From Sculpture to Film and Photography

Social Consideration, Communication, Observation: From Sculpture to Film and Photography outlines Lange’s adoption of lens-based media coming out of the Royal College of Art in 1971, where he trained as a sculptor. It provides an aesthetic analysis of his sculptures (many of which disappeared and exist only as archival documentation) and establishes a set of influences on his early artistic development: from the large, abstract, hard-edge steel sculptures on his arrival at the RCA to an increased interest in realism and the subject of labour, as reflected in his last environmental sculpture, Irish Road Workers (1971). Lange’s relation to Conceptual Art’s dematerialisation and post-medium condition marks the beginning of his photographic and film studies of people at work, Social Consideration, Communication, Observation (1971). Lange’s aesthetically uninflected way of documenting the working body as the unfolding of an action draws on process and performance art, both ascendant at the time. Meanwhile, his commitment to leaving a memory of the social world distances his work from performance and the ontological exercises redefining and expanding the field of sculpture of his conceptual counterparts.