beguiling us with otherworldly beauty.
McCall’s breakthrough occurred in the early Seventies. Frustrated by the limitations of video art, he decided to deconstruct film, and fashion something new. The result was Line Describing a Cone (1973), a juddering 16mm film projected onto the far side of the room. The film consisted of nothing but an animated white dot that slowly grew into a curving line and eventually became a circle.
This sounds a little dull — but the magic happened when light cast by the projector encountered ambient particles in the air, formed by the thick cigarette smoke that swirled around the era’s lofts and galleries. As light bounced off the motes of smoke and dust, an ethereal, ghostly cone, giving the impression of three dimensions, started to form and linger in the gloom. (Prohibitions on smoking in public ensure that McCall has to use special haze machines to achieve a similar effect today.) Line Describing a Cone, like the variations that followed, seemed to herald a new “in-between” type of art: part drawing, part sculpture, part film, part installation.
Until now, I’ve only ever encountered photographs of McCall’s work, which always has a sci-fi look, like something out of Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. To really experience the full effect, though, it is essential to wander into the artist’s cones of light — and the four Vertical Works at Ambika P3 in London offer the perfect opportunity to do so for anyone, like me, who missed McCall’s exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in 2007.
Entering the hushed, pitch-black space, a few yards from the hurly-burly of Baker Street, is somewhat like walking into a futuristic church. Four digital projectors beam elongated wigwams of light from the ceiling into the haze-filled space below. Each projector creates a shifting pattern on the floor, forming the “footprint”, as McCall calls it, for the ever-evolving structures that hover in mid-air.
The effect is calm, meditative, otherworldly — as if McCall is expertly manipulating moonbeams, or somehow tethering the Northern Lights within a gallery.
All four works, presented in the UK for the first time, were made since 2004, shortly after McCall — who was recently commissioned by the Arts Council to create Column, a twisting spiral of cloud that will rise above the River Mersey as part of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad — began producing art again after a hiatus of two decades.
Whereas his work in the Seventies had a more conceptual bent, nowadays McCall says that he wants to evoke the human figure — an effect underlined by the titles (Breath, Breath III, Meeting You Halfway, You). As a result, the show strikes an elegiac note, because his substance-less structures are so spectral. They surely articulate loss and death: each is a record of someone’s passing, rather than their presence.
However you understand McCall’s Vertical Works, though — and they could simply be seen as the quintessential sculptural expression of our virtual information age — I urge you to visit them, for contemporary art offers few experiences as strange and poetic as this.
Until March 27. Information: 020 7911 5876. A related exhibition, 'Works on Paper’, is at Sprüth Magers London (020 7408 1613) until March 26. Alastair Sooke interviews Anthony McCall on 'The Culture Show’ on BBC Two on Thurs at 7pm.
...enjoy!
Adrian
...enjoy!
Adrian
