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Darcy Lange: Portrait of an Artist as a Worker
Currently at the Adam Art Gallery, MARK AMERY urges all to see Darcy Lange’s vital retrospective Study of an Artist at Work.
“ARE THERE ways for the camera to record without stripping people of their spirit, without sloganising, without replacing a deep sense of community by a shallow voyeurism?” asked New Zealand artist Darcy Lange back in 1985.
We have an ever-increasing number of channels but, if you ever needed to confirm suspicion that television isn’t getting any truer or any closer to its subjects get yourself to the Adam Art Gallery. The Lange retrospective Study of an Artist at Work from Govett-Brewster Art Gallery features video and film and other media dating primarily from the 1970s and early 80s. Just as Lange’s statement above still carries great contemporary charge, I’ll be surprised if I see a more vital exhibition this year than this.
Lange was an international pioneer in film and video art. With these media he recognised he could both engage meaningfully with life politically and socially and actualise most effectively his sculptural and conceptual ideas. He brought new dimensions to a realist tradition begun by French 19th century painter Courbet and followed by great documentary photographers of his century like Walker Evans. In the heady late 60s/ early 70s when artists’ were starting to explore the conceptual in a variety of media he believed that artists still had a “responsibility to keep questioning the nature and power of realism”.
Lange’s name has been close to invisible in our art history. This may have a little to do with the fact that he had rarely exhibited since the 1980s and passed away in 2005. Yet it also has to do with the suspicion with which both video and the documentary have been treated until relatively recently. An outsider for most of his lifetime, things have now come full circle – Lange’s work deserves to be centrestage for the current crop of socially engaged and process driven contemporary artists.
In the spirit that has seen the Govett-Brewster Gallery champion another pioneer Len Lye, curator Mercedes Vicente has gone to considerable lengths to ensure this, restoring and transferring to digital a huge amount of material.
Like his contemporary Phil Dadson Lange worked across media. His film and video incorporate elements of photography, sculpture, performance and sound art, and these have also been seperate components of many projects. After Elam in Auckland Lange studied at London’s Royal College of Art in the late 1960s and began the shift from sculpture into film. Some of Lange’s late student work placed life-size figures before filmscapes or within constructed three dimensional spaces. These explorations of space were themselves extensions on earlier sculptural work, represented in this exhibition by a large piece of steel geometric abstraction.
The way this sculpture creates a theatrical space by thrusting up and out to allow for the balance of forms within is not so different to the way Lange later treated the boxed field of vision created by the film frame. There’s an artist’s eye as well as concept behind his long observance at a distance of the ordered planes of an allotment and the slow activity of elderly men within it, or the camera mounted on a Scottish hillside to observe a flock of sheep powerfully cascading into view.
Lange’s Work Studies completed between 1972 and 1975 in England, Spain and New Zealand are presented together on eleven individual monitors. While this bulk presentation doesn’t encourage the meditation and engagement with real time rhythm Lange was possibly after, you do get to appreciate the rigour, creativity and richness of his enquiry.
Lange’s major subject was the worker. Here we see how he experimented with his own working process to find ways to best capture the creative personality of the worker and give marginalised activity gravitas. Be they a Ruatoria shearing gang or London furniture makers he strove to capture the rhythm and movement of labour as a performance. These long inquisitive looks at activity create a music in real time with their repetitive phrasing and processes analogous to the work of minimalist composers like Steve Reich.
Lange is ever trying to break down social hierarchies, be it the viewer’s view of his subjects or the power the person behind the camera has over its subject. Lange himself is often present, the hand behind the camera not an invisible authority. In an impressive series exploring the creativity of teaching in British schools from 1976 and 1977, Lange not only films in the classroom he also films teachers and pupils reactions to the recordings. With the artist popping in and out of frame and the teacher rehearsing her response the work becomes as much about the construction of a reaction.
As Lange’s works take time to watch, he also saw his practice as more about an ongoing process of documentation than creating art gallery product. The exhibition title ‘Study of An Artist At Work’ is smart in this respect, and its reflective of the research basis of a lot of current contemporary practise. The exhibition is constructed in parts less as something to walk around as a resource to explore.
This is particularly true of the later work. With 10 hours of footage around Maori land rights alone, DVD technology makes it possible for the first time to flick through it as one might books in a library. Yet the emphasis on process over product can also be a bit of a smokescreen - next to the work of the 70s this work from the early 1980s lacks cohesion and feels unfinished.
Bundled to one side and requiring gallery assistance to access is Lange’s ‘Artists at Work’ Series, filmed between 1998 and 2000. There’s an uneasy tension here as to whether this was deemed worthy of including in the exhibition or not.
This is unfortunate. I watched an episode on photographer Marie Shannon. It may have been full of dodgy sound editing and repeats but this was an artist as outsider using the camera to powerful character-filled effect. The camera keeps skirting off to where we least expect. At one telling point, Shannon stands all prim and proper in the middle of her studio clasping onto a photographic print to show the camera, alarm on her face as the camera keeps jerking erratically off as if smelling truer things around her.
This counter-television gives us true portraits, revealing the artists on both sides of the camera.
