Evans is a place on Earth: With The Lights On, It's Less Dangerous:Anthony McCall @ Tate Modern.

Thursday, 26 June 2025

With The Lights On, It's Less Dangerous:Anthony McCall @ Tate Modern.

Well, that didn't take long. Anthony McCall's Solid Light exhibition at Tate Modern certainly looked good. Lights and lasers and the like tend to. But it was very hard to get excited about it. Or even spend much time there.

How long do you really need to spend looking at films of lights drawing circles or other seemingly random lines? It took a while for my eyes to adjust to being in the dark and while doing so I managed to walk backwards into another friendly visitor but that was the most exciting thing that happened while I was there.

I walked around the two rooms of the gallery a handful of times to see if things might change. Things did change. But not very much. The works in the big room, the ones I've begun and ended this blog with and the ones I've not given names (they had names but I'm not sure which ones were which - the labelling was confusing) were made between 1973 and 2018 and that's a lot of time to devote to making such single minded, one might be tempted to say niche, art.

The claim is that McCall's art blurs the boundaries between cinema, sculpture, and drawing and, I suppose, in a way they do. Just not a particularly interesting way. The lights slowly draw patterns on translucent screens but I found myself more attracted to the misty haze rays that formed the drawings than the drawings themselves.

These works have been shown in London and New York loft spaces to members of the avant-garde film world for decades. Mixing with cigarette smoke, clinked glasses, idle chatter, and possibly the odd errant hand they may have had a little more frisson than I discovered in the comparatively sterile environs of Tate Modern. Or maybe not. I wasn't in those loft spaces with those avant-garde dudes. I was in The Fox & Hounds in Tadley.

Landscape for Fire (1972)

McCall's in his late seventies now and the show gives us a chance to look back at a work he made more than half a century ago in the form of Landscape for Fire (a half hour long film) and again it's visually arresting for a brief while before going on far too long with virtually nothing of interest occurring. A group of men in white fire repellent outfits wander around a grassy field lighting fires in some kind of pre-arranged pattern.

That's it. Fire is fascinating. It keeps us warm but it can also kill us. Hindus venerate it as I discovered watching Amol Rajan attending the Kumbh Mela on the Ganges on telly last night. That's why they often wear orange. But I got a lot more understanding of the power, and meaning, of fire from that TV programme than I did looking at McCall's art.

At the start of the exhibition there's a room devoted to McCall's drawings and still photos taken of his artworks in situ. I had a look when I went in and then I went for another look before leaving. Disappointingly, they seemed less, rather than more, impressive on a second viewing. There are, surely, great artists working with light and maybe Anthony McCall is one. But either this exhibition doesn't do him justice or he's not. I went and bought an ice cream. Stracciatella.