Anthony McCall: Split Second

Anthony McCall: Split Second
19th June, 2024 – 10th November, 2024
Guggenheim Bilbao Museum
Avenida Abandoibarra
2 48009 Bilbao

From June 19 to November 10, 2024, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is presenting
Anthony McCall: Split Second, an exhibition which marks the tenth anniversary of the Film & Video program and the space specifically set aside for it in the Museum. Since 2014, the Film & Video programming has offered a comprehensive yet highly unique look at video art and contemporary artistic practices associated with the moving image, and throughout this period it has shown iconic works by artists like Christian Marclay, Ragnar Kjartansson, Pierre Huyghe, Diana Thater, William Kentridge, Javier Téllez, Sharon Lockhart, Monira Al Qadiri, Alex Reynolds, and Marine Hugonnier, among many others.

This time, a selection of works by Anthony McCall (St. Paul’s Cray, United Kingdom, 1946) is being presented in a show entitled Split Second. McCall is a British artist living in New York who is a pioneer in new artistic media, expanded cinema, and video installations. Using projected light, McCall creates sculptural phenomena which plunge visitors into an immersive experience. The rays of light create geometric structures, while dots grow to form lines, either straight or curved segments that sometimes
crisscross in the space.

These configurations can be interpreted as air drawings, minimalist sculptures, or a type of radically abstract cinema. These three fields— cinematography, sculpture, drawing—have converged in McCall’s works since the 1970s and are called “solid light,” a concept that refers to the effect caused by the controlled projection of planes of light in the exhibition space. The solid light shapes are subjected to constant changes in orientation, position, and scale, giving the impression that they are tangible and encouraging the public to walk through them in a paradoxical interaction, since they cause no tactile sensations but instead only an inexhaustible sense of surprise.

The exhibition presents the premiere of a new solid light work by McCall called Split Second Mirror IV (2024), a double horizontal light projection that includes two large mirrors, projectors, and translucent screens. These elements divide or split the two conical volumes generated by the light placed symmetrically in the gallery, as if they sought to reflect or multiply their respective motions. In this new creation, the light is projected at differing heights, causing elliptical and horizontal effects. Plus, the artist uses digital animation to make the forms rotate in space, where they merge to create a linear drawing consisting of a field of intersecting, spiraling planes.

The installation affords a paradoxical experience: the multidimensional images seem solid, even though they are made of light, yet they also feel immobile, even though they repeatedly change over time. By inviting visitors to interact with the moving light sculptures, McCall questions the use of narrative, setup, and the manipulation of light, time, and space in conventional cinema. The artist describes his creative evolution in this way: “This work is part of a long series I’ve been working on for over fifty years. I began focusing on cinema, but over the years I’ve also become interested in the sculptural dimension and the fact that drawing always plays a role, and even performance, in the sense that visitors interact with each other and with the work.”

The room leading into the exhibition presents an early seminal work by McCall entitled Miniature in Black and White (1972), which uses a Kodak carousel slide projector, which was very popular at the time, to show a rotation of eighty-one slides that reproduce negative color images that appear after looking at a fixed image for a period of time and then looking at a white object. The same space also houses Smoke Screen (2017), a series of large-scale photographs that freeze the motion of solid light so that our eyes can stop to scrutinize the textures of the artificial fog which is momentarily revealed through a ray of light.

Anthony McCall: Split Second opens on the 19th of the June, 2024 until the 10th of November, 2024 at Guggenheim Bilbao Museum

©2024 Guggenheim Bilbao Museum