Toronto video artist, writer, teacher, gender terrorist. With impeccable style and atrocious wigs, he represented Canada at the 1982 Venice Biennale, had retrospectives at the National Gallery of Canada and the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, founded the Visual Studies Program at the University of Toronto and gave great dinner parties.

Many of his fifty-odd tapes hinged on the construction of fetching alter-egos: Art Star, a pretentious poseur from Sackville; the Woman from Malibu, a detail-obsessed California housewife; Robin, a ditzy Queen West scenester; Coleena, Malibu's ex-pat sister in Siena. His lover George Hawken's words about his last tape, Dishevelled Destiny could equally be applied to all the work: "He was as much the friend to the unexpected as he was the enemy of sentimentality and easy emotion... (The work is) animated by his sense of fun, his joy of life and the huge, generous and generative pleasure he found in his friendships."

Letter from Colin (excerpt), 1991
“Go-Go has been a nice little scene. The bartendress (is that a word?) recognized me last night, which meant it was time not to go there again. I know of course she recognized me by my charm, and the company I keep. But then, I've never found it that difficult to be remembered. Butchers, shoe salesmen and occasionally plumbers recall me. Having made a mark signifies the treachery of familiarity. I don't want to be familiar...

My sex life has been and remains extremely impersonal. It reveals nothing about me. My grocery list is much more fascinating. Not so much the contents, the list as it were, but what I intend to do with that pink yielding leg of lamb. I do seem to recall having sex with my groceries, but that may have been in the sixties while I was having an "enhanced" experience... Got to go teach now. It feels like I'm descending into the sordid abyss of trying to improve humanity's mind. I imagine becoming head of a charm school. I disguise knowledge as a G-string. Better to be curious than to find out.”

June, 1988 On our way back from Hong Kong, Colin and I had an overnight in Tokyo, where we hooked up with Pam and Janice, two Toronto dykes who were living there working as hostesses. Colin's query: which of the 300 tiny gay bars in Shinjuju were the current créme de la jour? We started at a bar that would have been spacious by Tokyo standards if it weren't for the huge artificial cherry tree whose silk-budded branches forced everyone up against the walls. Colin bantered between the blossoms with a Mishima-esque leather queen. Our next stop was an art-fag video bar, seating for ten, that played nothing but Peewee Herman on the monitors. Colin and the bartender chatted about Cowboy Curtis. At three in the morning, down an alley, up three flights and along six corridors, we found Motown. An exclusive clientele of hairdressers, nothing but Aretha Franklin on the sound system. Colin was entranced. The three other guys were likewise intrigued, but shy. Pam decided to break the ice by doing a strip-tease on the bar. Off came her shirt, to much applause. The hairdressers turn. Two got up together, giggling convulsively, and started to bump and grind. Colin was very encouraging. They got as far as their white jockeys, then scurried back down to their bar stools. Colin bought everyone vodka shooters. Pam and Janice did a duet in their bras. The bartender poured more vodka.

We made it back to our hotel room at sunrise, just in time to pack. Later, on the phone, I asked Colin for his favourite memory. I bet to myself it would be Motown. Instead, he reminded me of a well we'd seen a week earlier, in a small village north of Guangzhou. We'd wandered from the tour bus, away from the market where snakes writhed in buckets among the lush produce. A woman, maybe twenty, was drawing water. She sensed us, turned and smiled shyly. Colin was transfixed. She had the sort of movie-star beauty that is opalescent, sunlight suddenly from behind a dark cloud, perhaps especially riveting because of the poverty of the village. "Like Genevieve Bujold in Anne of a Thousand Days," he joked, his eyes were reverent, full of awe. His eyes were so often full of awe.

In the early eighties Colin Campbell was professor in residence at a little-known, yet extremely influential atelier: The Woman from Malibu's Video Art Academy and Finishing School (Yonge Street Campus, upstairs from the Athlete's Foot outlet). Ten easy lessons, non-accredited. No tuition, just intuition. No transcripts, just trans-sex. No prior experiences necessary, just start making tapes-or martinis. Between classes he was variously producing Bad Girls, Modern Love, He's a Growing Boy, She's Turning Forty, Dangling by Their Mouths, Conundrum Clinique, White Money. Lessons invariably overlapped with production. As did life.

Lessons
1. Turn last night's dinner conversation into tomorrow's dialogue. Colin's scripts were flagrant collages of his pal's best bon mots and intimate confessions. We'd emerge from screenings both chagrined and flattered by such blatant thievery. And grateful, because he'd tightened our timing, improved our delivery, deepened our meanings.

2. Make nightclub sets from couches and lamps in the studio. In turn, make couches and lamps from display racks that the Athlete's Foot outlet downstairs left in the alley last week. The same corner of the loft, the same Athlete's Foot "couch," the same lamp-are featured in every tape he made in his place on Yonge Street, yet they always seem new and different. Five-minute makeovers were effected with a swath of fabric, a coat of paint, a backdrop of pastels on coloured paper.

3. Shoot with one or two or no lights, one or two or no crew, one or two or no backdrops, but always two or more drinks. He was hopeless with tech yet he'd find his unique way to make it work. His best shots were sometimes when he forgot to turn the camera off. His best edits were often the ones he made by mistake, his best montages the ones he slammed together deck to deck.

