Originally published in: Videographe, 1975.

The videotapes of Colin Campbell evoke a double level of self-reference: to the structure of the medium through which the work is conveyed, and to the personal circumstances of the artist. These are the perennial sources of modern art, but in the context of the 1970s (in the wake of so-called ‘conceptual’ art), it is the autobiographical elements that provide the greater challenge: they are what give his art its claims to originality and they are what expose it to lapses of taste that may undermine its quality.

Videotape was used initially as a means of documenting performance: he speaks of Dennis Oppenheim as a crucial influence; but whereas performance, in that case, sets the person of the artist in a particular relationship to his environment that readily projects itself onto a level of generality, Colin Campbell’s performances turn the attention of the viewer on the artist’s own personality in its most emotionally sensitive aspects. True/False of 1972 is a key work. In it, the artist’s head and shoulders appear first in profile then in full face, as he repeats a series of statements about his own personal life: “I am part Jewish… I still masturbate… I am heterosexual… I snort coke… I had had crabs” and so on. After each statement he pauses, then says “true”; then pauses; then “false.” The tension of his effort to retain an impassive expression communicates powerfully; he swallows hard from time to time.

Colin Campbell describes the television medium as a “conveyor-belt of reality.” What he means is that the intimacy of scale and domestic context, and the immediacy of its presentation of information give a sense of familiarity that might make us feel we had actually witnessed the events it reports, and might make it hard for us not to stop and speak in the street to someone we had only seen reading the news. It is this aspect of the medium that True/False probes. The videotape documents a performance, but it does not contain it neutrally. Indeed it is the inference of intimate personal knowledge implicit in the medium itself that is challenged. We feel that television allows us to know the person well, but when it is put to us, we cannot be sure of anything about him.

The insight is a valid one and the piece of unquestionable importance, but there are rough edges. The rigid profile and full-face views suggest the formality of criminal records photography rather than the casual directness of television, but mainly the piece founders because the issues raised aree too big for it to contain. In part, this is a failure in his understanding of television, in part, in his understanding of art. Television is ambivalent in its mass-oriented intimacies, private to a point, but also very public. At times we will see a celebrity confronted on issues just as important as these, but then we are very well aware that the issues are outside the privilege of our acquaintance, and yet in such situations as Watergate (and unlike True/False), we very often can tell what the truth is, whether the speaker tells it or not. Television itself corrects Colin Campbell’s excesses, when we see a familiar character from a play or parlour-game claim that he/she uses Lemon Pledge or eats Rowntree’s chocolates, and they do not even need to say “True-false” to just make us wonder. At only one place does Colin Campbell hit this level, when he says, “I like Sackville.”

There are other points to do with art as art. The arts – and especially the visual arts, perhaps – communicate very strongly the sense of participation in the artist’s own perceptions. A painting signifies not only the content of its painted subject but also the bias of the personality that envisaged it. Our attention may be directed either way, but there is an important distinction to make. If Rembrandt’s art causes us to have an interest in his personality and to care whether he snorted coke or not, that is because we have first responded to the sense of the personality we get from the art, as an aspect of its quality as art. Honest self-expression is not automatically an artistic virtue if it bores or alienates us. Moreover, there may be issues that are beyond the competence of art to handle. Issues of life and death and real human anguish may strike our emotions too powerfully to allow us simply to savour the experience as art, and to that extent to turn another’s misfortunes to our own pleasure. There is no possibility of an absolute embargo on particular aspects of life. What is in good taste is better defined by taste than by prescriptive formula, provided only it is understood that ’taste’ encompasses the question of how art ought to locate itself in life and society. True/False demands that we care more deeply than the work gives us reason to care, and about issues that are too serious or too personal to be raised gratuitously in an art context.

This piece hinges on the connotations of television; others manipulate the information-content of the image. Real Split has a photograph of half the artist’s face, split right down the centre, occupying one half of the screen while Colin Campbell adjusts his head behind the hotograph to restore the other half. Later he applies paint to his face, at one stage achieving a better blend with the photograph, at one time enhancing the plasticity of his actual features and at another generating a quite ferocious expression. The twin questions of the illusion of reality and reality of illusion relate not only to the physical presence of the head, but also to the changing projection of personalty as the two halves explore the minute margins of plausible accommodation.

Janus sets the artist’s nude body in relation to a life-sized photograph of himself. He moves against it and eventually kisses it. The camera moves slowly over the interlocking figures. The harmonies are carefully resolved, but this refinement at a formal level only add momentum to the subject’s sledge-hammer assault on our sensibilities. When we see it initially as two male figures, it reads as a homosexual act. When the immobility of the second figure first becomes apparent, we may interpret that figure as sculpture, and still carrying erotic connotations, the act may elicit the term “Pygmalianism” that psychologists use to describe the physical love of works of art. When we see it is just a photograph and understand that the activity is no more sensual than pushing one’s body against a piece of cardboard, yet the realisation that it is his own image, raises issues of narcissism and auto-eroticsm. That it undoubtedly confronts us not only with the revelations of the artist’s sexuality but with aspects of our own goes nowhere to mitigate the shock.

There is no denying the internal consistency of the work or the sensibility that enables it to pare away irrelevant details and co-ordinate the rest for the assault, but there is a broader sense of “sensibility” that the work offends – because the issues are too big.

