The Continuous Present

by Lisa Le Feuvre:

From: Anthony McCall: Film Installations (edited by Helen Legg, Mead Gallery,
Warwick, 2004) ISBN 0902683667; pp33-41

"The time of the composition is the time of the composition. It has been at times a
present thing it has been at times a past thing it has been at times a future thing it has
been at times an endeavour at parts or all of these things. In my beginning it was a
continuous present a beginning again and again and again and again it was a series it
was a list it was a similarity and everything different it was a distribution and an
equilibration."1
Gertrude Stein

Duration has two sides to it: something quantifiable in terms of seconds, minutes and
hours, and something qualitative, where the lived experience of time is paramount. Time
can be described as operating in two quite different yet dependent ways: natural
(experienced) and mechanistic (measured). An hour of measured time is constant no
matter how that time is spent, but an hour of natural time differs from experience to
experience: in good company an hour speeds by, whereas at a gathering where you
know no-one an hour can last an age. At the moment of becoming more self-conscious
of the passing of time its very existence becomes more apparent. Only on realising the
measured time is it possible to gain a relational sense of experienced time. In Anthony
McCalls work duration is one of the mediums that we, as viewers, are invited to engage
with. The spectator inhabits duration time takes on a spatial quality operating through a
memory of what has gone before and what can be predicted for the future. Each work is
realised through our intersection with it.

Gertrude Stein speaks of the continuous present: a notion concerned with experience
and knowledge, as well as knowledge of experience and experience of knowledge. She
suggests that the world and our knowledge of it can only possibly exist in the
present. The continuous present is a dimension where each frame of memory is layered
on to the present, making every experience unique and extended into space and time.
This idea was partly suggested to her by the then relatively young medium of film. As
she put it, in a cinema picture no two pictures are alike each one is just that much
different from the one beforeeach time that I said the somebody whose portrait I was
writing was something that something was just that much different from what I had just
said that somebody was and little by little in this way a whole portrait came into being.2
Stein's explorations in her writing of ways to represent this sense of a continuous
present are extended in the work of John Cage who opened up the possibility that music
could be more broadly defined as that experienced (listened to) by each of us in the here
and now. Cage was a great admirer of Steins project to liberate language from syntax
and through his own extension of what might be considered musical structure or

1
Gertrude Stein, Composition as Explanation, Hogarth Press, 1926, pp.
2
Gertrude Stein, Portraits and Repetition , Hogarth Press, 1926, reprinted in Gertrude Stein:
Look At Me Now and Here I Am (Writings and Lectures 1911-45), Penguin Modern Classics,
1971. ed. Patricia Meyerowitz.
organisation he created work that was far from being a simple communication from artist
to audience. Increasingly, he became interested in creating compositions that had no
beginning, middle and end; instead he would initiate fields of sonic activity within which
the listener would be called on to play an active role. In doing so, he strove to blur the
definition of art into quotidian experience where, for example, the incidental sounds of
traffic could be experienced as musical composition, with the context and listener active
definers of it.

In considering the continuous present both Stein and Cage discussed repetition as
something that was far from repetitious. In 1963 Cage organised the first performance of
Eric Saties Vexations at the New York Pocket Theatre3. Written in 1893, this piece
consists of a single sheet of music which the pianist (or by necessity series of pianists)
repeats 840 times, lasting around 18 hours and 40 minutes. Representing the same
thing twice will never create the exact same experience: each repetition makes the next
experience new. Cage reflected: we can say that repetition doesnt exist, that two
leaves of the same plant are not repetitions of each other but are unique. Or two bricks
on the same building on the street are different . . . [Vexations] does have repetition; but
as the performance continued, we heard that it does not that each time it was played, it
was different.4 Cage suggested that Andy Warhols work, in a similar way, encourages
the viewer to forget the previous experience each time a repetition occurs. Warhols
1964 film Empire5, for example (as well as Douglas Gordons re-presentation of it in
Bootleg Empire6), repeats a single view but as one allows oneself to become immersed
in the film each frame seems constantly experienced for the first time. If memory and
repetition are constantly renewed with each insistence7 time and duration become both
reflexive and endlessly current. This interest in repetitive difference is key to the twofold
(measured and experienced) nature of temporality in Anthony McCalls work. Both Stein
and Cage are key reference points for McCall, as well as for the experience of his work
they are in and of his practice.

