At the beginning of 1973, Anthony McCall, sculptor of light, was 26 and had made waves with his first piece, Landscape for Fire. This was a film of a performance in which white-clad spectres light fires across a huge landscape, experimenting with McCall’s belief that a performance isn’t a performance unless it’s documented in some way. “If it takes place in the middle of nowhere,” he says, “you need to record it.”
Half a century later, I meet him at Tate Modern in London, which is about to launch a major exhibition of his immersive, 3D moving shapes. McCall is softly spoken, even tentative; there is nothing excitable in his manner. Yet there is something almost supernatural in the way he manages to conjure the exhilaration, radicalism and explosive creativity of that bygone era.
