Darcy Lange in the Netherlands circa 1980s
An internationally significant collection of art may have faded into obscurity if not for a series of serendipitous connections that led Govett-Brewster Art Gallery curator Mercedes Vicente to track down the artist, an unsung hero of the Taranaki art world. Natalie Finnigan reports.
Mercedes Vicente had long been a fan of Taranaki artist Darcy Lange. Although not well known at home, Lange was a highly regarded videographer in Europe and the United States during the 1970s.
When Vicente arrived in New Plymouth from her native Spain in 2005 to take up a job as curator at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, her mission was to track Lange down.
Unfortunately, she did not meet him, as he died within three months of her arrival. However, she did track down his work, and has staged a series of international exhibitions during the past five years, including an exhibition in Spain which runs until April.
When Vicente contacted Lange's family, she discovered a large amount of his personal possessions and work were in a shed on the family farm at Urenui.
"It was remarkable to find Lange's old crates from his time in Europe during the 1970s intact in the shed," she said.
"We piled everything into bags and took it back to the gallery to be fumigated, before starting a long process of sorting it all out and archiving it properly."
She asked the family for permission to vest Lange's work and professional documents in the Govett-Brewster Gallery, so they could be restored and preserved.
"I don't think Darcy's family had any idea how important his work was, because he had not received the same recognition in New Zealand as he had overseas."
Lange, a pioneering videographer, had made a significant contribution to the art world in the 1970s, but had barely been heard of since he moved his young family back to Urenui in 1984.
The ties he had formed with the international art community were severed by distance, Vicente said.
"They did not have email or the internet, so it was very difficult to maintain a connection."
Lange was a mixed-media artist who had studied sculpture at the Royal College of Art in London, but his most notable work was with video.
During the 1960s and 1970s, he pioneered a style of video practice that was essentially social documentary, whereby he filmed people at work in real time, in a range of working environments such as schools, factories and mines.
Lange's art was primarily concerned with social structure and the politics of class, which is why his studies of working environments are historically significant.
Vicente's connection to Lange began in 1978, when world- renowned art historian Benjamin H D Buchloh, of Harvard University, met Lange at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD).
Lange had been invited to teach at the college by American artist Dan Graham, and Buchloh was an editor at the NSCAD Press, where he was responsible for publishing books by and about contemporary artists.
Although they had little contact after their 1978 meeting, Lange's impression on Buchloh was such that he maintained an interest in and respect for the importance of Lange's work.
When Buchloh met Vicente in New York in 2001, a professional relationship was formed that resulted in Vicente co-publishing an anthology of his writings in 2005. It was Buchloh who led Vicente to Lange's work when she announced her relocation to New Zealand, and was intrigued about Lange's artistic activities since his return to New Zealand in 1984.
Once Vicente obtained the tapes from Lange's family, the painstaking process of converting them to a modern format began.
The 1/2-inch tapes were converted one by one, a costly process largely funded by the New Zealand Film Archive, and later as part of the overseas exhibition budgets.
Lange's collection was first displayed at Govett-Brewster in 2006, and during this time, Vicente began work on a book titled Darcy Lange: Study of an artist at work.
The release of the book coincided with the first international exhibition of Lange's work at world-famous Ikon Gallery in Birmingham in 2008.
The art community sat up and took notice of the exhibition, since the history of video art that had been written and revised during the 1990s and 2000s had largely excluded Lange because of his absence.
"Lange's work had been largely unseen over previous decades, and therefore he was left out of most of the written history of video art.
"I was compelled to bring attention to his legacy and significant contribution and seek the recognition it deserved," Vicente said.
After the Ikon exhibition, Lange's work was shown around the world: in New York, Yale University, Austria and Switzerland.
But back to the Spanish connection. While studying in London in the late 1960s, Lange would take summer sojourns to Spain to study under flamenco guitar master Diego del Gastor.
Lange formed a strong connection with Spain, and became passionate about capturing the beauty of the landscapes and the people in his work.
In 1975, he conducted a study of work in Spanish village of Cantavieja, in southern Spain.
This study was similar to agricultural studies he had conducted in Taranaki and the King Country in 1974.
In Vicente's book, she quotes Lange's view on what he captured in the village of Cantavieja.
"It is tragic that the American advisers and tractors provided to the feudal estates have cut the olives, turned Andalusia into a desert and denied the right to work to these beautiful Andalusian towns. They did it as if to take the last breath of Andalusian life from the people," Lange said.
One person who was aware of Lange's work in Cantavieja was Lorenza Barboni, curator at the gallery Espai d'Art Contemporani (EACC) in Castellon de la Plana, a coastal town between Valencia and Barcelona in Spain not far from Cantavieja.
Barboni travelled to Birmingham's Ikon exhibition in 2008, and had hoped to see the Cantavieja tapes.
However, although Vicente had been thrilled to find the Cantavieja tapes among the collection from Lange's estate, she did not have the budget to convert them in time for the Ikon show in 2008.
In 2009, they were converted to be shown at an exhibition in Ljubjana, Slovenia, at which point Barboni began to plan an exhibition of Lange's work at EACC in Castellon.
This venture came to fruition last month, when Vicente travelled to Spain on behalf of the Govett-Brewster to curate the exhibition.
So far the show has received positive reviews from the Spanish art press. However, the most interesting aspect of the exhibition for Vicente came when two special visitors arrived at the gallery on opening night.
The men had travelled to Castellon for the exhibition because they had heard it would include the Cantavieja tapes, which featured footage of a local farmer hard at work.
Javier Tena and his brother had never seen the footage of their father, who died many years before. However, they knew an artist from New Zealand had filmed him as part of an art project in the mid-1970s.
They recalled their father talking about the artist he familiarly called "El senor ingles", and 37 years after the footage was shot, they were overwhelmed to see their father on film.
Vicente was more than happy to fulfil their request for a copy of the tape, as in a way it brought Lange's connection with Cantavieja full circle.
"I feel like have done what I set out to do with Darcy's work," says Vicente.
"As a curator, an important part of your work is to preserve the legacies and promote the work of under-recognised artists.
"It has been a long journey, and I don't expect to give so much to one artist's work again, but then again you never know what will happen."
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