Introduction

Darcy Lange (Aotearoa New Zealand, 1946–2005) was a pioneer artist and pivotal figure in early analogue video, although he is relatively unknown today. He 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. Lange, like many of his early socially engaged video users, held utopian hopes for video—before it turned to video art, as American artist Martha Rosler decried, ‘shedding the utopian moment’. Lange began as a sculptor and also had an artistic life as a musician, playing flamenco guitar from an early age and throughout his life. During his studies at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London (1968–71), Lange became discontented with a sculpture studio practice that was divorced from reality; he abandoned sculpture and adopted film, photography and video shortly after. He desired that his art serve a social function, from the early observational video series Work Studies (1971–75), documenting people at work in factories, mines and rural settings, and the socially engaged Work Studies in Schools (1976–77) in Britain, to the Māori Land Project (1980), joining Indigenous activists’ land rights struggles in New Zealand, and the later multimedia performances, People of the World (1983), with musicians from ethnic minorities in the Netherlands, and the ecological opera Aire del Mar (1988). Lange’s documentations of people at work, produced in the twilight years of the industrial era in Britain, constitute a memory and a record of labour and class from below. Video was a social documentary form, and his critique of representation embraced a political dimension that was collective, providing a voice to the voiceless, formed and transformed collectively. His situated practice in labour, education and Indigenous struggles was shaped by—and resisted—the artistic, cultural and political preoccupations of the 1970s and 1980s. His videos represent the hopes and socialist aspirations of the late 1960s, the yearnings for a communal and anti-establishment art, which came to an end by the 1980s with the pervasive effects of neoliberal capitalism that largely dismantled the more egalitarian social democratic principles and practices that Lange endorsed.