In 1975 McCall exhibited a text-based work entitled Two Laws of Presentation at Herbert
Distells Museum of Drawers, a twenty drawer chest housing 500 miniature works at the
Kunsthaus Zurich. Consisting of a series of index cards, this work graphically
represented the differential between short and extended events, ranging from five
seconds to twelve years. The two laws of presentation mentioned in the title were, firstly,
the form of attention is a function of the form of attending and, secondly, the form of
attending is a function of duration. Recalling Steins prose, these laws and diagrams
make an explicit reference to McCalls interest in duration. In the same year, his work
Long Film for Ambient Light explored this interest on a larger scale. In its first realisation
in 1975, the location was the Idea Warehouse, 8 an exhibition space where artists were

3
Andy Warhol was present at this performance. His experience of it, and his later discussion with
Cage about Saties use of repetition, probably influenced the way he edited his 5 hour 21 minute
film Sleep, which he was working on at the time (see The Films of Andy Warhol: Part II, Callie
Angell. Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994)
4
Conversing with Cage ed. Richard Kostelenetz, Routledge 2003 p. 237
5
Andy Warhol Empire 1964. 16mm film, black and white, silent, 8hours, 6 minutes
6
Douglas Gordon Bootleg Empire 1988, video
7
See Gertrude Stein, Portraits and Repetition, in Gertrude Stein: Look at Me Now and Here I
Am: Writings and Lectures 19111945, ed Pamela Meyerowitz, Penguin 1971
8
Long Film for Ambient Light was inspired by the space of the Idea Warehouse, however it is not
dependent on it, and has been exhibited elsewhere: for example in 1975 at Galerie St Petri in
invited to make projects spanning two days. McCalls 24-hour film ran from twelve noon
June 18th through to twelve noon June 19th. The space was the top floor of a loft
building with a gently sloping roof, the lower side facing to the street, which could be
seen through nine large south facing windows. On initially seeing the space McCall
remarked in his notebook that the wall of windows reminded him immediately of a strip of
film on its side; and the light entering the space through the windows, with the rising
ceiling gradient spreading the light through the room, made it reminiscent of the
spreading beam emitted from a film projector.

The particular architectural properties of the Idea Warehouse drew McCall to reference
the apparatus of film in Long Film for Ambient Light. He covered the windows below
which a different kind of street-time occurred from the temporal nature of the room itself
with white paper. During daylight hours they became light sources punctuating the
architectural structure, and mimicking the physicality of a series of projector gates (the
aperture through which the projector lamp illuminates each film frame as it passes
through the projector). In the empty space a single bare light bulb, hung in the exact
centre of the room at eye level, existed as the only internal artificial illumination. At night,
light emitted from the bulb bounced off the papered windows turning them into reflective
screens, inverting the analogous relationship of the space to the conditions of film
presentation. Lasting twenty four hours, it would be very unusual (although not
impossible) for a visitor to experience Long Film for Ambient Light in its entirety, making
each individuals subjectivity and subjective experience define the length and rhythm of
each interaction. At dusk, as day became night, and at dawn, as night became day, the
shift between the two states reversed in an extended (cinematic) dissolve, with the
windows evolving from white rectangular light sources to white rectangular screens, and
back again. Along with the altered architectural space, this work consists of two
additional elements: a time line of fifty days with the date of the presentation of this work
at the centre, and a two page text, entitled Notes In Duration, displayed on the wall.
This was far from some museum-like interpretation material; these three elements
together were the constituent parts of the film. Referring to earlier performative works
and the nature of film, the notes also expand on McCalls statements on duration,
evoking the work of both Stein and Cage. Everything that occurs including the
(electrochemical) process of thinking occurs in time . . . Our insistence upon static,
absolute lumps of experience as possessed to continuous, overlapping multiple
durations, shows a warped epistemology, albeit a convenient one . . . A static thing in
terms of impulses to the brain, is a repetitive event. Whether the locus for consideration
is static or moving, we deal with time-spans of attention, the engagement of cognition
and memory within the context of art behaviour.9 The act of reading breaks the visitors
movement around the space resulting in a physical effect on the visitors engagement
with the work, and perhaps more powerfully the statement questions the conceptual
experience of the work. By casting into doubt the possibility of stasis, the emptiness of
the room is questioned: it is as uneventful as John Cages 4 3310 is silent. The ambient
light and sound become central to the work highlighting how, to use John Cages words,

