Overview
- Focuses on a pivotal analogue videographer expanding the understanding of video’s predominant structural tendencies
- Considers video as a democratic dialogical tool for social transformation
- A materially modest, self-effaced, poignant critique of labour and class, education and indigenous struggles
Part of the book series: Experimental Film and Artists’ Moving Image (EFAMI)
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Table of contents (7 chapters)
Reviews
researching the work of New Zealand-born videographer Darcy Lange (1946–2005). Through
her efforts in New Zealand, the United Kingdom, USA, and Europe, the corpus of his video
works has been compiled and collected, his original tapes saved, an archive secured,
exhibitions staged, and articles published. Despite his peripatetic life and the idiosyncrasies
of his practice, Lange now enjoys a secure place in the annals of post-1960s experimental art.
In this new volume based on her doctoral studies at the Royal College of Art in London,
Vicente has compiled the most comprehensive account of his work, offering deeply informedand relevant readings of his output, through various art historical and theoretical lenses. Her
original insights into the specificity of Lange’s contribution to art history as a ‘real-time’
image maker with a deep commitment to examining and interacting with specific arenas of
social life – homes, schools, workplaces, and whenua (ancestral land of Māori, indigenous
people of Aotearoa New Zealand) – is a remarkable achievement. Her conclusions
importantly reveal Lange’s ongoing currency as a pioneer of social practices that seek to turn
passive subjects into active and engaged participants. This is a book of great integrity and
relevance.
Christina Barton, Director, University of Wellington, UK.
Vicente's book doesn't just make the simple (and perhaps now uncontroversial) claim that Lange should be included in the canon of twentieth-century art. It's also attentive to the ways in which Lange's conception of videography was itself part and parcel of the twentieth century's reconfigurations of social and aesthetic conceptions of production, labour, autonomy, realism, ethnography, and canon itself.
Eu Jin Chua, Adjunct Senior Lecturer, University of Auckland, New Zealand
Long overlooked, video artist Darcy Lange’s practice in the 1970s and 1980s seems remarkably topical today. In her deeply researched and vividly written study, Mercedes Vicente shows how Lange’s experiments were deeply motivated by ideas of social justice. Exploring participatory socially engaged art and postcolonial theory, Vicente's book is a reset for the way in which the history of video art is understood and written.
David Crowley, Professor of Visual Culture, National College of Art and Design, Dublin
This tremendous book is the fruit of Mercedes Vicente’s tireless restoration of the work of
Darcy Lange, the maverick moving image activist, from inspirational community portraits tocosmopolitan multimedia. Trends in contemporary arts, from slow cinema to community
practice, found early and probing expression in Lange’s work. Indispensable.
Seán Cubitt, Professor of Screen Studies, School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne
Comprehensively conceived and lucidly written, this long-awaited monograph on Darcy Lange’s pioneering videographic activism locates this practice in its times, places, and concerns. Building on thorough archival and contextual research, Mercedes Vicente renders intelligible the originality of Lange’s ethical-aesthetical quest of overcoming traditional notions of authorship, and his consequential plea for observation, collaboration and participation.
Tom Holert, Harun Farocki Institut, Berlin
Darcy Lange has long been an enigmatic figure. His use of photography and the video camera served a deep commitment to understanding class and race dynamics in Britain, New Zealand and Europe, yet he is often difficult to place in its art historical canons. Until now. Mercedes Vicente’s excellent study of his work, the culmination of many years of research, opens up new insights on his practice and approach, and the complex contexts of conceptual art, video practice and ethnographic film in which it developed. Through Vicente’s passionate advocacy, Lange’s work now fully situated in the complex socio-political histories of his time. In the process, an artist of great contemporary relevance is also revealed: prescient in his close and ethical attention to the lives, work and rights of those communities – urban and especially rural – who were overlooked.
Lucy Reynolds, Course Leader for MRES Creative Practice Centre for Research in Education, Art and Media, Westminster School of Arts Co-editor, Moving Image Review and Art Journal (MIRAJ)
Darcy Lange’s ‘witness’ documentaries on labour in the 1970s and the participatory film-work on Maori land-rights in New Zealand in the early 1980s provided a vivid, if short-lived, contribution to debates on representation during and after conceptual art. Mercedes Vicente does a terrific job of reassembling and reassessing this film and video material, enriching our understanding of Lange’s work and the multiple artistic sources and intellectual pathways that generated it. We now know the moving image debates of the 1970s far better. This is critical art history of the highest order.
John Roberts, Professor of Art & Aesthetics, University of Wolverhampton
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Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Darcy Lange, Videography as Social Practice
Authors: Mercedes Vicente
Series Title: Experimental Film and Artists’ Moving Image
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36903-2
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-031-36902-5Published: 21 November 2023
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-031-36905-6Due: 04 December 2024
eBook ISBN: 978-3-031-36903-2Published: 20 November 2023
Series ISSN: 2523-7527
Series E-ISSN: 2523-7535
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XVIII, 278
Number of Illustrations: 45 b/w illustrations
Topics: Experimental Film, Fine Arts, Photography