Study of an Artist At Work, Darcy Lange, Adam Art Gallery, until May 13.
* * *
“ARE THERE ways for the camera to record without stripping people of their spirit, without sloganising, without replacing a deep sense of community by a shallow voyeurism?” asked New Zealand artist Darcy Lange back in 1985.
We have an ever-increasing number of channels but, if you ever needed to confirm suspicion that television isn’t getting any truer or any closer to its subjects get yourself to the Adam Art Gallery. The Lange retrospective Study of an Artist at Work from Govett-Brewster Art Gallery features video and film and other media dating primarily from the 1970s and early 80s. Just as Lange’s statement above still carries great contemporary charge, I’ll be surprised if I see a more vital exhibition this year than this.
Lange was an international pioneer in film and video art. With these media he recognised he could both engage meaningfully with life politically and socially and actualise most effectively his sculptural and conceptual ideas. He brought new dimensions to a realist tradition begun by French 19th century painter Courbet and followed by great documentary photographers of his century like Walker Evans. In the heady late 60s/ early 70s when artists’ were starting to explore the conceptual in a variety of media he believed that artists still had a “responsibility to keep questioning the nature and power of realism”.
Lange’s name has been close to invisible in our art history. This may have a little to do with the fact that he had rarely exhibited since the 1980s and passed away in 2005. Yet it also has to do with the suspicion with which both video and the documentary have been treated until relatively recently. An outsider for most of his lifetime, things have now come full circle – Lange’s work deserves to be centrestage for the current crop of socially engaged and process driven contemporary artists.
In the spirit that has seen the Govett-Brewster Gallery champion another pioneer Len Lye, curator Mercedes Vicente has gone to considerable lengths to ensure this, restoring and transferring to digital a huge amount of material.
Like his contemporary Phil Dadson Lange worked across media. His film and video incorporate elements of photography, sculpture, performance and sound art, and these have also been seperate components of many projects. After Elam in Auckland Lange studied at London’s Royal College of Art in the late 1960s and began the shift from sculpture into film. Some of Lange’s late student work placed life-size figures before filmscapes or within constructed three dimensional spaces. These explorations of space were themselves extensions on earlier sculptural work, represented in this exhibition by a large piece of steel geometric abstraction.
The way this sculpture creates a theatrical space by thrusting up and out to allow for the balance of forms within is not so different to the way Lange later treated the boxed field of vision created by the film frame. There’s an artist’s eye as well as concept behind his long observance at a distance of the ordered planes of an allotment and the slow activity of elderly men within it, or the camera mounted on a Scottish hillside to observe a flock of sheep powerfully cascading into view.
Lange’s Work Studies completed between 1972 and 1975 in England, Spain and New Zealand are presented together on eleven individual monitors. While this bulk presentation doesn’t encourage the meditation and engagement with real time rhythm Lange was possibly after, you do get to appreciate the rigour, creativity and richness of his enquiry.
Lange’s major subject was the worker. Here we see how he experimented with his own working process to find ways to best capture the creative personality of the worker and give marginalised activity gravitas. Be they a Ruatoria shearing gang or London furniture makers he strove to capture the rhythm and movement of labour as a performance. These long inquisitive looks at activity create a music in real time with their repetitive phrasing and processes analogous to the work of minimalist composers like Steve Reich.
Lange is ever trying to break down social hierarchies, be it the viewer’s view of his subjects or the power the person behind the camera has over its subject. Lange himself is often present, the hand behind the camera not an invisible authority. In an impressive series exploring the creativity of teaching in British schools from 1976 and 1977, Lange not only films in the classroom he also films teachers and pupils reactions to the recordings. With the artist popping in and out of frame and the teacher rehearsing her response the work becomes as much about the construction of a reaction.
As Lange’s works take time to watch, he also saw his practice as more about an ongoing process of documentation than creating art gallery product. The exhibition title ‘Study of An Artist At Work’ is smart in this respect, and its reflective of the research basis of a lot of current contemporary practise. The exhibition is constructed in parts less as something to walk around as a resource to explore.
This is particularly true of the later work. With 10 hours of footage around Maori land rights alone, DVD technology makes it possible for the first time to flick through it as one might books in a library. Yet the emphasis on process over product can also be a bit of a smokescreen - next to the work of the 70s this work from the early 1980s lacks cohesion and feels unfinished.
Bundled to one side and requiring gallery assistance to access is Lange’s ‘Artists at Work’ Series, filmed between 1998 and 2000. There’s an uneasy tension here as to whether this was deemed worthy of including in the exhibition or not.
This is unfortunate. I watched an episode on photographer Marie Shannon. It may have been full of dodgy sound editing and repeats but this was an artist as outsider using the camera to powerful character-filled effect. The camera keeps skirting off to where we least expect. At one telling point, Shannon stands all prim and proper in the middle of her studio clasping onto a photographic print to show the camera, alarm on her face as the camera keeps jerking erratically off as if smelling truer things around her.
This counter-television gives us true portraits, revealing the artists on both sides of the camera.
Study of an Artist At Work, Darcy Lange, Adam Art Gallery, until May 13.
Mark Amery’s visual arts column courtesy of the Dominion Post, Friday April 20, 2007.
