Colin Campbell—video artist, writer, teacher, and sage—passed away Oct.31, after a valiant struggle with cancer. The artist was born in Reston, Manitoba in 1942. Although Colin was an aesthete, immaculately dressed and obsessed with arranging the furniture, he never lost his small-town roots. His video-personae were endearing innocents enchanted by the big wicked world. A contemporary of artists General Idea and David Buchan, Colin shared a fascination, albeit with ironic distance, with stars and their omnipresence (“I almost ran over Liza Minelli today.”). His various performing-personae permitted him to acerbically observe the realm of art and culture. Art Star, of Sackville, I’m Yours, situated the emerging video-art medium in the context of Canadian painting legends Alex Colville and Lawren Harris Jr., both denizens of Sackville, New Brunswick. The Woman From Malibu (1976-77) tapes brilliantly unfold against the superficially permissive milieu of seventies California and Hollywood-tabloid culture. Robin the suburban punkette, in Modern Love and Bad Girls (both 1979), skewers the leeches endemic to celebrity-fixated art milieus, while the artist himself was a prime catalyst Toronto’s own polymorphous and very queer cultural demimonde.

Along with his colleague Lisa Steele, Campbell practically invented narrative video. Initially trained as a sculptor, Campbell’s three decades of videotapes blurred boundaries between performance, fiction, and autobiography. He used many contrasting but complimentary presentational strategies: direct and indirect address, frame-within-frame mise-en-scene, multiple points-of-view melodrama colliding against events in “the real world,” and even faux documentary. Colin was a storyteller who loved to play with time, space, and realities.

And also gender. Many of Campbell’s personae are either of indeterminate gender, or startlingly cross-gendered. His female-identified characters—The Woman From Mailbu, the irrepressibly naive Robin, Coleena the scheming exiled performance-artist (living the high-life in the South of France!), and even the crustily-aging Coleeta Sackville-West, defy traditional female impersonation. Colin used a flat, gender-neutral voice for these personae. What audiences are seeing and hearing often are at delirious odds with each another in Colin’s tapes. Time becomes as confusing as the problematized gender, and also distinctions between voices. Colin was an aficionado of Victorian and fifties Hollywood melodrama, but he was also suspicious of their closed structures; just as he was a committed queer, AIDS, and anti-censorship activist who celebrated fluidity while mocking labels.

Colin’s videotapes exhibited internationally at the 1980 Venice Biennial, at Documenta in West Germany (1977), in O Kanada (Berlin, 1982), in the 3rd International Istanbul Biennial (1992), and in scores of international, national, and Toronto venues. His tapes are included in the collections of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and Canada’s National Gallery, among others. A career retrospective of Colin’s works between 1972-1990 was co-organized by the National Gallery of Canada and the Winnipeg Art Gallery, and was on display at Toronto’s Power Plant in late 1991. In 1997, Colin was rewarded with the Bell Canada Lifetime Achievement in Video award.
Colin was also a vital contributor to artist-run culture, and a founder and board-member of the video-distribution organization Vtape. He taught at Mt. Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick, the Ontario College of Art and Design, and the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Toronto, where he helped implement a graduate program in visual studies. Colin’s teaching career was an exemplary achievement, and he was also the author of two unpublished novels.

Select examples of Colin’s work are currently visible in the Video Primer program at the AGO and the Monitor North show at Toronto’s Power Plant. A three-volume compilation, Invention, is available for purchase at Art Metropole (788 King Street West, Toronto), and Colin’s tapes are available for viewing and in distribution at Vtape (401 Richmond Street West, Toronto, Suite 452)

Colin is survived by his partner George Hawken, by his wives and lovers who remained lifetime friends, his brothers Neil and Greg and sister Judy, his son Neil, his friends and colleagues, his contemporaries and artistic descendants, and his students. He is lovingly remembered for the graciousness so evident in his art and life.

A memorial was held on Sun. Dec. 2, at the Latvian House on Bathurst Street, and another on Fri. Dec. 7 at Hart House, University of Toronto.