Anthony
McCall

In the largest of its black boxes, the Antonio Dalle Nogare Foundation has chosen to exhibit the British artist Anthony McCall’s spatial installation “Line Describing a Cone” (1973). The artwork consists of a ray of white light emitted by a 16mm film projector positioned at one end of a darkened room. The machine projects a slim line that gradually traces out, frame by frame, first an arc and then the circumference of a complete circle. Over the course of thirty minutes this ray of light takes on the form of a three-dimensional hollow cone, whose presence in space is rendered even more tangible by the mist from a smoke machine that fills the room. The artist encourages visitors to move around and inside the projection in order to interrupt the light projection with their own bodies. In this way they actively interact with the installation highlighting how their individual subjective experience of time and space is essential to the projection of the film.

Anthony McCall’s art straddles the worlds of sculpture, cinema and drawing and its historical importance is recognized internationally. The artist began working with experimental films in 1971 and “Line Describing a Cone” is his first “solid light film”.