LIGHTWORKS REVIEW MOVIE
LIGHTWORKS REVIEW SERIES
LIGHTWORKS REVIEW TV

This technological advance made this work feel entirely different now to when I first viewed it in 2001. Our eyes have also become retrospectively more sensitive to the lack of resolution in earlier formats like DVD and the humble VHS tape.

LIGHTWORKS REVIEW TV

We now realise just how orange TV makeup is. We have all become accustomed to 4K televisions. © Tacita Dean, courtesy Frith Street Gallery, London and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris. Like Kusama, all is circles: day to night the lighthouse lamp rotates gravely as the giant film loop chases its own tail.ĭisappearance at Sea, 1996, Tacita Dean. In an echo of Turner’s seascapes, Dean creates a deceptively simple, circular portrait of a lighthouse. Transported into the world of Kusama’s unique psyche, while remaining at a safely bell-roped distance, I couldn’t help but smile.įrom selfie to infinity: Yayoi Kusama’s amazing technicoloured dreamscapeĪs you approach the end of the exhibition, there is a room dedicated to Tacita Dean’s 16mm film installation, Disappearance at Sea (1996). Using a complex set of mirrors and portals, the work by turns fractures, refracts and reflects the room around it.Īs you play with the various portals it offers, the work feels so very precise in its ability to surround you with shimmering dots or echoes of our own circularly vignetted face. Stereotypically Japanese, Kusama’s craft is exacting in terms of the experiences she creates, and this work is no exception. Tate: Purchased with funds provided by the Asia - Pacific Acquisitions Committee 2008. In his “Solid Light Works,” McCall has created something that reflects the nebulosity of our time: an illuminating environment of dark night, harsh angles, and undulating line forms.The Passing Winter, 2005, Yayoi Kusama. Then one would merely be substituting one hierarchy for another within the same system, a formalism for what is traditionally called content.” Anti-content is a position to rally around in these days of all content, all the time. “The specific construct of each specific film is not the relevant point one must beware not to let the construct, the shape, take the place of the ‘story’ in narrative film. “Structural/Materialist film attempts to be non-illusionist,” Gidal wrote, trying to define it in 1975. He resumed it in the early 2000s, using digital projections instead of 16mm film.

McCall dropped his practice for twenty years (in part because his work was not commercially viable). Adversarial and Marxist, the Structural/Materialists sought to dismantle and eliminate the ideologies of narrative cinema, up to and including the romantic impulse of avant-garde film and its artists. McCall emerged in the early 1970s from the London Film-makers Co-operative, where Malcolm LeGrice, Lis Rhodes, Peter Gidal, and others theorized Structural/Materialist film into existence. The wandering shadows of other people as they make their way through the gloom lend the space a post-life feel, turning it into a Dantean purgatory. To be directly under the projector is to be caught in the tractor beam of a spaceship. Stepping into the void created by McCall’s projections can evoke a variety of narratives. Stand close enough and you can see the black opening up before you between the walls of haze, beckoning you into.

LIGHTWORKS REVIEW SERIES

The line projections on the dark gray carpeted floor slowly move, and as they do the projector beams illuminate what appears to be an interlocking series of smoke walls.

The beam has a dimensionality the spectator experiences differently than in McCall’s horizontal works (two variations on Line Describing a Cone are also on display). The thirty-foot light beams create tented structures made visible by the glycol fog pumped into the atmosphere. Here, four works by McCall are projected vertically from the ceiling to the floor. In “Solid Light Works,” McCall’s current show at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, the monumentality of the light beam is underscored by the huge space of the blacked-out gallery in a hangarlike warehouse. Standing next to the light cast by such an apparatus-or in that light-accentuates its brightness and physical presence.

LIGHTWORKS REVIEW MOVIE

In a movie theater, of course, the projector beam is overhead and usually ignored. Yet, like any good movie, it captured spectators’ attention-even if, when they shuffled in, the credits seemed to have already rolled. Line Describing a Cone, McCall’s best-known work, is a radical expression of cinema without narrative. Their shadows obscured the image of the endlessly looping circle. Spectators went toward that light, interrupting it as it traveled to the screen.

Lightworks review