The crew of the SS Canberra could have had little idea of how they would contribute to the history of avant-garde film when they abruptly changed their sailing schedule in January 1973. They needed to get the liner back to New York in a hurry with a full crew, so, to defray expenses, they offered a cheap passage with all the luggage you could carry, and the artist Anthony McCall clambered aboard.

Fame and fortune were not detaining him in London. His most important endeavours involved setting fire to petrol canisters on abandoned air-fields, and his girlfriend at the time, the American artist Carolee Schneemann, had created her most acclaimed work when she devised a performance for several partially nude figures to play about in a gunge of wet paint, sausage, raw fish, shredded paper and chickens. Collectors were not queueing for her either. So they took to sea.

Almost since the day he got off that boat, McCall, who is now 61, has had a studio amid the cobblestoned shabby-chic of TriBeCa in New York. He seems boyish still: his hair may have thinned to a spiky covering, like a beige lawn, but he retains the genteel vowels he acquired in the London suburbs as the son of an actuary.

Recalling the voyage, he says: “There was quite a swell. David Bowie – in his high-glitter phase – was on board. Apparently he didn’t like flying. He used to take the air in the morning in platform heels.” And McCall did the same. He strolled, he pondered, and by the time he arrived in America he had conceived the idea for Line Describing a Cone,a film that is now recognised as a landmark art-work. It will be screened in London next week when a retrospective of the artist’s work opens at the Serpentine. Also to be shown are other films in what McCall calls the Solid Light series, plus Landscape for Fire, (a film of those flaming fields), plus drawings, slide projections and much else.

McCall says: “I’d begun to ask the question, ‘What would a film look like if it was only a film – if it only existed as it is being projected?’ The result was Line Describing a Cone – it all unfolds in the same time and space as the audience. There is no reference to a past time or another place.”

It’s an austere piece of cinema that basically takes the form its title suggests: a single pencil of light carves through the air, its passage outlined by clouds of dry ice, and slowly it grows to form a hollow cone. It’s a thoughtful response to the conventional experience of cinema, which insists that we sit quietly and watch footage of past events. McCall’s film encourages us to move about, to interrupt the line and interact with the film, and to experience projected light in the here and now.

It was celebrated when he exhibited it in New York, and so were works such as Landscape for Fire; these were spectacular inventions that worked over ideas about how to mark out space and time outside the art gallery. “They were deeply politically incorrect. They were petrol fires. We measured exact amounts of petrol into shallow cans and ignited them. By experiment you could work out exactly how long they would burn for.”

Rich he may not have been, but McCall was embraced by the artists of New York. “The art community was centralised,” he recalls. “There were a couple of bars where you would find everyone on any night. Max’s Kansas City was the main one. That was just around the corner from Warhol’s Factory on Union Square. And at that time many people’s lofts were uptown.” To make some money he began to freelance as a graphic designer. This was what he had studied at college – he never actually trained as a fine artist. Soon he found that he had given up art entirely. He would not return to it for 20 years. “I never formally made a decision to stop,” he says, “but then important decisions are rarely made.”

Why didn’t he come back to London? “Habit? Inertia?” he shrugs. “I like New York.” He says that he thought about returning to art, but various factors discouraged him: the booming art market that provided such a good living for him as a designer of art books and catalogues was founded on the popularity of painting; there was little interest in film or conceptual art. Besides, a strange technical problem had arisen.

“I thought of returning to the Solid Light films,” he says, “but I had originally shown them in downtown lofts which were pretty rough and ready. Many had very recently been industrial spaces – they had crumbling walls and rough floors – and when you had a few people in them the dust would get kicked up to create a kind of medium through which you could see my films. Well, when the work began to be shown in galleries uptown, they were quite invisible because the places were spotless. It was only later, when smoke machines were invented – and much later, the Hazer [fog machine], which is better for me – that I realised I could go back.”

He finally returned to art in the late 1990s. “Personal reasons” encouraged this, he says, though he declines to elaborate, and when, in 2001, Line Describing a Cone was made a centrepiece of a groundbreaking survey of art and the projected image at the Whitney Museum in New York, McCall was emboldened to continue.

Now settled for good in New York, married and with a child at university, he has found a new, unexpected lease of life. He is still making Solid Light films – a recent example will be screened at the Serpentine – and he is also investigating new departures, such as a year-long light installation that he hopes will illuminate an old railway bridge in upstate New York.

Things have certainly turned around for him since the 1970s. “Back then, if I was looking at avant-garde film as a career decision it was a very poor decision,” he says, “It wasn’t even on the radar.” It’s a strange tale of a career aborted and retried. He just had to wait for the public to catch up with him.

Anthony McCall, Serpentine Gallery, London W2 (www.serpentinegallery.org 020-7402 6075), Nov 30-Feb 3

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