Lund, Sweden (a small storefront gallery) and the following year at Neue Galerie, in Aachen (a
large Baroque hall within a museum).
9
Anthony McCall Notes on Duration 1975, reprinted in Two Statements, in P. Adams Sitney,
ed., The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism (New York: New York University
Press, 1978), p. 252.
10
John Cage 4 33 1952: Cages most referenced work of three movements where the musicians
are silent the work existing entirely of ambient unplanned sounds.
the world changes according to the place we place our attention. This process is
addictive and energetic.11

Like Yves Kleins 1958 exhibition Le Vide at the Iris Clert Gallery in Paris, Robert Barrys
announcement of 1968 During the exhibition the gallery will be closed, or Martin
Creeds Work No.227: The lights going on and off, 2000, there is nothing to see other
then the conditions of exhibition but in each case these are far from mute: they are
contingent on time. Le Vide, for example, was very different at its highly orchestrated
opening than the following day; similarly Long Film for Ambient Light develops over time.
Light intensity changes, visitor numbers ebb and flow, street sounds shift with measured
time, expectations alter depending on each viewer the work is insistent rather than
repetitious or empty. Subtle changes are not visible when standing in the room, but on
stepping out and then returning the shifts are made instantly apparent. By comparing
these just perceptible changes it becomes possible to predict what will happen in the
future. Moreover, as the work has become situated within history, each presentation of
Long Film for Ambient Light will slightly shift it, and as documentation of each realisation
is distributed, expectations of future manifestations of the work are layered upon past
representations of experience. This engagement of memory on both micro and macro
scales is key to the operations of film (even when non-narrative), as it requires an
engagement to both remember what has gone before and to predict what is likely to
happen in the future. In experiencing McCalls films from the earliest to his most recent
works the moment that one makes sense of one's perceptions is when past and
predictive perceptions correlate. In Four Projected Movements, 1975, for example, each
successive movement is a repetition of the previous one, produced by the repeated re-
threading of the same spool of film. Each of the four fifteen-minute sequences consists
of a triangular blade of light rotating slowly through ninety degrees. Yet each movement,
relative to the wall, the floor, and ones body, is unique; the axis of rotation, the starting
and finishing position, and the direction of each movement, change each time. The first
rotation can be experienced as the simple sweep of a three-dimensional plane of light.
But from the second reel onwards, it becomes a question of why it has changed from
before, and then, how it will change the next time, and the time after that. The solving of
this paradox requires an engagement with not only the projected beam but with each of
the elements of the film the interplay between the film-reel, the film projector, the
architectural space, the projected plane of light, and the viewers location over time.

As these works are defined as film, the visitor is encouraged to bring well-versed
behaviours associated with the medium to the work. However, in requiring the use of a
projector and projectionist in the space, the context of films conditions are shifted from
the black box (the cinema) to the white cube (the gallery). The structure and materiality
of all McCalls films push at the absolute limits of the definition of both film and cinema;
unpacking relationships of screen, audience and projection apparatus. The audience
traditionally will always be placed between the screen and the projector and the
technical requirement of establishing a focal length between the two creates a space
between these two fundamental logistical elements. This adds the dimension of space to
light and time - properties that create the experience of film. Deke Dunisberre writes of
the earlier work Line Describing A Cone, the primacy of the screen is abandoned in
favour of the primacy of the projection event12 however here the projection event is a

11
John Cage in conversation with Daniel Charles, For The Birds, Marion Boyars 1981 p19
12
Deke Dunisberre, On Expanding Cinema Studio International Nov/Dec 1975, quoted in Shoot
Shoot Shoot exhibition newspaper, 2001
projection of perception rather than light from a projector. In Long Film for Ambient
Light, as well as Long Film for Four Projectors and Four Projected Movements, McCall
addresses the viewer as mobile, where the interaction between spectators is as intrinsic
to the event as the film component itself. This is art as non-event that takes on a
different perceptual relationship to spectacular culture.

