Leaving (With Four Half-Turns) consists of a solid-light film by Anthony McCall, 2011, and the live performance of a composition for guitar and amplifier by David Grubbs. This will be the first public performance in the United States of this thirty-minute work.
A white circle is projected on the wall in the darkened exhibition space. Mist emanating from a haze machine makes the rays of light projection visible, creating in space a large, volumetric conical form. The piece has four movements, each lasting seven and a half minutes. In each movement, the volumetric form begins whole, but is gradually cut away until nothing is left. David Grubbs’s composition, which shifts gradually from acoustic to amplified sound, is responsive to the graphic forms of the projection and to the repeated disappearance of the sculptural object.
Prior to the collaborative Leaving (With Four Half-Turns), the evening begins with two individual works. Anthony McCall will present Line Describing a Cone 2.0, the digital remake of his landmark 1973 16mm film event Line Describing a Cone, and David Grubbs will perform material from a recently completed, forthcoming solo album.
Anthony McCall is known for his ‘solid-light’ installations, a series that he began in 1973 with his seminal Line Describing a Cone, in which a volumetric form composed of projected light slowly evolves in three-dimensional space.
Occupying a space between sculpture, cinema and drawing, his work’s historical importance has been internationally recognized in such exhibitions as Into the Light: the Projected Image in American Art 1964-77 at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2001-2), The Expanded Screen: Actions and Installations of the Sixties and Seventies at Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna (2003-4), The Expanded Eye at Kunsthaus Zurich (2006), Beyond Cinema: the Art of Projection at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2006-7), The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality and the Projected Image at Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC (2008), The Geometry of Motion 1920s/1970s, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2008), and On Line, Museum of Modern Art (2010-11).
A solo exhibition, Five Minutes of Pure Sculpture, opened in April 2012 at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin.
McCall is in the process of completing an Arts Council England sculpture commission, part of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad, to realize his Column in North-West England: a spinning column of cloud that rises vertically from the surface of the water into the sky.
David Grubbs, associate professor in the Conservatory of Music at Brooklyn College, CUNY, has released eleven solo albums. He is known for his cross-disciplinary collaborations with writers such as Susan Howe and Rick Moody, and with visual artists such as Angela Bulloch, Anthony McCall, Cosima von Bonin, and Stephen Prina. Grubbs was a founding member of the groups Gastr del Sol, Bastro, and Squirrel Bait, and directs the Blue Chopsticks record label. He recently created the sound design for Jonah Bokaer x Anthony McCall’s ECLIPSE, the inaugural performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s BAM Fisher, and he is featured in Augusto Contento’s forthcoming documentary film Parallax Sounds.
Grubbs is currently completing the book Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, The Sixties, and Sound Recording for Duke University Press.
