Attending to Long Film for Ambient Light, Teaching and Learning Cinema, March 2007.
Re-creation of an expanded cinema situation from 1975.
On 16-17 March 2007, artists Lucas Ihlein and Louise Curham (Teaching and Learning Cinema) re-created the conditions for an experience of Anthony McCall's Long Film for Ambient Light (1975) at the Performance Space, Sydney.
McCall's Long Film came at the end of a series of works in which McCall was stripping back cinema to its absolute minimum - light, time, and human experience/perception.
This "film" consists of an empty room with a bare lightbulb, and windows covered with a translucent material, for a duration of 24 hours. It is not necessary for visitors to stay for the entire duration - they can come and go as they please.
However, it's clear that the decisions you make as "audience" will determine the kind of experience you have. We were excited about this work as we read various historical documents, and McCall's artist statements - but we wanted to see what it was like for ourselves. Specifically, we wanted our experience of the work to contribute to an updated understanding of "what the piece was really like".
Much analysis has been made of the work as a gesture within the history of avant-garde art (specifically minimalism and a critique of the apparatus of cinema) but little has been reported on the experiences of particular visitors who came along to McCall's original screenings in the 1970s.
We kept diaries of the planning for the event, as well as copious notes during and after the Long Film. With the assistance of audience-experience specialist Lizzie Muller, we conducted audio interviews with invited visitors to gauge their expectations, feelings, sensations and thoughts during their time spent with the piece.
More info on Long Film for Ambient Light:
Official Teaching and Learning Cinema website.View the timelapse video, read reports from Chris Fleming and Mike Leggett, or visit the blog for notes Louise and Lucas made in preparation for the Long Film.
This re-creation of Long Film for Ambient Light was not an official "screening" authorised by Anthony McCall, although we did communicate with him extensively, before, during and after. McCall is interested in our historical appraisal from a distance of 32 years (and a geographical span of New York to Sydney).
We compiled a box of documentary material to contribute to McCall's archives. In 2009 I visited McCall in his studio in New York and presented him with the archive box:
An essay by Lucas Ihlein, entitled "Attending to Anthony McCall's Long Film for Ambient Light", was published in Perform Repeat Record: Live Art in History, edited by Adrian Heathfield and Amelia Jones. Find out more here, or download the pdf of the article here.
The Teaching and Learning Cinema's re-enactment of Long Film for Ambient Light is mentioned briefly in Maeve Connolly's book The Place of Artists' Cinema: Space, Site and Screen, Intellect, 2009, p223.
Lucas Ihlein, "Repeated the Line", story in Barbara Campbell's 1001 Nights Cast, March 2007.
For more on McCall, see Su Ballard, "Emergence: the generation of material spaces in Anthony Mc-Call's Line Describing a Cone", in Digital Creativity, Vol 18, Issue 1, 2007.