Anthony McCall: the father of immersive art

Anyone who’s braved the depths of 180 The Strand in recent years will be aware that a certain breed of art is upon us. You know the stuff: the migraine-inducing fantasia that pummels your pupils until your eyes hear and your ears see. I’m on about immersive art, a viral term applied to every thrill from the Balloon Museum to Frameless, Superblue to Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Rooms or by extension, any ‘[insert famous dead artist’s name with greedy estate]: The Experience’.

Anything to escape ourselves.

But if anyone has earned the right to immerse, it’s Anthony McCall. He was immersing before we all realised we needed it quite so badly.

I interview McCall in a slick, strip-lit back office of Tate Modern, where the 78-year-old has just opened the show ‘Solid Light’ in the space previously occupied by the Infinity Rooms (it was time for a change). After an hour in McCall’s inky, futuristic, light-drenched lair, it takes some retinal readjustment. McCall is charming and composed with a black jacket and beige chinos that feel more starchitect than artist. Perhaps there is something to this; McCall’s environments are akin to architecture – if foundations were algorithms, walls were screens and joists were shards of light.

The show’s starting point is a work that Tate acquired in 2005: Line Describing a Cone (1973). It’s a 30-minute-long projection on 16mm film in which a dot on the wall gradually traces a circle, leaving behind it a trail of light that forms a cone. It was McCall’s breakthrough piece.

The earliest work here is only one year younger than Line Describing a Cone, but it seems like another breed entirely. Landscape for Fire is a film of a performance McCall staged in the wilderness of London’s North Weald in 1972. At the time, McCall was a young graphic design graduate newly immersed in London’s avant-garde film community. The performance depicts a carefully choreographed sequence in which performers light fires in a geometric grid against a soundtrack of wind and burning. But the film presented a problem. “I realised that I needed to record it because performances in remote spaces presuppose documentation,” he says. “But I was concerned that I was showing was secondhand, that the performance was the thing, not the film. I wanted to see if there was a way to make a film that was itself a performance.”

McCall had his first show at Tate in 2004: Long Film for Four Projectors (1974), which was five and a half hours long and screened only once at Tate Britain. In 2012, he showed ‘The Complete Cone Films’ in Tate Modern’s tanks. How does it feel to be back? “I am very pleased,” he says. “Having been self-exiled for 50 years.”

The exile McCall refers to might explain the tectonic shift in his work between Landscape for Fire and Line Describing a Cone. In London, McCall was adjacent, but not a formal member of the experimental London Filmmakers Co-op. But aside from the community itself, there was little audience for his kind of work; galleries and museums didn’t show it, collectors didn’t buy it and the audience was largely made up of the succinct group of artists who made it. Then he met American artist Carolee Schneemann, who was then living fleetingly in London. They began a relationship, and when she returned to New York, McCall followed.

If London’s creative personality was introverted and, at times, hostile, New York was an extrovert, rippling with overlapping movements: conceptualism, Fluxus, the Judson Dance Theater, the tail end of minimalism. “It was a revelation to find a bar full of people talking about art,” he recalls. “I was pleased to be there with Carolee and I got to meet a lot of her performance friends.” There, he fell for films by Andy Warhol and Michael Snow and met his heroes almost instantaneously. “Sol LeWitt and Mel Bochner visited my studio within three months of landing,” he says. “I always considered that tremendously generous.”

The first work he made in New York was Room with Altered Window, his foray into architectural intervention and a “test drive for whether a beam of light could be a film.” In August of that year came Line Describing a Cone, the first in his Solid Light series. “That brought other baggage,” McCall says, describing how the works form an umbrella for a multitude of disciplines, under which are drawing, performance, installation and architectural intervention. “It also included sculpture because it was a three-dimensional form that had to be walked around to comprehend fully,” he says.

With the Solid Light works, McCall was making waves in New York. But in 1976, something unforeseen happened. He was invited to show Line Describing a Cone at the Konsthall in Lund, Sweden. The work that had got everyone talking in the smoke-filled lofts of New York was suddenly invisible in the comparatively sterile Swedish air. “If you don’t allow smoking and there’s no dust, there’s nothing to see except a picture on the wall”, he recalls. “That was a crisis. I couldn’t solve the problem with dry ice or frankincense. I couldn’t make enough mist to catch the light.” It suddenly occurred to McCall that his medium wasn’t really light at all, it was dust, smoke, haze and fog – the stuff we rarely see unless there’s a barb of light blazing through it.

After this event, he discarded art for 20 years. He founded a successful graphic design studio, making art books for the likes of Richard Serra. “Every so often, someone would want to interview me about my art, and that was always rather painful. I was always quite troubled by the reminder.” Presumably, he still had artistic urges. “Yes, but there’s something important called denial,” he asserts. “The studio was very demanding, deadline-orientated work. There wasn’t any time.”

In the mid-1990s, he became aware of the haze machine, which could improve the visibility of the work by creating a “thin, rather sea-like mist” with “beautiful soft sculptural effects and marbling.” The digital projector had also been invented, which offered alternatives to the rigid 4:3 aspect ratio of analogue. The art bug had returned and McCall sought to reimagine the Solid Light for the 21st century. The scene he resurfaced into was different; galleries were now interested in experimental film and McCall had to lodge his foot back in the door. “I had to figure out a way to start again without repeating myself.” Many of the works from McCall’s second wave appear in the Tate show: Doubling Back (2003), Face to Face (2013), and Split-Second Mirror (2018) in which McCall uses a mirror for the first time to reroute the plane of light. Beams slip through the air like silk. The light is static, but not still – it moves and ripples like morning fog on a lake, like you might bathe in it.

Although McCall has long worked with programmers to write the algorithms that steer his animations, working pen-to-paper has always been a through-line. With each technological advancement, McCall would adapt. “I would accommodate to the demands, but I was never a tech-head – it always came down to what I was trying to achieve, which was usually quite simple and related to space.”

McCall’s ability to alter the entire architecture and sensation of a space could be seen as a precursor to the current trends in art. Artists and collectives like UVA (United Visual Artists), Studio Lemercier, Random International harness advanced, sometimes generative programming to create the illusion of solidity and volume in space. They force the body into a choreography, tickling our biology and duping us with all manner of light, smoke and mirrors. Works like these, though now often grouped under the slightly unpalatable, over-occupied category of immersive, tread a thin line between captivation and gimmick, but importantly, they have a lineage and McCall is a progenitor.

Does he identify the parallels? “I never made the DNA connection,” he admits. “But I do see that such a connection exists and that pleases me.” But he urges caution around relinquishing control to technological advancements. “I recognise there are traps for the unwary. You can think that by doing generative programming you’re making something aesthetically interesting. Maybe you are, maybe you’re not. My attitude towards technology is that you should be completely receptive to what’s coming down the pike, but utterly sceptical at the same time. If you hold those two things in balance, you won’t get into much trouble.”