(Originally published: Now Magazine, December 12-18, 1991)

Colin Campbell, the pioneering Toronto-based videographer, holds a solid position as one of Canada’s foremost artists. Local viewers can find out why with Media Works, the fine two-decade retrospective of his tapes, currently on view at the Power Plant. Organized by Bruce Ferguson and Jon Tupper in Campbell’s native Manitoba, the show comes to town as part of a tour that opened at the Winnipeg Art Gallery and includes Ottawa’s National Gallery, the Windsor Art Gallery and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Campbell consistently breaks ground with gender-bending scenarios rich with humour and pathos. In The Woman From Malibu, for example, a fully clad male model mutely endures the fussing of a confident female photographer clad in a clingy slip. The witty image hits home because it’s such a shock to see the reversal of just who typically objectifies whom.

Seated at the gallery, Campbell reflects on the roots of his career, which are also the roots of the international video art scene as a whole. “At the time I started making videotapes, I was working as a sculptor,” Campbell says. “I met Dennis Oppenheim, a New York sculptor who was doing body work using video. I thought it was completely compelling as a medium, and since 1972 have never looked back. Most of the people who started using portable equipment in art, in fact, were sculptors. Not many stayed with it for long – the technological novelty wore off. But a few of us started using the medium as a narrative form. In fact, narrative video art was pioneered in Canada. As early as 1974, Peggy Gale curated a survey of Canadian video art for the Art Gallery of Ontario. By the late 70s, it was being seen on the international scene, and in 1980, video artists represented Canada at the Venice Biennale.”

Campbell’s work began as a very personal vision, with works like True/False, This Is The Way I Really Am, and the satiric Sackville, I’m Yours that explore issues of sexuality and artistic identity from an autobiographical slant.

“For me, video’s appeal lay in its potential for theatricality, performance and narrative. The first subject of those things was myself. Gradually, I started to turn the camera outward, developing characters and personae much different form my own.”

But the sly probing of gender and its consequences continues.

“Even though my recent work looks very different from my early pieces, it remains very concerned with gender stereotyping. I’ve tried to make gay sexuality and heterosexuality co-exist, as they do in my life. I also like video’s immediacy. It’s possible to complete projects very quickly, whereas films can take one to five years. As a result, video can reflect extremely current political and social situations. The subject matter can be at the very edge of what’s going on, and it’s there for people to ponder.”

The show is presented with an installation, with stills — most featuring Campbell himself in various male and female guises – lining the wall of two spacious galleries, and homey desks cluttered with binders containing a selection of Campbell’s scripts and criticism. Three hours’ worth of the tapes that make up the heart of the exhibit are continuously screened on a projection monitor, with another five hours available on a small monitor with headphones. Though it’s an attractive setting for Campbell’s art, this pristine gallery presentation underlines the peculiar position video art occupies as a cultural phenomenon. Like experimental film, video is a time-based medium, most often seen at low-key, one-off screenings. The individual works of art can remain obscure even while their creators, like Campbell, are respected as artists of international stature.

“Primarily,” comments Campbell, “the way video art is seen in Toronto is than an artist organizes a one-night screening of a new tape. That has its problems because the venues tend to be small, and if people aren’t free on a given evening they can’t see the piece. Video art doesn’t have a patronage system of collectors, because it doesn’t really fit into conventional art market categories. It’s an easily reproduced multiple. With a Rembrandt, there’s only one painting. And Canada doesn’t have a strong base of visual art collectors anyways. Most Canadian artists have developed with the support of government grants. I can understand the desire of painters, sculptors and printmakers to become part of a commercial gallery’s stable of artists, because potentially they could support themselves through sales. But video artists would be hard pressed to support themselves through sales alone, because the price for tapes are extraordinarily low.”

Campbell, who supplements his income by teaching at University of Toronto, observes the irony in the fact that, though television shows are produced as video, works of art created on tape are excluded from mainstream TV programming.

“Television has been a distinct failure in terms of responding to shaping society, which is why you never see artist’ tapes on TV. Television is the only potential for video artists to make money, but I don’t think it’s going to happen. North American TV programmers seem to think all art is non mass-media-consumable. They do a show called Civilization which packages the entire history of art in 30 minutes.