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Set and
dancers costumes for the
ballet Relche, 1924.
92
Film Beyond Its Limits
GEORGE BAKER
When Godard says everything has two parts, and that in a day theres
morning and evening, hes not saying its one or the other, or that
one becomes the other, becomes two. Because multiplicity is never
in the terms, however many, nor in all the terms together, the whole.
Multiplicity is precisely in the and, which is different in nature
from elementary components and collections of them. . . . AND is
neither one thing nor the other, its always in-between, between two
things; its the borderline, theres always a border, a line of flight or
flow, only we dont see it, because its the least perceptible of things.
And yet its along this line of flight that things come to pass, becomings
evolve, revolutions take shape.1
Gilles Deleuze, Three Questions on Six Times Two
Grey Room 25, Fall 2006, pp. 92125. 2006 George Baker 93
and effect logic of narrative and its rationalist basis, Relche strikes
out at the audience directlyabsorbing it, focusing on itby lighting
it. So the audience is blinded even while it is illuminated, and that
double function demonstrates that once the watcher is physically
incorporated into the spectacle, his dazzled vision is no longer
capable of supervising its events.2
Absorption, incorporationthe metaphors of Krausss descrip-
tion speak as well to the situation created some fifty years after
Picabias set by the first of Anthony McCalls solid light films,
Line Describing a Cone, 1973. McCalls inversion of cinematic con-
ventions was slightly different than Picabias inversion of the hier-
archy of theater audience and stage, although both would prioritize
light and its effects. Asking his viewers, like the prisoners in Platos
canonical Parable of the Cave, to turn away from the scene of rep-
resentation, McCall proposed that the audience for his film should
face the projection apparatus directly, gazing into a source of light
and attending to the light beam cast into space by the apparatus.
Presaged by performances close in spirit to happenings that the
artist often produced to be filmed, and by sculptural experiments
with solid light that involved the partial masking and thus
manipulation of sources of daylight in given architectural spaces,
Line Describing a Cone began with a single beam or point of light.
Over the course of thirty minutes, this beam slowly and inexorably
developed into a circular shape, ultimately describing a hollow
cone of light that pierced the darkened space of its exhibition
or projection.
As if this turn away from the scene of representation was a
simple rationalist move, a true analog to the Platonic parable, McCall
described his intentions in words characteristic of the still-residual
modernism of the time. Line Describing a Cone is what I term a
solid light film, McCall asserted. He then announced a hostility to
representational or narrative content that had been endemic to
visual modernism for almost a century: It is dealing with the pro-
jected light beam itself, rather than treating the light-beam as a mere
carrier of coded information, which is decoded when it strikes a flat
surface (the screen).3 To face the source of the projected light of
film, to turn all of ones attention to the projection apparatus itself,
was seemingly to disallow ones mastering by the cinematic specta-
cle; it was to face the medium as a material that could be perceived
directly and thus understood. McCall continued:
Line Describing a Cone deals with one of the irreducible, nec-
essary conditions of film: projected light. It deals with this
phenomenon directly, independent of any other consideration.
It is the first film to exist solely in real, three-dimensional,
space.
94 Grey Room 25
This film exists only in the present: the moment of projection.
It refers to nothing beyond this real time. (In contrast, most films
allude to a past time.)
It contains no illusion.4
96 Grey Room 25
inverted projection onto the audience
during the course of the dance, would
be answered by an actual cinematic
projection, the film Entracte by
Picabia and Ren Clair that was pro-
jected onto the stage as the ballets
intermission, a moment when the
stage is usually unoccupied, when the
audiences activity is usually priori-
tized.10 This movement of reversal
and inversion, a concerted communi-
cation of disparate mediums around
a palpable limit or threshold, is pre-
cisely the strategy resurrected by
McCalls invention of the solid light
film. For the most striking paradox of
McCalls Line Describing a Cone is
that in its extreme analytic work upon
the medium and the materials of film,
the medium achieves a real (as opposed
to represented) spatial dimension;
film in fact accedes to the condition of
sculpture.
It is as though, the critic Scott MacDonald noted to McCall, Anthony McCall.
filmmaking had led you out of film.11 We might say that a similar Line Describing a Cone, 1973.
Installation at Artists Space,
dynamic dominated almost every form of advanced art practice in New York, 1974. Photograph
the wake of minimalism, ranging from painting to music to dance. by Peter Moore The Estate
A commonplace now of critical understanding, minimalism repre- of Peter Moore/VAGA, NYC.