4. Assimilate high theory and low humour by osmosis. Colin never read Foucault and Deleuze; he didn't need to, he had friends who did. He just inhaled the gist over dinner, unerringly extracting the curds from the whey. He shoplifted from both sides of the culture promiscuously: headlines, Edie Sedgwick, gossip, trash talk, Barthes, then transformed his theft into unassailable ownership. His tapes are very op-ed, of their moment, a catalogue of tabloid obsessions and current debates. He found uniquely personal ways to respond to political crises, be it censorship or AIDS. Though he was appalled by injustice in any forms, his interventions were never from the soap-box; he refused the rhetorical in favour of ironic commentary.

5. Write roles for old friends because they need cheering up, and for new friends because they need unpacking. Video as socialization: who cares if friends can't act? The raw, jarring, awkward and at times excruciating gap between the person and the performance was the space he zoomed in on. Colin was allergic to verisimilitude, fascinated instead by the vulnerability of self-consciousness.

6. Monologues are more interesting than dialogue because they don't pretend to be natural. In Dangling by Their Mouths he quotes the dead-mother monologue from Faulkner's As I Lay Dying at length. In tape after tape he returns to Faulkner's strategy of competing monologues, different characters confessing their versions and secrets and poor little poems to the camera. The first movie we saw together was Fassbinder's In the Year of Thirteen Moons. More than anything, this film helped me understand the art that Colin was chasing, embracing, creating. The art of declamation, the art of melodrama, the art of tableau.

7. Tableau. The art of waiting for the thing you don't expect to happen, to happen. The art of composing a body within a box until the frame cracks and the performance breaks and some sort of truth seeps out. Often a truth spoken by…

8. Women. Colin was unthinkable without women, fascinated by women, incapable of not identifying with women. Such empathy carried risks of hubris, of misunderstanding, risks he deemed willing to venture. He's the only person I've known whose friendships (deep, profound, intimate, long-term) were truly transgendered. Which meant that he resolutely refused to let gender define anyone. Which of course made him a very queer enigma that neither Church Street (gay town) nor College Street (trendy town) could fathom. (Queen Street-the art scene-did him somewhat better.)

9. Bad drag. Bad drag is better than good drag. Bad wigs are better than good wigs. Bad drag skips the surface and slams you right into the hunger of gender, the ten-year old boy with the towel over his tits in the bathroom mirror pretending to be Elizabeth Taylor, terrified of being caught. Which brings us to

10: narcissism. Video as mirror, camera as confessional, the screen a pool of mercury: darkly beautiful, tremulous, on the verge of wonder, on the brink of tears. Only a narcissist as unflinching as Colin could stare into the lens with such honesty, and see himself so clearly. And know that through such a mirror he could see us.

Letter from Colin (excerpt) 1987

“It's about 4:30 and I just spent the last hour shopping for coriander, hot chilies, parsley, tomatoes, the price of gold. Dusk comes early now and the city has a nice, dense, dark, crowded feeling about it on the streets that I really enjoy. Bumped into lots of people I know. I felt in a really good mood. I had this sudden memory of this time of year in Reston when I was a teenager, and how that was the only time I could make myself imagine I wasn't there, but in Hong Kong or something. It was the only time of day I liked. I also imagined all the wolves creeping in from the forest to the edge of the town to snatch away teenagers like me (there were no forests, and no wolves). And I'd rush home and go to my room and turn on the lights and maybe read Cry of the Wild or something. I knew I was a lucky person and that my life would be really interesting, but just couldn't figure out how to escape, so I imagined being eaten by wolves, kidnapped by aliens-just anything that didn't cost money, because I didn't have any to buy a bus ticket out of town, to ride through that formidable dark horizon.”

One spring Colin and I drove out to the singing dunes near Kelso, en route to Palm Springs. He shot the final scene of Hollywood and Vine there, where the Woman from Malibu walks out into the rolling miles of white sand, searching for bleached pony bones. When you walk along the hard-packed ridges, your feet make low, pure tuba notes as the sand shifts. We tried to videotape these noises, but between the whistling wind and our laughter, we never got a good recording.

You know the stone soup story. Stranger comes to town, drops a rock in a cauldron of boiling water, claims it'll make the best soup in the world. The villagers dismiss the stranger as a wing-nut. But then, curiosity wins out, they can't resist contributing a carrot, an onion, a bone, the best from their cupboards. That night the village feasts.

Video for Colin was best when it hands-on and home-made, a cauldron for his village to gather around. He disliked re-editing, preferring the courage of his convictions. Video was a way to be a friend, a way to listen, a way to care deeply. Video was sitting up all night on the roof of his Yonge Street loft, talking and drinking, laughing and wondering. All the nights on all the roofs, at all the tables of all the places he lived-College, Simcoe, Dovercourt, Queen, McCaul, Richmond, Camden-finding and sharing the best from all our cupboards, above the neon and garbage, below the vast sky. All his nights had wolves and all his years had thirteen moons.

John Greyson and Colin Campbell became friends in 1978 and were lovers from 1986-89. A Toronto film/video artist, Greyson remains mortified by his performances in six of Colin's tapes, but achieved revenge by casting Colin in six of his own.

A version of the above text was presented in a tribute to Colin Campbell at the Power Plant in February 2002. It was published in C Magazine in 2002.