Line Describing a Cone at Cementa Festival 2015
Line Describing a Cone is like no other film – during its 30 minute duration, a single point of light grows, inch by inch, to form a circle on the screen. The screen, however, aint where the action is! The room, filled with fog, becomes a container for a massive sculptural object – a cone of light – and the audience is free to roam, and play with the shell of light as it curves over your head. The piece is marvellous as a reductive structuralist film – literally, all you have is light and duration, and Anthony McCall makes you aware of the travelling path of the light beam – but it’s also a great participatory experience, and very liberating, once you get over the inhibition to play that’s been programmed in as a natural part of film and art-viewing practice.
TLC has toured Line Describing a Cone (Anthony McCall, 1973) to Australia three times: in 2005, 2015, and 2025.
In 2005, Teaching and Learning Cinema (in its former guise as Sydney Moving Image Coalition) organised an Australian tour of Line Describing a Cone. Although presented in artists’ lofts during the 1970s, in recent years Anthony McCall’s films have increasingly been displayed in art museums. We chose to reconnect the piece with its “rougher” history, showing the work in small artist-run warehouses in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth. Because of the nature of this work, these are not “re-enactments” but rather presentations or enactments of the piece, following the specifications laid down by Anthony McCall.
The 2005 tour was presented in association with IASKA (International Art Space Kellerberrin Australia) and Performance Space (Sydney), and visited:
- Kellerberrin (wheat and sheep town in Western Australia)
- Perth (Breadbox Gallery)
- Melbourne (Ignifuge Warehouse)
- Sydney (Lanfranchi’s Memorial Discoteque)
- Brisbane (Jugglers Cafe and Gallery)
The 2015 tour visited:
- CEMENTA festival, Kandos (former cement manufacturing town in NSW – first outdoor screening)
- University of Wollongong (Media Arts, Visual Arts and Design)
- Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra
- Urambie Village Community Hall, Canberra
The 2025 tour:
- Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra as part of the LIGHT SOURCE exhibition curated by Martyn Jolly and Tony Oates. Screened alongside Malcolm Le Grice’s Castle 1 (1966).
- University of Wollongong (Screen Media Production)
More info:
- Line Describing a Cone: Projection Specifications.
- Listen to Stuart Harrison‘s audio recording from the Melbourne event:
- A nice review of Line Describing a Cone from 2001.
- A short review of our presentation of the piece in Perth in 2005, by Anne Marie Archer.
- Some notes about our “failed” presentation of Line Describing a Cone in the town of Kellerberrin in 2005.
- Photos from the 2005 tour, including improvised mock up versions of the cone done on super 8 film by Jo Law and Vicki Smith.
- Reflections on working with Line Describing a Cone outdoors, in the small town of Kandos in 2015.
- Line Describing a Cone on the TATE Gallery website.
- An interview between Anthony McCall and Mark Godfrey about Line Describing a Cone (and its digital remake, Line Describing a Cone 2.0) at Tate Papers, 2007.
- Su Ballard’s essay “Emergence: the generation of material spaces in Anthony McCall’s Line Describing a Cone”, published in Digital Creativity, Volume 18, Issue 1 March 2007 , pages 34 – 42.
- Lucas Ihlein’s 2004 report on McCall’s “Doubling Back” in New York.
- Letter from Anthony McCall in 2005, for us to read at the start of a screening.
