"Line Describing a Cone"

Line Describing a Cone (Anthony McCall, 1973) probes the boundaries between film and sculpture, light and dark, materiality and immateriality. As McCall remarked in 1974: "The film exists only in the present: the moment of projection...".

Line Describing a Cone (Anthony McCall, 1973) probes the boundaries between film and sculpture, light and dark, materiality and immateriality. The film is made from a beam of white light emitted from a film projector positioned at one end of a darkened room. Passing through the projector is an animated film of a thin, arcing line that, frame by frame, gradually joins up to become a complete circle. Over the course of thirty minutes this line of light traces the circumference of the circle as a projection on the far wall while the beam takes the form of a three-dimensional hollow cone. 

As McCall remarked in 1974: "The film exists only in the present: the moment of projection. It refers to nothing beyond this real time ... the space is real, not referential; the time is real, not referential". 

Presentation by Erika Balsom