Darcy Lange, Videography as Social Practice

About the event

Book launch: Author Mercedes Vicente in conversation with Steven Ball.

Darcy Lange, Videography as Social Practice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) is a critical monograph of a pivotal figure in early analogue video. Trained as a sculptor at the Royal College of Art, Lange (New Zealand, 1946-2005) developed a socially engaged video practice with remarkable studies of people at work in industrial, farming, and teaching contexts that drew from conceptual art, social documentary and structuralist filmmaking. Lange saw in portable video a democratic tool for communication and social transformation, continuing the legacy of the revolutionary avant-garde projects that merged art with social life and turned audiences into producers. The book follows Lange's trajectory from his early observational studies to the crisis of representation and socially engaged video and activism, as it is shaped by, and resists, the artistic, cultural and political preoccupations of the 1970s and 1980s. It strikes a balance between being a monograph providing a close analysis of Lange's oeuvre and drawing from unpublished archival materials whilst maintaining a breadth with theoretical discourses around the themes of labour and class, education, and indigenous struggles central to his work. The book's frameworks of conceptual art, structuralist and ethnographic film theory, social documentary and the critique of representation, video as social practice and the notion of 'feedback', participatory socially engaged art and postcolonial and Indigenous theory— expand our understanding of video outside the predominant structuralist tendencies. Lange's transnational and nomadic career introduces notions of alterity and challenges nationalistic accounts that excluded him in the past.

The talk was also be accompanied by a selection of Lange's videos.

Steven Ball is an artist and Research Fellow at Central Saint Martins where he manages the British Artists’ Film and Video Study Collection. His research encompasses historical and contemporary artists' moving image, post-expanded cinema practices, and their relationship to contemporary collections and archives. He writes on contemporary and historical moving image related art practice, and occasionally curates screenings and exhibitions.As an artist he has worked in audio-visual media since the early 1980s across a range of performance, screening, and exhibition contexts. He also writes, performs, and releases song recordings. His practice engages with local and global landscape ecologies reflecting social, political, environmental and post-colonial conditions, often situated within and between the UK and Australia.He is a member of the sensingsite artist collective.

Mercedes Vicente is a curator, writer, and researcher. She is Associate Lecturer in Critical and Contextual Studies at London Metropolitan University and Associate Lecturer at MA Culture, Criticism, Curation at Central St Martins. She has held museum positions as interim Director of Education and Public Programmes at Whitechapel Gallery in London, Curator of Contemporary Art and Darcy Lange Curator-at Large at Govett-Brewster Art Gallery/Len Lye Centre in New Zealand, and Research Curatorial Assistant at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, among others.