“I left for good those roads marked out with dead fires,” wrote the Quebec poet Roland Giguerre, “for other wider roads where my blood fused with the heavens as an arrow with its target.”

These lines appear in the closing sequence of one of the last videotapes made by Toronto artist, educator and video pioneer Colin Campbell who has died after a precipitous wrangle with cancer at the age of 59. In the world of Canadian art, he was instrumental in developing a place for video, and was a passionate advocate, and practitioner, of the art form.

Dishevelled Destiny, as Campbell’s new tape is called, was made more than a year before his diagnosis, and yet it reads as a formal leave-taking. For all its poignancy to viewers today, the tape is far from solemn and often hilarious, taking us on a nostalgic journey back to Sackville, N.B., where he discovers his videotapes gathering dust in the basement of the Owens Art Gallery. In some scenes, he appears as a beret-clad parody of famous former Sackvillian Alex Colville; in others, he appears in the blousy drag persona of Colleeta Sackville-West. For all its self-deprecating irony, the overall effect is consoling. This was a man comfortable in the bittersweet stock taking of all life had brought him.

Campbell was born in Reston, Manitoba (where, he used to say, his teenaged thrill was screwing coloured light bulbs into the ceiling fixtures) but he landed his first job in the early seventies teaching sculpture in the art department at Mount Allison University. It was at this time that he made Sackville, I’m Yours, a brilliant, low-budget work that parodied the mechanism of fame, highlighting the obscurity of the Canadian artist – doubly damned if he chose to work in the marginal new medium of video.

Affecting a world-weary and decadent manner, an on-camera Campbell responds languidly to questions form an imaginary off-camera interviewer about why he stays in Sackville (the public adores me, how could I leave such a wonderful place?). The tape demonstrated, in an ironic way, the pathetic and, at that time, typically Canadian fate of the isolated big fish in a small cultural pond.

Sackville, I’m Yours was interesting in another way as well: it demonstrated the medium’s capacity for making important statements on a peanuts and beer budget, championing content and subjective experience over the slickness and conformity of TV, and deftly using that most subversive tool in the artist’s arsenal – humour.

If identity was an early theme for Campbell, he was also one of the first artists to explore the use of fictitious personas and elaborate multi-character storytelling. The fluidity of gender also became a central interest.

His Woman from Malibu series of six videotapes, made between 1976 and 1977, featured Campbell in drag (blond hair, dark glasses) recounting his/her story directly into the camera lens; the demise of a friend accidentally gassed to death by a pest-control man, the pursuit of her late husband’s hobby of assembling and collecting animal skeletons (all freak stories Campbell picked up in the media during a sojourn in Los Angeles).

But for all his campiness, his performance shows a touching empathy with the middle-aged woman he portrays. As Toronto video curator Peggy Gale wrote in 1993, Campbell’s tapes cause us to ask ourselves, “What is the nature of prejudice, including my own – for homosexuals, for middle-aged women, for young beauties, for intellectuals? The Woman from Malibu tapes are remarkably self-revelatory – funny but never mocking.

These works have won for Campbell whatever one can call fame in the world of Canadian video art – a place in an important group exhibition of Canadian video at the Venice Biennale in 1980, a full-career retrospective organized jointly by the National Gallery of Canada and the Winnipeg Art Gallery in 1990, and curated by Bruce Ferguson, who is now dean of arts at Columbia University in New York.

Asked to pinpoint the nature of Campbell’s legacy, Ferguson describes him as a quintessential Canuck: “I see him as being part of that tradition of marginal wit that I associate with Canadians. I’m thinking of Wayne and Shuster, Martin Short.”

Today, curators continue to pay homage to Campbell’s vision. This month, his tape Culver City Limits (1977) is being shown in an Art Gallery of Ontario video exhibition, Masquerade, curated by Michelle Jacques.

Next month, Magnetic North opens at the Power Plant in Toronto, a sweeping round up of Canadian video organized by the Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis and Winnipeg’s Video Pool. It will include Campbell’s Hollywood and Vine (1976).

In addition to his work as an artist, Campbell devoted enormous energy to leadership in various sectors of the arts community. He was the founding chair of Vtape, a centre for video distribution in Toronto launched in 1980 that now handles the work of more than 500 artists. He held that role until his death.

“He was the very soul of the place,” says his colleague and former wife, Lisa Steele, herself a major force in the Canadian video-art scene.

As well, he stepped forward in innumerable dark hours to champion freedom of expression, perhaps most memorably when he served as a prime organizer, with artist John Greyson, of the province-wide Six Days of Resistance in 1985. The protest was called in response to a regulation requiring arts organizations and festivals to submit videotapes to the Ontario Censor Board before screening (Campbell and his coalition won).

As well, says Power Plant curator Philip Monk, Campbell was instrumental in Toronto’s awakening sense of itself as an art centre. Monk points to his infamous incarnations, in the Bad Girls tapes, as a copy-shop attendant making her way in the big city. (This suburban goody-goody reads about bohemia in Adele Freedman’s column in The Globe and Mail and decides to check out the action).

Campbell presented these tapes in Dickensian weekly installments in the Cabana Room of the Spadina Hotel in 1980, an event Monk describes as a “critical moment in the self-recognition of an art community.” Like many of Campbell’s imaginary protagonists, she appears out of step, a misfit both strangely prudish and impetuous – a curious alter ego given the poised and well-spoken demeanour of the artist himself.

Increasingly, Campbell’s interests centered on writing. After the debut of his first film, Skin, at the Toronto Festival of Festivals in 1991 (which focused on the plight of women infected with HIV), he spent much of his time working on two novels, both unpublished. He also began to devote increasing energy to his teaching job at the University of Toronto, where he spearheaded the creation of an interdisciplinary visual studies program.

In his relations with his teaching colleagues and students, he attained, by all accounts, the same caliber of diplomacy and grace that characterized all his human relations. Su Ditta, now an adjunct curator of Oakville Galleries (and the former head of media arts at the Canada Council) sat in on several arts juries with him over the years, and recalls Campbell in action.

“When you were around him, you immediately became aware of his dignity and his funny, acerbic mind,” she recalls. “His ability to analyze things was superb but his way of presenting ideas was very gentle. In a very unauthoritarian way, Colin set the tone that everyone felt compelled to live up to.”

Campbell, who died Oct. 31, leaves behind his former wives, the artists Janice Hoogstraten and Lisa Steele, and his partner, George Hawken. As well, he leaves his two brothers, Neil and Greg, his sister Judy, and his son, Neil Campbell, who teaches philosophy at the University of Waterloo. A memorial service will be held on Dec. 2 at 7 p.m. at Latvian House, 491 College St. Toronto.