This is the fourth of four chapters from Self Served: Early Video and the Politics of Narcissism by Lee Rodney, a thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Art at York University, April 28, 1997.

Chapter Four:
Telling it like it is(n't): autobiography, mock-confessions and serious fictions

I've always enjoyed story telling and I think that video is highly dependent upon your ability to tell a story and how to pace it, because you always have to know when to insert some fiction. It's a big illusion that we get any kind of whole picture of anybody. -Colin Campbell' 12
All I can do is tell the truth. No, that isn't so-I have missed it. There is no truth that, in passing through awareness, does not lie. But one runs after it all the same. Jacques Lacan 113

In Eric Cameron's 1972 essay, "Notes for Video Art" he posed a question that many artists similarly asked (consciously or subconsciously) in the early 1970s: "what can you do with a television camera ?" Oddly, Cameron immediately notes the phallic proportions of the lens fitting, and answers this rhetorical question with a blank space marked by quotations.114 He asks: "Is it not possible to pose a question like `What can you do with a television camera?' without in the same instant suppressing the pre-echoes of an obscene reply: "." Contrary to Cameron's presumptions however, the most immediate response isn't necessarily that one "fuck" the camera or engage it in a physical way: it is also possible that an equally spontaneous reaction might be to enter into dialogue with it. Asking Cameron's rhetorical question once more-"what can one do with a television camera?"- one can just as well tell it a story, and many artists did.

The way in which these video stories are told varies substantially, as does their narrative function. Like Wilson and Lake's videos in the preceding chapter, Colin Campbell and Lisa Steele's tapes are also about self-representation. But the central issue here is not one based on the question of representation; rather these investigations hinge upon the question of the self, or the fiction of the self. The tapes in this chapter fit loosely into the realm of autobiography, although unlike the subject that writes itself, these tapes reflect the subject speaking itself, not through script, but though spontaneous performance. Several questions arise from the specifics of the video situation, one that is primarily a dynamic relation between the artist and the camera, or monitor. When do first person narratives become confessions? Conversely, if the notion of confession presumes an essentialist view of the self (one in which the speech is seen as a product or expression of the speaker) can confessions also be fictions? These are some central questions of this chapter. I take as axiomatic not simply the split subject of Lacanian psychoanalysis, but also the notion of Kristeva's subject in process, or on `trial.'

My original proposal for this thesis was to consider what I referred to as "non-narrative" tapes, not considering what non-narrative actually meant, and not recognizing the artificial limitation that this would impose on the thesis as a whole. This would have deceptively constructed a tidy framework around tapes that didn't necessarily set out to tell stories; it also would have been easier. While these early tapes by Steele and Campbell do not have complex narratives with multiple characters, plots, or closure, they are stories, "personal" stories, presented in varying ways through an intimate association with the camera.

Colin Campbell and Lisa Steele met in 1975 when Campbell left his teaching position at Mt. Allison University and came to Toronto in search of a more productive working environment. Here he found a small but sympathetic community at A Space and Art Metrople and immediately connected with Tom Sherman and Lisa Steele. My decision to pair Campbell and Steele was not based upon their relationship and subsequent collaboration after 1975. The tapes I am looking at predate this association, though the works suggest comparative analysis due to the similarity in presentation (spontaneous and direct address to the camera) and desire to narrate the self, or to tell stories about the self either through characters or the direct recollection of personal experience. Thus, through these tapes, Steele and Campbell perform representation as a process, spontaneously telling stories to the camera.

Though both artists use the video medium to engage the genre of autobiography, each artist does so differently. Comparatively, Steele's and Campbell's tapes could be said to represent opposing sides of the same coin. Steele focuses on the performative moment of narration, the workings of memory, and how this functions in attempting to account for the real.

Conversely, Campbell's interest lies in constructing self, willfully engaging fiction, and inhabiting characters to speak through. There is little overlap in terms of subject matter or the degree to which fictive elements are brought in: this pairing may seem unorthodox, as Campbell and Steele approach the truth/fiction split differently, but each artist's approach calls up the links between the literary tradition of confession and autobiography, and this tradition's easy adaptation to the video medium.

