Out of the shadows

Anthony McCall made his name with 'light sculptures' that people could enter. But a show in Sweden led to 20 years in the wilderness

- Zoe Williams

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. "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.

McCall studied graphic design and photography at Ravensbourne College, on the outskirts of London, but became "steeped in other ways of using cinema. It was called experimental film, it was called expanded cinema, structural film, new American cinema." This all fed into Line Describing a Cone, his first "solid light" work, where the rays projected on to a screen seem to create a tangible object in the darkness.

At that time, he was in love with the performance artist Carolee Schneemann: "She had her own form of happenings called kinetic theatre, already up and running." They'd met in London, but she wanted to return to the US, so they moved to New York together. There were so many things McCall admired about the American art scene - the performance artists, loosely collected under the umbrella fluxus; the experimental film-making of Andy Warhol; Yoko Ono's drop of water, which you were invited to watch until it evaporated. "There was an intensity about the world in New York at that time which was unmistakable." It must have seemed like a golden time.