Landscape for Fire

- Film & Video (Film & Video)

7 min 05

Anthony McCall

location: London, United Kingdom
year born: 1946
gender: male
nationality: British

Landscape for fire is a major work by Anthony McCall. The film recounts a performance where characters in white, light up fires in a very orchestrated choreography of lights in a vast flat landscape. The performance is carefully planned – the fires are lit and geometrically aligned in a precise temporal progression. The appearance of the characters is preceded by a a horn, playing on our perception of a distant sound, strange and scary, suggesting a limit or a hazard. The crackling of matches, the ignition of gasoline, and the brisk breeze of the wind helps us to feel part of this strange celebration as we face the elements air, earth, and fire. A radical breath streams through the work. The editing of the film multiplies perspective: creation, presence, disappearance inhabit this powerful and original work.


Since the 70s, the British artist Anthony McCall has continued to push the boundaries of art. Exploring the boundaries between cinema and sculpture, he uses light and time as his signature materials. His work spans across drawing, installation, and performance, one of his preferred mediums. McCall is a key figure of British avant-garde film from the 70s. His first films retrace his outdoor performances. Experimental film in 16mm is one of his main mediums that he uses in confrontation with sculpture and performance. McCall is an indispensable reference to a younger generation of artists working in video and installation in England and abroad. Anthony McCall was born in Great Britain in 1946. He lives and works in New York.


Colors:



Other related works, blended automatically

Fire Cycles III (Subcycle 10)
© » KADIST

Anthony McCall

1974

This score is a graphic record of the detailed choreography of one of Anthony McCall’s Landscape for Fire performances...

Plug the well ( July / August 2003)
© » KADIST

Keith Tyson

The work of Keith Tyson is concerned with an interest in generative systems, and embraces the complexity and interconnectedness of existence...

Epiphany…learnt through hardship
© » KADIST

Ryan Gander

2012

Epiphany…learnt through hardship is composed of a bronze sculpture depicting the model of the little dancer of Degas, in the pose of a female nude photographed by Edward Weston (Nude, 1936) accompanied by a blue cube...

A vehicle with no Lights
© » KADIST

Ryan Gander

2004

A vehicle without light is a group of more personal photographs...

Baobab
© » KADIST

Tacita Dean

2001

The photographic quality of the film Baobab is not only the result of a highly sophisticated use of black and white and light, but also of the way in which each tree is characterized as an individual, creating in the end a series of portraits...

let this be us
© » KADIST

Richard T. Walker

2012

let this be us is a single-channel video by Richard T...

Masks (Merkel F6.1)
© » KADIST

Simon Fujiwara

2016

Masks is a series of abstract paintings by Simon Fujiwara that together form a giant, fragmented portrait of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s face...

Untitled (Perfect Lovers + 1)
© » KADIST

Cerith Wyn Evans

2008

Untitled (Perfect Lovers + 1) by Cerith Wyn Evans takes as its starting point Felix Gonzales-Torres’s seminal work Untitled (Perfect Lovers) , in which two clocks were synchronized and left to run without interference, the implication being that one would stop before the other...

Work No. 299
© » KADIST

Martin Creed

2003

This photograph of Martin Creed himself was used as the invitation card for a fundraising auction of works on paper at Christie’s South Kensington in support of Camden Arts Centre’s first year in a refurbished building in 2005...

Nachbau
© » KADIST

Simon Starling

2007

Invited in 2007 to the Museum Folkwang in Essen (Germany), Simon Starling questioned its history: known for its collections and particularly for its early engagement in favor of modern art (including the acquisition and exhibition of works by Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Matisse), then destroyed during the Second World War, the museum was pillaged for its masterpieces of ‘degenerate art’ by the nazis...

Martin Creed | The Dick Institute
© » TATE EXHIBITIONS

Martin Creed

Martin Creed | The Dick Institute Experience the work of one of this country’s most ingenious, audacious and surprising artists at the Dick Institute ARTIST ROOMS Martin Creed presents highlights from the British artist’s thirty-year career...

The Fifth Quarter
© » KADIST

Toby Ziegler

2005

The Fifth Quarter might have taken its mysterious inspiration from the eponymous Stephen King story collated into the Nightmares & Dreamscapes collection...

Espadrilles
© » KADIST

Rosalind Nashashibi

2019

Rosalind Nashashibi’s paintings incorporate motifs drawn from her day-to-day environment, often reworked with multiple variations...

11
© » KADIST

Chris Wiley

2012

Architectural details become abstracted renderings in Chris Wiley’s inkjet prints 11 and 20 (both 2012)...

Study for my Heroes in the Street (Stan)
© » KADIST

Ian Wallace

1986

Wallace says of his Heroes in the Street series, “The street is the site, metaphorically as well as in actuality, of all the forces of society and economics imploded upon the individual, who, moving within the dense forest of symbols of the modern city, can achieve the status of the heroic.” The hero in Study for my Heroes in the Street (Stan) is the photoconceptual artist Stan Douglas, who is depicted here (and also included in the Kadist Collection) as an archetypal figure restlessly drifting the streets of the modern world...