Darcy Lange
dal 28/7/2006 al 23/9/2006
Segnalato da
28/7/2006
Darcy Lange
Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth
Study of an artist at work
Study of an artist at work
The Govett-Brewster Art Gallery presents Darcy Lange: study of an artist at work,
the long overdue retrospective exhibition of New Zealand video pioneer Darcy Lange
(Urenui, 1946-2005). This major survey features the breadth of Lange’s artistic
practice including video, the cornerstone of the exhibition, sculpture, film and
photography. Curated by Mercedes Vicente, the exhibition examines a career devoted
to video and contextualises the role Lange played in the history of new media.
A graduate of Elam School of Fine Arts in Auckland and the Royal College of Art in
London, Lange established a career in the late-1960s with large hard-edge abstract
sculptures but soon turned to photography, film and video. In 1972 he started
videotaping under the general theme of ‘people at work’ in English factories, mines
and schools. Returning to New Zealand in 1974, he continued documenting workers’
lives and Maori activists’ struggles to establish land rights, from Bastion Point to
Ngatihine, north of Auckland, in his important Maori Land Project (1977-1981),
amassing hours of video taping.
Thematically, ‘people at work’ situates Lange’s work within a lineage of social
documentary film and photography and a shared ideological history with such 1930s
American FSA (Farm Security Administration) photographers as Dorothea Lange and
Lewis Hine, and filmmaker Frederick Wiseman, a contemporary of Lange.
With these seminal works, he became one of the first artists to use the ‘long take’,
the recording of people’s actions in real time as they performed daily working
tasks. His restless experimentation with the structural possibilities of moving and
still images led to a parallel use of photography, film and video, simultaneously
shot.
The capacity for early portable video to provide live and taped feedback - unlike
film or photography - meant it could serve as a medium for criticism and analysis
and a catalyst for social change. Lange stressed the relationship with the subjects
of his recordings by playing back the recorded material to them. In his 1976-1977
work studies in Birmingham and Oxfordshire schools in England, Lange recorded
teachers in the classrooms, then the teacher’s and the student’s reactions to the
tapes.
The absence of electronic editing equipment in the early stages of video, which
prevented shaping a tape into a finished product, further encouraged the development
of a ‘process’ video aesthetic. This emphasis on process was shared by other
contemporary artistic practices of the 1970s like conceptual, performance and land
art.
Without the intervention of montage or use of dramatic sequences of multiple takes
and camera angles, Lange’s videos rely exclusively on the process of slow
observation provided by the long takes. The viewer sees the action unfold on the
screen at the same speed as it occurred.
Lange never saw these tapes as finished works but as ‘researches’ and ‘an
educational process’. The reactions of his subjects to the tapes became as much a
part of the body of work, guiding him in its development. By exposing the process,
Lange’s videos become in themselves studies of videotaping as a work activity.
A comprehensive catalogue will be published later this year documenting the exhibition.
Darcy Lange: study of an artist at work is showing at the Govett-Brewster Art
Gallery in New Plymouth, New Zealand until 24 September 2006.
Govett-Brewster Art Gallery
Contemporary Art Museum
Private Bag 2025 - New Plymouth