Anthony McCall: The Solid Light Films and Related Works

Anthony McCall's Line Describing a Cone has long been a classic of American avant-garde cinema, but because it was most often screened in dusty Soho lofts in the past, the piece was little known to a wider audience. The inclusion of Line Describing a Cone,1973 in the Whitney Museum of American Art exhibition "Into the Light: the Projected Image in American Art, 1964-1977" has opened McCall's work to a great deal of interest both in America and abroad. While curators are only now beginning to mine the history of the projected image in art, McCall continues to be one of the most important of the Post-Minimalist artists to use projected film.

This book includes a major essay by Branden Joseph, an interview with the artist by Jonathan Walley, and the first photo-documentation ever made of his pieces as well as diagrams of related works. Additional biographical and bibliographic materials are included in the book to provide a baseline for further scholarly research in the area, as well as 100 never-before-seen reproductions of historical photographs, sketches, and diagrams from the artist's archive. New photography of the never-before-photographed Long Film For Four Projectors, 1974 was commissioned for this book. Anthony McCall: The Solid Light Films and Related Works is a co-publication with the New Art Trust in San Francisco, California.

Christopher Eamon is curator of the Pamela and Richard Kramlich Collection of Media Art and director of New Art Trust. His curatorial credits include "Christian Marclay and Julie Becker" (Whitney Museum of American Art, 2001) and "Video Acts: Single-Channel Works from the Collections of Pamela and Richard Kramlich and New Art Trust" (PS1 Contemporary Art Center, 2002/3 and ICA London, 2003).

Branden Joseph is assistant professor in the department of art history at the University of California, Irvine. He is author of Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant-Garde (MIT Press, 2003) and an editor of the journal Grey Room.

Jonathan Walley is a graduate student in film studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.