Suppose that the film you're watching is a very minimal and abstract show. It doesn't fill the whole of the screen's rectangle with colourful business. What you see is only a single thin line of bright white, with darkness all around. The light beam that projects this line will not have the form of a pyramid. It will be a mere plane, triangular in shape, with its apex at the projector, its base on the screen.

Introduce some smoke, and you'll see it – a thin, flat, sharp-edged dart of light, hovering in space, cutting through the dark. And if the bright line on screen should move or bend or grow, the projected sheet of light will evolve accordingly. Cinema can generate a form of immaterial, kinetic sculpture. These are the basics of the art of Anthony McCall.

British artist Anthony McCall (born 1946) 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 1970s and his earliest films are documents of outdoor performances that were notable for their minimal use of the elements, most notably fire.

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, in 1973. These works are simple projections that strikingly emphasise 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.

Read a review in The Independent. (Excerpt above)