The following article was first published by Square Cylinder in February, 2026

Picture a dark, windowless room, sealed off from all but three projectors. The floor of the room is appointed with freshly laid industrial carpet — not visible, but sensible through one’s feet. It absorbs sound and twinges the air with a curiously acidic industrial smell. Black walls and ceiling otherwise absorb any available light. Visitors who enter this space cannot see one another, engulfed as they are in an envelope of darkness. The shared atmosphere is additionally thickened, as though by some subtle fog, such that the air becomes a palpable medium, carved only by those three beams of white light.

Three of Anthony McCall’s earliest solid light sculptures, “Cone of Variable Volume” (1974), “Conical Solid” (1974), and “Line Describing a Cone” (1973), are positioned in this air, filling out an exhibition titled “First Light.” Three black screens mark one edge of the installation. Visitors can pass freely behind or before them. They would be similarly invisible except for the moving pictures projected on them. These pictures are deceptively simple and geometric. 

Described as light drawings or sculptures of light, the three works on view here were originally conceived for grimy lofts in Manhattan during the 1970s. They require thick, atmospheric conditions to manifest. Their effect went dormant when those same lofts were rehabbed, repainted, and made sterile in the late seventies (when it also occurred to people to stop smoking indoors). British-born McCall went dormant too, withdrawing to a career in professional design for another forty years, only to emerge from that “wilderness” (his words) in the early 2000s, when his work could be made available through digital transfer and theatrical techniques. Significantly, “First Light” begins with the work he first returned to, “Cone of Variable Volume.”

“Cone” captures the white line of a geometric circle, cast by an accompanying projector some ten feet away. The beam of light illuminates the tiny airborne particles — that thickness — thereby describing a grey cone. The result is immediately alluring. One wants to enter the cone, to pass through its light and the illusion of form that it creates, to pass one’s hand through the beam and triple or quadruple check if it has density. Of course it does not, but the encounter recalls the wonder of basic geometry, when Euclid’s perfect circle becomes Apollonian conics. 

McCall’s forms are not static. “Cone of Variable Volume” is composed of equal but deliberately non-concentric circles. Each circle shifts independently of the other to create a quaking anxiety, a shudder. The form of the circle cast in this room is not at rest, not balanced, but agitated, blurring before our eyes. It’s no wonder that when McCall returned to this work, he recognized not an abstract form but rather the depiction of organic breath.

“Conical Solid” serves as a meditation on Euclid’s definition of a circle: “A circle is a plane figure contained by one line such that all the straight lines falling upon it from one point among those lying within the figure equal one another.” In the animation, the circumference of the circle is undefined. It has no border. Its bounds are merely articulated in the flash of an intermittent radius that appears and disappears at different angles, always connecting the same center to its boundary. The image makes us think of a clock face as well, making it easy to project several temporal associations onto its façade.

The effect of “Line Describing a Cone” is especially contingent on the air quality, because the accruing arc hangs suspended between the projector and the screen, the apparition of a sculpture. It is also the specter of times past. Though cold and drafty, and covered in the soot of old industries, the abandoned buildings of that era had been embraced and co-opted by conceptual artists working without expectation of a market.

These 16mm films were created using by now primitive animation techniques whereby McCall captured the progression of simple white gouache lines over the course of countless still frame photos, which he then assembled sequentially into a short film. As McCall points out, though the labor occurred on the picture plane, his primary interest was in the behavior of light between the projector and screen.

When so much of our daily lives is defined by the flash of projected light crafted carefully for consumers, one cannot help but imagine McCall as a forefather of today’s screen-based enterprise. The mathematical underpinnings of this work, combined with that Light Artist’s calling card of immersive experience, would doubtless prompt any techno Burning Man billionaire to microdose on a lunch break. But McCall’s design calls for much more awareness, to consider the space between one’s eye and the perceived screen, as well as the politics that disappear in the apparatus of apprehension. 

Perhaps we could imagine McCall’s installation as akin to the Platonic cave, where his light beam admits to the wonder and distress of pageantry. In our age, the engineered transmission of light has been disappeared by self-anointed philosopher kings who have taken McCall’s magic a step too far, to fashion the world in their image and to swallow us all up in it.