98 Grey Room 25
mediums or forms. For, as opposed to the marked de-specification
of art embraced by some forms of Conceptual artConceptual arts
investigation of the condition of what Joseph Kosuth called art-in-
general (although our understanding even of this investigation
needs to be complicated)the strategies of postminimalism expanded
rather than voided what we might understand an artistic medium
to be, freeing, we could say, a mediums specificity from the for-
mer constraints of its materials or object-forms, allowing that speci-
ficity to act upon the world in new ways.14 At its most challenging
moments, the postminimal quest for spectatorial continuity opened
up a quest for a radical continuity of forms, which we might call a
transgressive model of medium-belonging that sought to take medi-
ums to the limits where they began to touch and shape other forms,
but only by othering themselves in the process.15
Everywhere we look in McCalls early projects we see a similar
desire to open radically the object of art to a phenomenological and
durational experience, one that would however in the process artic-
ulate the interpenetration of the remnants or concerns of individ-
ual mediums and forms. There would be slide projections such as
Slit Scan or Miniature in Black and White, 1972, that would play
with the temporal concerns of film as well as the film mediums
dependence on the persistence of vision in an entirely other medium
and apparatus. There would be seemingly static photographic works
such as Water Table, a series of six images of a table in a sunlit
room that cataloged a concerted and progressive interaction of dis-
parate forms. Dribbled with water, the table was also covered with
wooden elements whose linearity and repetition was reminiscent
of the primary forms of minimal sculpture, arranged in a random
manner however close to the concerns of process art and distrib-
ution sculpture (i.e., Carl Andres scatter works). As the photo-
graphic series progressed, these linear elements were gradually
removed from the scene, allowing the sunlight in the space to reflect
more directly off the spilled water, ultimately dematerializing the
very solidity of the table through the mirror play and incorporative
sheen of light. While holding various forms and elements some-
what awkwardly togetherthe linearity of drawing, the modular-
ity of sculpture, the documentary inscription of photography, the
sequencing of a narrative form or of filmWater Table ultimately
both exhibits and thematizes continuity in its dematerialization
of matter through light (the works title is an obvious pun, literaliz-
ing the term used for the level of flowing water beneath solid
ground, and the work itself belongs to a larger interest on McCalls
part in using elemental materialsfire, water, lightthat explicitly
exceed the boundaries of clearly delineated forms).
And, in McCalls early development, there would also be envi-
ronmental and performative works made to be filmed, such as
light. In a first modulation, the frames are presented in units orga- Above: Anthony McCall.
Partial Cone, 1974. Schematic
nized around matching pairs: one frame of a half-circle followed by diagram showing the distrib-
one blank frame, two frames of the half-circle followed by two ution of image and non-image
blank frames, and so on. In a second variation, the fully solid pro- frames within a 72-frame
(3 second) section of the film.
jection of the half-circle dominates the inserted blank frames at
first; McCall proceeds to insert one blank frame every twenty-four
frames, then in units composed of decreasing gaps (1 every 12, 1
every 8, 1 every 4, etc.). The last variation reverses this progression,
allowing the blank frames to dominate, into which one frame of the
half-circle is inserted in units of now steadily increasing intervals.
The flicker effect achieved in each variation passes through and
beyond the human capacity to register the perceptual change of the
frames flying by at twenty-four frames per second; in McCalls
words, a threshold moment is quickly reached in which at certain
points the solid ceases to appear as such as its fabric increasingly
assumes the quality of pure, agitated light, or, of course, vice
versa.26 It is crucial to note, however, that while McCalls Partial
Cone explores film illusion again in ways that connect the work to
the genre of the flicker film, his manner of modulating the film form
takes its structural principlemodularity and permutationfrom
formal procedures that seem closest to those of minimal sculpture.
With the obsessiveness and compulsion of a Sol LeWitt progression
of modular cubes, McCall exhausts the structural permutations of
his patterns of film frames, treating and ordering the individual
unit of the frame, in fact, in a manner absolutely parallel to the
manner in which industrial materials were deployed in minimalist
sculptural form. Sculptural modularity here produces cinematic
modulation, no matter the attempts of some film theorists to keep
much in play: light and time. The wondrous thing about both of
these components of the film medium, however, is their belonging
not just to the medium of film but to the larger world itself. By
which I mean to say that in Long Film for Ambient Light McCall
could be said to discover that light is an essential condition of film,
but it is also a condition of the worldand this films action
would be caused by that ambient lights actions itself, the action
of the light of the world (the gesture is essentially Cagean, of course,