Anthony McCall

26Jun07

 

selections from part 6 of ‘Sparing with the Spectacle’

BRANDEN JOSEPH

As noted, when discussing “Long Film for Four Projectors” McCall
Consistently chose not to emphasize the installation’s spatial or
sculptural effects for themselves so much as for their impact upon the
viewers, specifically the manner in which they disrupted the
audience’s identity as a defined or unified entity. “Though providing
an enormously increased set of viewing options over the ’screen’ film,
the ‘Cone’ series still dictated an axis of attention which pointed to
the light-source, the film-projector,” he observed. “This had the
consistent effect of clustering the audience along the light-beam.
Now, I wanted the light-beam to occupy the space in a way that did not
emphasize certain viewing positions over others.” As quoted
previously, such spatial dispersion was combined in “Long Film” with
an extended duration that similarly disarticulated the audience as “an
essentially passive congregation with a single focus and homogeneous
behavior patterns.”

The same year that Long Film debuted, McCall codified his
presuppositions about duration in Two Laws of Presentation, a d
(literally) small work made for artist Herbert Distel’s The Museum of
Drawers (1970-77). In it, McCall postulated two rules, drawn from a
larger set of notes entitled “Aspect of Temporality”: (1) The form of
attention is a function of the form of attending. (2) The form of
attending is a function of the duration.” These were schematically
illustrated by a set of nine index cards, each of which corresponded
to a separate duration. Representing time as space in a manner
reminiscent of a graphic music score, McCall plotted durations–ranging from five seconds to twelve years–by means of a simple horizontal line. Black dots denoted the relative density of the attending audience. At five seconds and one, five, and even thirty minutes, the group forms a definable circle with all individuals apparently focused on the event. By three and, especially, six hours(the minimum length of Long Film) the audience has ceased to be an identifiable group, and the attention of certain individuals is shown wandering to other areas or corners of the virtual room depicted by the card. Spatial and temporal diffusion are reciprocally determined.

The material interrelation of space and time would be most explicitly manifested in McCall’s Long Film for Ambient Light(1975). Spatially, the work consists of a loft or gallery space the windows of which are covered by white paper that admits light during the day and reflects it at night. Completely devoid of film projector, interior lighting is produced by a single, constantly illuminated light bulb hung in the middle of the room. A wall text, “Notes in Duration,” is included as an integral part of the installation. In it McCall criticized the conventional distinction between static and temporal events, a division underlying the supposedly medium-based distinction of art from cinema:

This film sits deliberately on a threshold between being considered a work of movement and being considered a static condition….
Art that does not show change within our time-span of attending to it we tend to regard as “event.” Art that outlives us we tend to regard as “eternal.” What is at issue is that we ourselves are the division that cuts across what is essentially a sliding scale of time-bases. A piece of paper on the wall is as much a duration as the projection of a film. Its only difference is in its immediate relationship to our perceptions.

Occasional works like these derived from the active drawing characterized by Line Describing a Cone. McCall’s concern with duration, however, predated the conception of the solid light films and formed the basis of a much more elaborate series of fire performances. These began as early as 1971 as private and largely audienceless Fire Events. A glascene envelope containing the burnt remnants of Fire Event // (1971) was mailed to Schneemann on the day of its performance, bearing the following handwritten inscription:

Performed Saturday 27 Nov ‘71 at 43 Egerton Gardens SW3, at 20:00 hours. There were three other performances the same day, at 19:55 hours, 20:05 hours and 20:10 hours. The selected audience was invited not to attend, after the event had taken place. There will be no repeat performances.

The Fire Events soon transformed into a series entitled, Landscape for Fire. The first was performed in 1972 on the occasion of the wedding of McCall’s friend, Anthony Howell, in a field on Howell’s mother’s farm near the town of Reading. “This first Landscape for Fire was relatively small scale,” McCall explains,

involving, I think, a grid of nine or perhaps 12 points. I only recall myself as a single performer, but my notes and drawings suggest that there were others. For instance I used two foghorn elements, which would require two people, and at least one performer with a white square, so perhaps there were in fact four performers. The piece had a duration of maybe 15 or 20 minutes. The occasion was Anthony’s wedding (the reception which had occurred earlier in the day); older family visitors had long gone when Landscape for Fire was performed. There was an audience of around 20, almost all artists, poets or dancers.