However, the very notion of confession implies that truth can be found, and if accounts are given a certain form, logic or sequence, they seem to ensure authenticity. In this way there is also a link between the work of narrative and that of confessional discourse. Confession is not really confession unless we believe it is true. Similarly the economic presentation of unedited, black and white, real-time tapes implies objectivity. Fully aware of the truth claims called up by the video medium and narrative formats, many video artists engaged video and narrative to question the split between truth and fiction, objectivity and subjectivity, playing with convention and "objective" formats to expose the interests at stake in upholding truth and objectivity.115

As a time-based medium with a necessary beginning and end, video easily integrates narrative formats. Peggy Gale refers to the selective processes and framing devices inevitably employed in video recording and states that despite the objective status lent to the camera, "work recorded in continuous real time is far from neutral." She continues on to argue that any tape is inevitably constructed through selection and choice; it approximates at best a "serious Fiction," rather than replicating a given, preexistent reality. 116 A prevalent genre of video production (particularly during the seventies117), autobiography underscores questions of selfrepresentation that hinge upon truth and fiction. This happy merging of medium and genre came about, Gale suggests, due to the directness of video and the "simplicity of operation, especially in the early years." Unedited, unscripted and spontaneous, many tapes functioned to record performative moments: events that quite often borrowed in some way from confessional discourse-a type of performative self-fashioning mode.

Many histories of video trace a lineage from conceptually-based, realtime production-work limited by the primitive technology of the 'portapack' camera (much of which was characterized as 'narcissistic')-to a point where video 'grows-up', fully integrates narrative, looks outward and becomes `social', hence "politicized." This approach ignores the now time honoured adage, "the personal is political," and presumes a kind of noble disinterestedness at the heart of outward-looking artistic and social inquiry.

This attitude can be traced to varying degrees in video criticism from the mid-seventies to the present, beginning most notably with Rosalind Krauss' pivotal essay of 1976.118 In the Canadian scene this opinion was expressed most fervently through the voice of Toronto critic John Bentley Mays, who saw in early video production self indulgence of the worst kind. In Mays' view, the visibility of the artist within the frame signaled artistic immaturity. 119 Video got its start when those handy, portable television recording systems arrived from Japan in the mid-sixties. Then artists got bored with recording chiefly themselves and turned their camera on the more complicated world outside their studios. Despite its adolescent growth-spurt, some early critics thought the medium's technological crudeness would soon have artists limping bored and empty-handed back to their easels...."


The remainder of the review is filled with praise for the technical virtuosity of the most recent generation of tapes exhibited at the AGO at the dawn of the eighties. However, Mays' yardstick seems to be one derived from the production values most closely aligned with cinema and television. 120 More recently, though, the odd disdainful remark can be detected in places less expected. In a recent essay on sexuality in Canadian video, Sara Diamond stated of Campbell's earliest works that he "began with the culture of narcissism's multiple mirrors so typical of early video [but] quickly moves on," providing a pseudonym in his later tapes. 121 This context also implies a kind of `progression' from silent tapes to ones that use narrative; however Campbell's pseudonym was there at the outset in 1972, and it is no more self-evacuating than Campbell's exploration of his own image in his silent tapes. 122

The difference between Campbell's silent tapes like Janus (1973) and True/False or Sackville, I'm Yours (both 1972), is that the two earlier tapes more clearly prefigure Campbell's later focus in the Woman from Malibu series; whereas Janus seems hopelessly caught up in self-love. By 1975, Campbell had abandoned his earliest experimentation with silent explorations of his own body and found a new medium in the glamorous persona of the Woman from Malibu.123 But, contrary to the chronology implied by both Mays and Diamond, Campbell was exploring the complexity of subjectivity and identity with absolute economy as early as 1972, before the Woman from Malibu was conceptualized. In Sackville, I'm Yours and True/False Campbell asks questions of the truth/fiction dichotomy at the heart of all self-representations. Campbell was talking from the outset, not in all of his early works, but in at least the few tapes that I address here. Perhaps he wasn't speaking volumes in a literal sense, but these monologues (one an interview, the other a series of declarative statements qualified as both true and false) succinctly point to a mode of self-fashioning in both visual and verbal representations of the self. Similarly, Lisa Steele's solo appearances in front of the camera resulted in a kind of self-fashioning: not through willful fictionalizing but through her use of "involuntary memory."124 In a broader context these tapes point to the intermixture of confessional discourse and autobiography, although neither Campbell nor Steele use the video medium to directly engage in confession.

