Drawing with light 3: Anthony McCall at the Hepworth

Anthony McCall

Anthony McCall’s ‘Solid Light Works’ is on at the Hepworth until 3 June 2018, and is a must see for any of you wanting to work with light as a drawing material. I have mentioned his work before, so I won't elaborate except to suggest that you go along mid-week when there are less people in the gallery, then you can get a much better idea of how each piece operates. The relationship between his projections and his other work is laid out very clearly in the exhibition and some of you might find the drawings about sequences and how to visualise things changing over time, as interesting as the more spectacular projected works. 

In particular the sketchbooks he used are exhibited in long showcases; I always find these interesting as you can see what is going on in the mind of the artist. If only you could browse through them, seeing an open sketchbook page makes you really want to turn the page and see where a thought went to next. I would have thought it would not have been too difficult to have scanned the pages and to have made the rest of the notebooks available as an interactive database, such as has been done with Richard Diebenkorn's sketchbooks.

Anthony McCall: Sketchbook

The exhibition also provides a more rounded context for McCall's practice and we can see him working as a performance artist as well as an installation and series artist. The work below only really comes alive when you see it in conjunction with the video of its making. 

Anthony McCall: 5 minute drawing: Charcoal on paper 6 sheets 1974

A video of the 5 minute drawing performance

How far an artist needs to go with the documentation of work and where the boundaries of the artwork lie are always interesting questions. Did this work only really exist during the 5 minutes of its original performance, is the work contained in the 'finished' drawing that is presented to us on the wall and which is in the collection of MOMA? Is the work only realised when the audience watches the video and then re-looks at the drawing on the wall or is it really all of these things as well as a reading of the text that is used to describe the work and which is placed next to the drawing on the same wall?

Light works straddle genres and may be seen as drawing, sculpture, installation, projection, or performance. they are often immersive and have a long history (again see drawing with light part one)

David Spriggs

Some light artists make direct references to the history of using light as a powerful sign; David Spriggs being an artist that has been linking an awareness of Stonehenge as a sun calendar with his own light objects. He is fascinated by the symbolic, cultural and historical significance of light. Spriggs forces you to engage with the work by making the viewer keep moving in relation to the installations. He constructs his images in layers, so that they constantly change in relation to each other as you walk around them. 

David Spriggs

You don't have to use projections to control the way you use light. Nobuhiro Nakanishi plays with perspective by chronologically stacking landscape photos he has transferred to glass and making sure that his pieces are placed next to an appropriate light source. His images work both as sequential images and as coloured light constructions. 

Nobuhiro Nakanishi

Projections can of course be very powerful and at night can be used to project on a wide variety of surfaces. 

Tony Oursler: Vampiric Mirror

Tony Oursler is always worth looking at if you are thinking about how a moving image can be presented. The very first exhibition of his work I came across was hosted in old suitcases. You had to look inside them and in each one there was a tiny image on a cathode ray tube that formed the heads of a series of dolls, all of which were talking. It was designed to be like a collection of ventriloquists' suitcases.
Javier Riera has used his interest in outdoors projection to develop a practice that explores the conjunction between the organic forms of nature and geometric forms. 

Javier Riera

Javier Riera's light projections make us rethink our relationship with nature and perhaps they also cause us to ask ourselves what right we have to impose our ideas and formal concepts onto the rest of the world. Nature usually gets there first and our first experiences of light entering dark spaces would have been nature made not manmade. 

Nate Boyce

Nate Boyce is perhaps more interested in solid light, his 3D printed realisations being then re-embedded into videos of 'reality' or cast as solid objects. However the film above sees him working to compose light.

Sunlight breaking through clouds

We are still thrilled by the sight of nature making its own light drawings, when clouds obscure the sun and then allow a shaft of light to pass through to the earth, our hearts lift. As light shafts down between the gaps in a tree canopy, it can feel as if we are in a cathedral. 

The use of stained glass in churches is another example of the spiritual enmeshing of light and religious ideas, a concept that goes back to the entering of a shaft of sunlight into a cave, being still used to create the ambiance lighting for nightclubs, so that as people dance they are helped to enter into a trace state, little different to the way things would have been thousands of years ago. 

Cirque du Soleil: nightclub lighting display Las Vegas. 

Coda

Tomopteris

Humans are not the only creatures that have found ways to be able to light up the dark. Tomopteris are segmented worms that are cousins to earthworms, but belong to a separate group called polychaetes. They are usually transparent, except when they take on the colour of the prey they’ve just eaten (like the one shown here with a red gut). Their bodies are mostly water, which means damage to their outer surface causes the immediate loss of the water pressure inside, resulting in a dramatic change in size and shape. They still retain a basic similarity to ourselves, a bilateral symmetry and a segmented body that appears to have a head and a tail is not too far away from the forms many fish take and we have like all other mammals evolved from fish.

See also: 

Drawing with light part 1
Drawing with light part 2

Artificial light
Articulated collage and shadow play