Conclusion

Lange’s work is embedded in the ideas of his time, and was in dialogue with his contemporary artistic scene. Yet he was a solitary figure, carrying out work that was obstinate, earnest and singular. Dan Graham, via T. J. Clark, once described Lange as ‘a late 20th-century Gustave Courbet, a man of the New Zealand countryside who became an avant-garde, urban, political artist’. Lange’s pursuit of realism was in solidarity with the working class in Britain. Shaped by his experience as an immigrant from the colonies with a farming background, he was faced with the context of an elite cosmopolitan art school in London and a staunch British class system. His egalitarian upbringing and Calvinist work ethic, no less than the aesthetic debates he was quickly absorbing at the time, would have influenced his work and personal survival. In this light, then, it is no surprise that Lange turned to film and photography and, as soon as he encountered the Sony Portapak, settled on video—seeing it, like others at the time, as a democratic medium. Paradoxically, the very qualities of his work that seemed ‘unfitting’ at the time now make it seem less dated: as Conceptual Art, it was not rigorously analytical; formally, it had the rough edge of an amateur approach; politically, it was non-programmatic; commercially, it was not a commodity; and in terms of exhibitions, it was largely unviable.