Anthony McCall – Long Film for Ambient Light

 

 

The work of McCall only exists in the encounter with its public. I am interested in how he creates frameworks for collective experience in terms of presence and absence and particularly his essay 'Notes in Duration'. The essay formed part of the work Long Film for Ambient Light, which examined durational performance and the relationship between spectator and work along with what he deemed the “presuppositions behind film as an art activity”:

 

“This films sits deliberately on a threshold between being considered a work of movement and being considered a static condition. Formalist art criticism has continued to maintain a stern, emphatic distinction between these two states, a division that I consider absurd. Everything that occurs, including the (electrochemical) process of thinking, occurs in time. It is cultural habit that persuades us otherwise – perhaps a function of intelligence, that breaks up perception of continuous time into 'moments' in order to analyse them. Our insistence upon static, absolute lumps of experience, as opposed to continuous overlapping, multiple durations, shows a warped epistemology, albeit a convenient one”.

 

McCall, A., Two Statements, New York, 1975.