With Landscape for Fire II(1972), which took place that August, McCall began working with a group known as Exit. Founding members of the group, J.J. Ratter and Gee Vaucher had been active in the CND “scene” mentioned by McCall and Bygrave in “Zap! Pow! Zowie!” and had been living communally in a farmhouse dubbed Dial House, located in North Weald, close to London, since 1967. Rechristening themselves Penny Rimbaud and G Sus (and joined by fellow Exit member Steve Ignorant), they later formed the radical punk band Crass, whose political music and performances led to a temporary alliance with and revival of the CND in the early 1980s. Exit was in fact also a band, of sorts, which had evolved out of an even earlier group, The Stanford Rivers Quartet. Whereas The Standford Rivers Quartet had utilized a series of graphic scores consisting of laying grid paper over paintings and other visual material in order to determine the amplitude, duration, and pitch of the sounds to be performed on keyboards, piano, trombone, and drums, Exit had evolved into a larger and more improvisational outfit alone the lines of British contemporaries The People Band.
McCall first met the Exit group in the context of ICES 72, which they had helped Matusow and his fourth wife, composer Anna Lockwood, organize and for which they designed and silkscreened the posters. By 1972, the lines between experimental composition and artistic happenings in London had become thoroughly blurred. Exit’s own performances, according to Rimbaud, had by that time “expanded to almost circus-like proportions with anything up to fifteen musicians playing while a team of artists executed often complex art happenings.” Thus, although ICES primarily featured experimental music, several artists, including McCall, Schneeman, and Geoff Hendricks were invited to perform. While most of the musical performances too place at THe Toundhouse, where Cage and Hiller’s HPSCHD was staged, Exit offered Dial House as an alternative venue for artistic events. Finding the spatial requirements of Landscape for Fire II too large for Dial House’s grounds, however, they negotiated to use the adjacent North Weald Airfield and also offered to assist McCall in the execution of the work(and, as it would turn out, many of the subsequent ones as well).

Exit proved extremely disciplined, often arriving on the scene the night before and camping on the site so as to be there early enough to begin laying out and checking the required materials as McCall arrived. Indeed, as McCall readily acknowledges, it was Exit’s interest and availability that ultimately allowed the fire performances o extend in length and complexity. Rimbaud recalls that he and the group “took an instant liking” to McCall: “his quiet, considered approach [was] one we felt was reflected in our own work.” And there were further affinities to be found between them on the point of duration. Before meeting McCall, Exit had already started to transgress the distinction between traditional concert performance and something closer to a sound installation. As Rimbaud explains:

Exit’s pieces were less scored that those of the [Standford Rivers] Quartet. We depended on improvisation based on the understanding that had by then built up between [what was originally] the three of us. [Exit was formed after the departure of the trombonist.] Although we would advertise start and finish time for our performances, we had a policy of starting at least an hour earlier than billed, this being so that the audience would walk into a musical environment which had not been conditioned by their presence. Likewise, finishing times were random, our performances often going on late into the evening(or until we were switched off by uncomfortable management).

Frequently, the audience did not wait for any such conclusion. According to Rimbaud, the group had taken the name Exit on account of “that being the direction we imagined most of any audience would take at our performances.”

By the time of Exit’s collaboration on Landscape for Fire III (1972), executed behind the sports ground at Oxford University on November 30, 1972, the duration of McCall’s “Conditions” (a term he adopted at the suggestion of Ehrenberg) had begun to extend toward durations that, a couple years dissolving latter, would reach twelve to thirteen hours, effectively dispersing the audience’s attention to the maximum–according to the second to last cards of McCall’s Two Laws of Presentation–before dissolving away entirely.

The next March, McCall stretched the performance duration of such events to the theoretical limit, drawing up the score for an “eternal performance” of Landscape for Fire that could conceivably be constituted indefinitely. That same year, he also produced Found Solid Light Installation (1973), which consisted simply of an appropriated map showing all the lighthouses in England. Tacking the map to the wall of the gallery pointed toward an event of enormous spatial and temporal dispersion.

For the Exit group, one of the most interesting aspects of McCall’s performances was its inhabition of the exterior realm staked out earlier by Kaprow’s happenings and more contemporary land art practices: “Anthony’s piece appealed greatly to us because although the happenings’ element of his work was one that we too had been developing, the idea of moving out of the confines of galleries and performance venues into open space was something that hitherto we had not really considered.” Exit soon followed McCall’s lead, similarly moving outdoors for such works as Oxford Piece(aka Water Piece), which would also take place in an open air field at Oxford.

Interestingly, McCall and the group got on so well that Exit decided to continue performing fire conditions after he relocated to New York, First following and then deriving variants of McCall’s scores, Exit was not entirely entrusted with the details of preparation and execution. Though they had long since proven themselves capable of dealing with bureaucratic fine points of obtaining site permissions, the group’s anarchist leanings soon took them toward the idea of “squat performances,” executed without authorization and advertised by word of mouth. The first and last of these took place on a hillside near beside a major automobile thoroughfare: “Apart from a small audience, the performance inevitably attracted the attention of the police who appeared so bemused by what was happening that we got away with nothing more than a warning not to return.” According to Rimbaud, an emerging environmental awareness would ultimately lead them to abandon the performances: “It was a case of beauty or the beast; the fire pieces had been undeniably beautiful, but we now realized with regret that they were environmentally unsound. The Colchester performance was our last.” The idea of squat performances, however, continued to appeal; as Crass they would stage other unauthorized events and attract a much less benign form of police intervention.

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