It is not only at an emotional level that this criticism applies. In other tapes, the use of the word “real” evokes philosophical problems that we know too readily are beyond the competence of art to deal with. In one tape, the artist has shaved one side of his body and “polished” it with oil; as the camera moves over it he repeats the phrase: “This is the way I rally am” until the words, through repetition, dissolve into pure sound. In a more recent work, the words, “This is real” appear in bold print alternating with, and eventually on, the same sheet of paper as, “This is an edit.” The logic of the paradox hinges on the indeterminacy of the demonstrative pronoun (“This” needs to be specified by a gesture of the hand or another sentence); there is no need to burden it with the whole weight of the problem of reality.

Two pieces in which Colin Campbell appears in the role of Art Star, Sackville, I’m Yours and Smile meet all my objections. They are works of high quality. At the time Colin Campbell was a faculty-member at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick. In both pieces he plays the role of an artist of international reputation facing an imaginary interviewer. At first nonchalantly declining the invitation, he is drawn into discussion of his success in Sackville in Canada, and beyond. Personal elements creep in, his affection (evidently ironic) for the town, and a sort of pseudo-name-dropping: “Art Bank,” “Art Gallery,” “Annie" and “Dorothy.” It is not specified that the interview is a television interview, but the piece capitalizes on the appropriateness of the connotation. He appears in the nude in both works, but then being a star implies that he will flaunt himself sexually. Also it suggests that he is “concealing nothing” in a literal as well as metaphoric sense. The whole situation is as artificial and as pointedly dishonest as interviews of this type always are. He is acting a part and quite consciously overacting it, and yet the part he is acting may be himself – on some level of fact or fantasy. The piece impinges on all those issues of reality and unreality that other works court too strenuously, but here because it only “impinges,” it avoids the accusation of grossness and circumvent the defence mechanisms that enable us to keep the big issues out of the way and get on with the day-to-day business of living. The incidents in themselves are trivial, but because of their very triviality, are able to engage our sympathies more completely and take us willingly a good deal further in the direction of those fundamental life-and-death matters that seem beyond the competence of art to tackle. Because the whole thing presents itself in the guise of artifice, one finds oneself caring more about the fragments of fact that may intrude. Did he really have a tuna-fish casserole at the President’s? Did he really ride six floors in a lift with “Annie” (Presumably Anne Brodsky, Editor of Artscanada)? And if he did, what does that signify? In this context where so much is evident deception, we are given no reliable clues; the broader significance is left entirely to the imaginative projection of the viewer.

In Smile, Art Star, after a few preliminaries, smiles for the camera and holds the smile for about ten minutes. The fixed expression belies the feelings it is supposed to communicate, but beyond that the immobilization of the image may challenge the actuality of the artist’s presence before the camera. Once the image stops moving it might just be a photograph (like Janus or Real Split), but a photograph brought down to the low resolution abstraction of the television raster.

The sense of humour, the autobiographical elements, the interplay of true and false, and above all, the narrative content suggest parallels with other recent developments in art. The word “story” seems to be in the air and offers the possibility of developing into a movement. In a broader context, it may represent a necessary release of the pressures of over-intellectualism in post-minimal art (just as for Coin Campbell personally, it relaxes the tensions at an emotional level). But it does not represent a swing back. The pendulum never swings back, but only relocates deferred issues in a new context.

William Wegman presents a basis of comparison, but characteristically the American artist’s tapes are brief and to the point, barely a minute long in some cases, and if the issues raised are occasionally as over-charged as a child’s being born without a mouth, the treatment rapidly defuses the emotional trauma and leave us musing on the structure of the story and its mode of manipulating our sentiments. Visually, Art Star’s image on the screen is more self-consciously and romantically poised, the delivery is slower and nudges us to grasp all sorts of loaded innuendo.

The more heavy-handed approach of the Canadian artist must relate to the context of a more provincial situation. Formally, the work gives a peculiar backlash to the ironic sentiments of Sackville, I’m Yours, but if over-statement is related to the anticipated response of a less sensitive audience, those accusations could fit the Toronto scene of Campbell’s present activity just as well as Sackville. On the other hand, comparative ‘crudeness’ may be distinguished form ‘virility’ only by the bias of our terminology, and may represent a possibility of development and refinement beyond the impetus of an art showing the effects of over-sophistication. With Colin Campbell, this could be the case.

The works I have discussed were mostly produced some time ago: True/False, Real Split and the “Art Star” pieces in 1972; and Janus and This is the way I really am in 1973. I have preferred to limit the discussion mainly to those pieces, in part because I feel surer of my own reactions there, and in part because the critical issues on which the question of quality pivots remains the same in the more complex works that follow. It may be, however, that in these works we see, not only an enrichment that carries the art definitely beyond the limits of performance, but also a measure of resolution of those aspects that still cause anxiety. I find these indications most strongly in Love-Life of 1974, where the artist reads sections of love letters sent to him by various people, as an accompaniment to images of landscape and an apartment within which a figure can be seen indistinctly. The fragments of visual and verbal narrative interact in a way that can be very beautiful. The fundamental seriousness and emotional directness of the earlier work remains, but in a mellowed form that may almost consistently transcend the residue of over-statement.