Review - Exhibition - In a Sensitive Light

Jaffer Kolb takes a look at the Serpentine Gallery's retrospective of the work of Anthony McCall.

Anthony McCall, at the Serpentine Gallery, Kensington Gardens, London W2, wwwserpentinegallery.org

 

As you walk into British artist Anthony McCall's show at the Serpentine, the first thing you see is a translucent white perspex screen, smaller than a piece of A4 paper, showing a rotating series of 81 slides of abstract light patterns and shapes. It's a bit Peter Kubelka, a bit Stan Brakhage, and an
unrepresentatively humble first impression of the exhibition.
But that's much of the charm of the artist's eponymous show: it's brilliantly curated, leading you into fantastically dramatic blacked-out spaces by way of comparatively low-key process drawings and crude examples of McCall's work.
Numerous schematic diagrams and studies hanging around the slide plinth in the front room show the sculptor at his most architectural. The drawings are precisely done; volumetric light diagrams are suspended in simply ruled boxes; matrices of dots determine the locations for his Fire Cycle series of
the early 1970s (where he lit fires in various patterns in the Scottish countryside).
It's a pleasant reminder that process work can be both beautiful and informative – these drawings don't have that nasty feeling of affectation. They look considered; they evolve and demonstrate a trajectory of thought that is at times pleasantly illogical. Covering the room's walls, the drawings span McCall's work from the early 1970s to the present.
As a continuation of this process work, two smaller rooms house projections of McCall's early films, one of which features a series of figures walking through a windy field, holding large squares of white fabric. In another, a man digs a square of earth and buries a box of dirt. These pieces are uneven, but mark a step towards the fascination with time and projection so important to McCall's later work.
The back three galleries, the Serpentine's largest, are dedicated to McCall's light sculptures – his masterworks. And these are no James Turrells. They cannot stand quietly in a corner; they do not inspire thought or wonder. They are centrepieces which demand attention and almost violent interaction. His Line Describing a Cone (1973) was the first example of experimentation with what has
become his instantly recognisable style. Shot (and projected at the Serpentine) on 16mm film, the piece comprises a white curved line against a black background. Fog machines create an atmospheric density which gives the projection a solid quality, creating the illusionof a half-cone shaped wall – and that's it.
Only that's not it, really. No photographs, of which I've seen so much of this artist's work, do the sculptures justice. McCall is fascinated by film and projection, and here, instead of passive observation, the film unfolds as you walk around and move through the static projection of light, reversing the process of audience participation. Depending on your angle, the projection has varying
levels of solidity and opacity. From certain angles, people moving through the light look like they're walking through a wall. The fog machines add another element when they turn on, making the light move like solid and shifting smoke. It's a spectacular effect, and one that could keep me entranced for endless amounts of time.
The other two light sculptures, You and I, Horizontal III (2007) and Turning Under (2004), take the simple design of the first piece one step further, and immediately recall the process drawings from the first gallery, which saw McCall experimenting with shapes and intersecting lines. Here he creates
unexpected spaces within the light-walls, which are curiously labyrinthine given their simplicity. Shown on digital, these pieces unfortunately lose something of the original 16mm format; that frenetic but microscopic jumpiness in the line; a trembling energy that's almost imperceptible.
This change is symptomatic of the one big failing in the retrospective: you don't get the sense that McCall has evolved very convincingly throughout his career. His work functions better when unpolished – in its recent iterations it's almost over-slick, like something from a science museum instead of an artist's studio. It's a problem solved when looking at his drawings, however, as the two
sets of media feed off each other. The great thing about McCall's work is his dedication to systematic research, into which hisdrawings give great insight. Exhibiting themdoesn't detract from the work's effect but enlivens it.