In this show Anthony McCall presents You and I, Horizontal, 2005, a work that follows in the tradition of the “solid light” films he created during the ‘70s. This new work continues his experimentation with film as a medium, his reflection on the mechanisms of vision, and his wish to engage the viewer as an active participant. The title seems to refer to an erotic entanglement. The work is in fact composed of two beams of light projected onto a screen in a darkened room; these take shape, fade away, and are simultaneously present in the room itself, given contour by the diffuse smoke that accompanies the projection. In the most well known of McCall’s earlier works, Line Describing a Cone, 1973, the cone, a beam emanating from a projector, could be described as the materialization of an optical schema. You and I, as a mise-en-scene of an erotic liaison, seems to link this optical schema to the mechanism of desire. What unites this new film with the older works included here is its unfurling of cyclical time. Miniature in Black and White, 1972, uses the rotations of a carousel slide projector to explore the effect of light on the viewer’s retina, while Landscape for Fire, 1972, displays, in a non-linear installation, a performance of the lighting of a rectilinear grid of fires in a field.
