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Anthony McCall’s extraordinary film works seek to de-codify a certain logic of established film or cinema and its relation to the spectator. McCall seems fascinated by the exploration and realisation of a cinematic logic yet unexplored, marginalized or suppressed but absolutely implicit to the form. In McCall’s solid light films there is a concentration upon what he calls ‘the projected light beam itself, rather than treating the light beam as a mere carrier of coded information’. His films deal with the irreducibility and necessity of projected light, he describes Line Describing a Cone as ‘the first film to exist in real, three dimensional space.’. The projected light itself becomes tactile and textural, and often involves varying degrees of complex modulation, permutation and repetition. All involve a certain reversal or at least an alteration of the politics of spectatorship, insofar as we are encouraged to gaze into the light rather than at the projected ‘image’. We are able to ‘enter’ into the film, become incorporated within it, to become with it, to pierce its fabric and occlude it. Our physical bodies are in an active relation to the film works rather than a traditionally passive role. These films dwell upon the nature of time – the invisible force of time – duration, multiplicity, change and becoming, and they force us to become engaged with continuous, overlapping and multiple durations that profoundly effect us physiologically.
McCall’s work not only brings into question our conventional ways of seeing and our way of relating to a sensory image, but ultimately our relation to each other.
‘Haptic Vision’
In his philosophical work on the cinema Deleuze reflects on the type of films that confront us with a certain challenge to our conventional powers of recognition, films that presents a ‘shock to thought’. Such works disrupt our capacity to link certain images through causal, rational or logical relations. The viewer becomes essentially liberated from certain habitual patterns of thought and is able to draw upon certain virtual reserve of thought in an act of co-creation of the projected film object. This form of cinema implicates the body and its alteration in the most profound fashion – the body is freed from certain patterns of control, enabling us to begin to think anew. In the cinema a certain kind of ‘time-image’ can be experienced in this altered body and as such invites a more direct experience of time. Certain time-images within the cinema invite a radical embodied form of filmic contemplation, but for Deleuze this cannot relate to the bodies we have already been given but to the way in which the body is altered and created anew. This new body emerges from a disruption and displacement of the pre-existing body. Certain films challenge the conventional relation of viewer/spectator and cinematic work. A significant part of this challenge is the invention of a new mode of cinematic visibility and sensation – what Deleuze calls ‘haptic vision’. With this cinematic haptics the capacity of our eyes become altered and expanded and begin to function like organs of touch. This haptic form of seeing is to be distinguished from optical visuality, which sees things from enough distance to perceive them as distinct forms in deep space: or, in other words, how we usually conceive of vision. Haptic looking tends to traverse the surface of the object rather than to plunge into the illusionistic depth of representational space, and as such it is not so much a matter of distinguishing identifiable form as the effort to discern sensation, texture and tactile intensive qualities. Space becomes tactile as if the eye were now a hand caressing one surface after another without any sense of the overall configuration or mutual relation of those surfaces.
This type of haptic space is particularly evident when one becomes literally incorporated within one of McCall’s ‘solid-light’ sculptures, e.g. Doubling Back and Turn. These are sensational forms to literally become lost in, which force us to repeatedly orient ourselves through the tactile exploration of the diaphanous fabric of the modulated form and changing our perspective through movement. There is a type of virtual space whose fragmented components can be assembled in multiple combinations and perspectives. It is clear that these haptic films involve the body much more than is the case with optical visuality. In the smooth space created by these tactile light forms all orientation, landmarks and the linkages between things are placed into continuous state of variation – i.e. a continuous transmutation which operates step-by-step to no pre-arranged or pre-governed schema. There are few stable unified referents since the orientations are never constant, but constantly modulate and change. Interlinkages are constituted differently each and every time according to an emergent realm of dynamic tactile and sensory relationships.
