For some years now a real rediscovery of the work of Anthony McCall has been underway, and there are numerous retrospectives which have been dedicated to him which have attempted to underline the contemporary validity of his work, even though it dates back to the 1970s. This was work which McCall began when working with the British structuralists, then developed in the United States where he started working on what he called solid light films, films made using light alone, enigmatic due to their sculpture-like scale. The solid light films are to be lived as sensory experiences which overturn the classical relationship that a spectator has when faced with the filmic object. The spectator is obliged to move within the space if s/he wishes to grasp these film-installations in their entirety.
Line describing a cone is still certainly one of his most famous films, undoubtedly because it was the first of a series but also because still today it is striking in its simplicity and elegance, and in its radicality. Beginning with the projection of a white luminous point, a line then appears, which slowly becomes a circle to then describe a conical volume in the projection space itself. Line describing a cone is a film which can only exist in the present, in that in the moment in which it is projected, it is nothing more than a pure perceptive and sensory phenomenon, lacking any materiality.