Line Describing a Cone is shown in a darkened room in which the air has been slightly
thickened with an artificial mist, which reveals the projected light as a tangible presence.
Starting with a single white dot, a curved line gradually appears to be drawn onto the
wall by the projector. By the end, the curved line has grown into a complete circle. As the
line develops on the gallery wall, a large, palpable, three-dimensional conical plane of
light is produced in the space between the projector and projection surface - Malcolm Le
Grice described the line as running out from the projector like a "searchlight"13. Attention
is drawn to the light beam rather than the screen, as over the course of thirty minutes
the line develops into a giant conical surface, taking on a sculptural form that visitors
walk around or interrupt in order to enter. Line Describing a Cone was the first in a series
of works where McCall explored the solid properties of light. 14 As McCall says of this film,
it exists in real, three-dimensional space. The film exists only in the present: the
moment of projection. It refers to nothing beyond this real time (by contrast, most films
allude to a past time).15 As discussed earlier, this engagement with the space of
projection draws attention both to the conditions of exhibition and to the spatial nature of
cinema in its traditional and experimental forms. On experiencing the work the viewer is
confronted with something that appears to have solid properties, occupying a room in a
way that could be read as sculpture. This purely sculptural nature however is itself
denied in the temporal nature of the work, as McCall has commented, the films [in this
series] are also quite unlike sculpture. They have no weight, they are not subject to
gravity, and of course very important they happen in the dark. They work explicitly
with duration as a primary plastic element. And their meaning does depend ultimately on
them being looked at as film16. However, as with all of McCalls work, this is no simple
binary opposition of sculpture/not-sculpture: it is more of a dialectical relationship where
the three dimensionality of the light is produced by the addition of time and vice versa.
One becomes aware of the, tautologically, solid light as the cone develops a tactile form
occupying space. To experience the work is to interact both with a solid occupying the
space, and with a beam of light cutting through the negative space around it.

Although Line Describing a Cone effectively has a start and end point, it takes on the
cyclical nature of later works like Long Film for Ambient Light when it is installed as a
continuous gallery installation. Visitors wander in and out at will. It is the spectator rather
than the film who determines the amount of time the film will last some will step in and
out of the gallery space, others will gaze from start to finish to start again. As with
McCalls later non-narrative films, each viewer decides upon the best place to see the

13
Malcolm Le Grice Studio International 1974.
14
Developing this film, McCall made three additional cone films in 1974. McCall has continued
to explore motion, and transformation, in his most recent film works. Doubling Back (2003), for
example, by superimposing two identical slowly moving curving planes, produces a single,
complex mutating object.
15
Anthony McCall, 1973. From his statement to the Jury of the Fifth International Experimental
Film Competition, Knokke-Heist. Reprinted in The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and
Criticism
16
Anthony McCall in conversation with Lisa Le Feuvre 2001
work there being a number of best places depending on the space, as well as upon the
other people in the room, a factor that encourages repeated viewing. The layering of
experienced time is a crucial element of Anthony McCalls work, but there is also the
added consideration of external time being fed back into the works themselves.
Inevitably movements in cultural, economic, political and social contexts effect present,
future and past readings of specific artworks. This shift will involve the reception of
artistic production: for example, since the time when McCall first wrestled with his
position as an artist, or a filmmaker, or an artist using film, the cultural context has
become far more open to the blurring of boundaries. Film, and more commonly video,
are typical mediums to find in a gallery setting. Museum time is a condition in and of
itself one quite different from the ways that we experience time outside of the gallery.
Indeed, as Brian ODocherty describes in Inside the White Cube, the gallery is designed
to eliminate time, space and identity from interactions with the artwork, with this model
repeated again and again to create an endless series of spaces designated for art. 17
McCall's films are shown in the gallery (or in spaces that have the characteristics of a
gallery), with no formal seating, requiring the audience to decide their own mode of
interaction. In this way, time external to the ontological status of an artwork will develop
and extend readings and positionings.

