Artists spent centuries making art about light – the divine rays of the Renaissance, the shimmering seascapes of Turner, the foggy hazes of the Impressionists – but it wasn’t until the 1970s that anyone really thought to make art with light. British artist Anthony McCall was one of the first, creating pioneering films that used projectors to trace shapes in the air, somehow seeming to turn nothingness solid.
It was a trick that the world wasn’t ready for. His immersive, smoke-filled environments, shown in New York lofts, were met with relative indifference, so he left art behind for decades. But the world caught up, and a ubiquitous trend for immersive art in recent years has seen his work reappraised. Now he’s at Tate Modern, taking over the galleries that until recently were home to the blockbuster Yayoi Kusama ‘Infinity Mirror Rooms’.
It’s a tough immersive act to follow. Kusama’s work is big, glitzy, selfie-friendly, but McCall’s isn’t. And in the wider context of London and its epidemic of heinous Klimt and Dali light shows, or even the good stuff like you see at places like 180 The Strand, can McCall’s simple, geometric films keep pace?
It feels physical, like the light is hitting you slap bang in the face.
After a room of sketches and an early film showing men in white overalls lighting fires at dusk, you’re plunged into darkness. The four light works here are quiet, ultra-meditative things, nothing more than shafts of white in a pitch black room. In the earliest work, a dot slowly grows into the outline of a circle, a pinpoint on a screen becoming a long cone as the beam of light coming from the projector catches the fog in the room.. As you approach, it feels real, like it’s there in the air, as if walking into it would be like walking into the side of a building. You have to fight your instincts that tell you you’re about to smack your head, you have to push through, breach the barrier. It feels physical when you do it, like the light is hitting you slap bang in the face.
The rest of the works, all more recent, do similar things. Curves slowly twist, lines slowly rotate, the beams of projectors create apparently solid spaces in the swirling mist of the gallery. The best piece shoots beams of light at a mirror, light bouncing back and forth.
It’s simple art stuff: it’s light, geometric shapes, the illusion of solidity. And that’s when it’s best, when it’s just quiet immersion in geometric movement. It doesn’t need to be about breathing or bodies, it doesn’t need conceptual heft. It’s like all of art, cinema and photography history condensed down to its very barest form.
But the show is burdened by context. You can’t help thinking about it in terms of Kusama, or immersive Klimt and Van Gogh, or contemporary artists like Es Devlin, United Visual Artists, teamLab, Ryoji Ikeda; and you can’t help wondering whether the Tate is trying to cash in on all of it.
But if you can leave all that at the door, drop all the context and tech innovation, you’re left with just line and light. And that’s basically what art is.