Thinking of cinema as haptic rather than optic is a step towards a consideration of the way in which cinema is capable of appealing to the body as a whole. The body becomes incorporated and enveloped more actively within the projected spectacle. Clearly the relevance of this view of haptic vision to understanding of McCall’s film works probably appears obvious. The surfaces of McCall’s filmworks, e.g. Line Describing a Cone, Doubling Back & Turn, are like magical diaphanous fabrics, sheets of light that display a delicate solidity. As such these solid light projections invite a far more radically tactile kind of vision and response. As viewers of these projections we are incorporated into an experimental or playful tactile relation to the outside, the surface and the inside of the projected image. In McCall’s work there is a reciprocity that occurs with this bodily incorporation into the tactile fabric of the film insofar as the spectator can and does affect the fabric of the film form itself through interacting sensually with it. McCall’s work thus changes both the nature of the filmic visibility through the nature of what he calls the direct and real existence of the projected light in three-dimensional space (or the body of the film) and the effected change in the perceptual attitude and body of the spectator. As one moves around a film like Line Describing a Cone, there is an irrevocable modulation and alteration on one’s perception of the artwork which becomes acutely clear when one tries to perhaps return to a certain position/perspective. What one finds (and it can be a bit of a shock) is that everything has seemingly changed, yet that change has been imperceptible.
The ‘Time-Image’
There is an implicit critique of certain notions of temporality within much of McCall’s work that displays a further affinity with Bergson and Deleuze’s philosophy of time. Time, duration, movement and becoming are very important aspects in all of McCall’s work. Much of his work, for example, contains an implicit critique of the hierarchical distinction between the so-called atemporal artforms such as painting and sculpture and time-based artforms like film and video. McCall embraces the disruptive insights of Performance, Happening or Event based artworks, (i.e. the insight that everything that occurs, including the process of looking and thinking, always occurs in time and that and that many conventional distinctions are quite absurd). There is at the heart of McCall’s film work a profound disruption of conventional notions of time together with an attempt to expand our understanding of temporality and duration. Both Bergson and Deleuze were interested in what they perceived to be the illusory or absurd notion of temporality that has tended to dominate conventional thought and perception. For both thinkers the illusory nature of time has given birth to a proliferation of so-called ‘false problems’. Bergson, Deleuze & McCall struggle against this illusion by attempting to rethink the complexities of real temporality and duration. For all three of them the illusory nature of temporality emerges from a certain thinking of time subordinated to spatial concepts., i.e. the seemingly pre-given understanding of static and homogenous spatiality from which we often derive our interpretation of time. The problem to be addressed by each of them is to rethink temporality on the basis of movement, qualitative change, modulated becoming and coexisting qualitative durations. For them our bodies, our nervous systems, are open to a succession of qualitative changes that are not mapped out as mechanical intervals but as a flow of time, each instant permeating each other. In conventional thought we tend to think of time as an abstract, homogenous element, which we measure through the discreet intervals of clock time. However, these discreet intervals are merely artificial and ultimately interchangeable static points. For Bergson, Deleuze & McCall the passage of time is more than the mere succession of states inscribed within discrete and even intervals. Our experience of time is that of duree, duration, of a dynamic continuation of a past into a present and toward a future. Each present moment interpenetrates the next present moment, with each new present functioning as a qualitatively different moment, each moment pushing into the next in a single movement of becoming. With each present moment something new comes into existence, something unpredictable emerges which then forms with the subsequent moments of becoming a qualitatively distinct ensemble or assemblage of time. So genuine duration is fundamentally indeterminate; the future is truly open and unforeseeable. Time is creation, time is invention, time is becoming. Time makes a difference because each moment brings forth something qualitatively new. It is this aspect which accounts for the radically different qualitative experience of time (e.g. in some circumstances 5 minutes can seem like an hour, and in others an hour speeds by and feels like barely a few minutes). Time is not homogenous but is heterogeneous, and McCall’s work precisely evokes this heterogeneous aspect of time. Repetitions, permutation, virtual stasis, imperceptible modulation, all serve, paradoxically, to render this strange qualitative nature of time something sensible. We literally become lost and enveloped within these works (e.g. this element is particularly evident with Long Film for Four Projectors) Homogenous clock-time dissipates as we become subject to the complex co-existence of multiple rhythms of duration.
It might seem that the Cinema projector just seemingly operates in a manner similar to our ordinary discursive modes of perception, intellection and language; i.e. we attempt to comprehend process, becoming and movement by slicing time into an abstract sequence of static moments, or immobile cuts, and then somehow re-link them back together into a homogenous systematic and rational order. Rather than grasping each particular specific movement as an indivisible whole with its own concrete duration, in which there is no distinction between motion and that which moves