You’re taught never to touch the art, but in this little one-room installation by British artist Anthony McCall, you couldn’t touch it even if you wanted to. McCall’s light sculpture looks solid: in a pitch black room filled with smoke, the lines he creates in the space look like grey marble walls. But reach out and your hand drops right though. Duh, it’s light, bozo.
But that’s all part of his trick, as you stand in the middle of the lines, you feel trapped in solid matter. His work dissects and bisects the space. It's eerily disconcerting to stand there, pushing your hand through what feels like real, actual, physical matter. It’s solidity out of nothing, or at least the illusion of it.
It's not new, McCall has been creating variations on the same light-sculpture theme for years, and maybe it's not that even that clever – but it is affecting. It leaves you trapped and yet somehow liberated, stuck inside something but free to move, like a sort of low-security art prison. Lock me up.
@eddyfrankel