In addition to the influence of quantitative measured time and qualitative developments

in the conditions of exhibition, there is a third external temporal factor: dialogue with the
practice of other artists. In citing a specific artwork as a direct response to another,
layers of influence move both retrospectively and into the future. In considering Line
Describing a Cone, for example, it is possible to trace a number of influences from the
work that double back to extend readings of McCalls original film. Gordon Matta-Clark
was very struck by Line Describing A Cone18 when he saw it at Artists Space19 in 1974,
anda year later he extended the spatial exploration of the film with his architectural
intervention Conical Intersect 20, which in turn Pierre Huyghe addressed in his 1996 work
Light Conical Intersect. Conical Intersect was sited in Les Halles, an ancien quartier in
the heart Paris that had undergone systematic and controversial renovation during the
1960s. By 1975 the nineteenth-century market had been ripped away and a large hole
left in its place, which would later become the Centre Georges Pompidou. Conical
Intersect is comprised of a number of elements: an alteration to architecture, manifest as
a performance over time, a film of that process, and documentation of both the process
and the resulting empty cone. At 27-29 Rue Beaubourg, one of the last buildings to be
demolished in the programme, Matta-Clark cut a cone-shaped volume through the walls
and floor at a 45-degree angle, running through the walls and floors of both buildings.
Matta-Clarks cone framed a view in which the Centre Georges Pompidou and the Eiffel
Tower two potent symbols of progress were aligned. To the passers-by however, the
cone formed a different spectacle; Matta-Clark described it as a sort of street theatre
and glowingly recalled the comment of a 70-year-old concierge who said Oh I see the
purpose for that hole it is an experiment in bringing light and air into spaces that never

17
Brian O'Docherty, Inside the White Cube, Lapis Press,1986, p????
18
See Gordon Matta-Clark (Corinne Diserens / Thomas Crow / Judith Russi Kirschner / Christian
Kravagna), Phaidon, 2003
19
Situated on Greene Street, New York Artists Space was founded in 1972 as a non-profit
institution supporting unaffiliated contemporary artists working in the visual arts, including the
media of video, performance, architecture and design.
20
Conical Intersect, 1975. Architectural intervention, documentary photographs, photoworks and
16mm film: colour, silent, 18 minutes 40 seconds.
had enough of either. The comment neatly encapsulates Conical Intersects anti-
monumentality; bringing light and air into a space is the classic strategy of modernism,
from Le Corbusiers re-planning of Paris to the glass and steel structures of buildings
that at the time symbolised economic success. It was an inversion of Line Describing a
Cone: light was cut into architecture to reveal a negative space defined by the sold walls
around it, rather than the light itself becoming the solid. Matta-Clark took the appearance
of solidity and created light and space in his architectural intervention.

Matta-Clark was influenced in this work by McCall, and in turn Conical Intersect fed
Pierre Huyghes reworking of Matta-Clarks intervention, Light Conical Intersect. At the
site of Conical Intersect, but twenty-one years later, Huyghe repositioned a single frame
of the film element of Conical Intersect, at the point where light shines through the cone-
shaped cut into the building. The information (the film) produces the event, or in other
words, the time of commentary reactivates the event. The projection of a past event
reactivates its conditions (without leaving a mark). Once again, the architecture is shot
through with light; a phantom hole appears, causing two temporal elements to coexist.
The cut-out in space is replaced by a cut-out in time21. These cutouts in time feedback
to the reference point for Matta-Clark and Huyghe: McCalls Line Describing a Cone.
This notion of a cutout in time is one that is key to McCalls practice and to its reception.
His works begin and begin again each time they are represented and referred to: they sit
with in the continuous present that is the very process of culture.

21
Pierre Huyghe, Kunstverien Munchen, 2000, p182.