When asked about his decision to role-play in most of his early works, Campbell refers to the importance of foregrounding subjectivity through the body in his own early work, contrasting this with the neutralizing tendencies of body art. I asked Campbell about his decision to appear plausibly or seemingly naked within his early tapes he replied by stating that, "the difference with video tape was that it was definitely an exhibitionistic or confessional kind of situation." 125 However, Campbell prefers to think of his work as constructed autobiography rather than confessional, though this talking mode is central to his earliest production. Casually remarking upon his silent and formal investigations of the video medium (and his eventual abandonment of that mode) Campbell stated: "you can only do so much of that, and then you start talking."

Talking Heads
The familiar head-shot of the television newscaster (the trusty man who brings nothing but the facts) carries with it connotations of utmost objectivity. Early autobiographical tapes often mimicked this format, taking advantage of these connotations to add to the veracity of the account, or conversely as a device for irony. The video apparatus had already turned toward the artist with the earliest "high-modernist" experiments.126 But it also seemed that the camera wanted to hear something, and it asked the subject to speak. Acting as a silent interlocutor or perhaps even taking the place of a larger audience, the monitor, as Gale suggests, ...was immediately third person and outside the live performer. The diarist or autobiographer reflects "truth" in detailing events and motives, perhaps seeking explanation for him or herself as much as for an assumed audience. In autobiography's first-person preemption of biography, object (third person) becomes subject, aiming to control or influence both public knowledge and memory and often flirting with fiction in the process. 127


Colin Campbell's Sackville, I'm Yours, conversely, flirts with autobiography. While he seems to be telling the tallest of tales, the flip side of this account serves to describe at least a few of Campbell's life experiences in Sackville, a small, conservative, university town in southeastern New Brunswick. In Sackville, I'm Yours, Campbell's glamorous persona, Art Star, begrudgingly agrees to be interviewed by one of his many admirers, answering silent questions as if the viewer were posing them. Campbell's impromptu staging of this interview served not only to confirm Sackville's cultural and geographical predicament, it was also his parodic swan song before leaving. However the parody in all of this cannot be overemphasized. This tape is not self-revelation in the conventional sense. Campbell facetiously remarks "in one sense it was almost cathartic, a few of the situations in the tape actually were derived from my own experiences living there, like tuna fish casserole at the president's house." Despite Art Star's glamour, or perhaps because of it, he appears to be naked (we only see Campbell from the shoulders up), 128 and as fiction, Sackville I'm Yours plays on the idea of the `naked truth.' All of Campbell's work engages the truth/Fiction dichotomy, but none quite so economically as Sackville I'm Yours. One of the grand Fictions of twentieth-century media culture is the notion of the star. Of this phenomenon Campbell states: "there's a certain mystique about being a star, its something that's supposed to be glamorous, there's always a kind of intrigue around what they'd look like without their clothes on: stars have to be sexy or sexual in some way."
While Sackville, I'm Yours is far from confessional, its residual function is at least somewhat therapeutic; as Campbell's alibi, Art Star ironically expresses at least a few of Campbell's discontents. 129 True/False, however, falls more squarely within the confessional domain. In this tape Campbell directly faces the camera and blankly states a series of potential confessions, each one qualified as both true and false. Foucault notes that we have become (in the west) a culture of confession. Permeating all aspects of daily life, confessional discourse emerges so that "one goes about telling, with the greatest precision, whatever is most difficult to tell." 130 Similarly, Michael Renov points to the proliferation of confessional discourse in North American media culture, analyzing this tendency within the historical context of autobiography. Renov finds that the predominance of confession in late twentieth-century culture takes its form through means different from those of the historical genre of autobiography: "while it can be said that there has been an explosion of confessional and therapeutic discourse within the public sphere of American culture, that efflorescence has been less literary than popular cultural-in the form of tabloid journalism, talk radio, and commercial television." 131 It is perhaps due to this pop-cultural bent, that first person narratives in the confessional mode easily merged with the video medium. The popularity of televised confession in talk shows perhaps stems from the viewer's pleasure in being `let in' on something, and it carries with it a voyeuristic/exhibitionistic association.

As the televised confessional mode has been culturally construed as truthful, it invites adaptation or even parody. Colin Campbell's tapes operate within (but also against) this genre. He plays with convention in such a way that the viewer never knows quite where to find him in the contradictory field of his pronouncements. There is somewhat of a confessional element in all autobiography, and confession is self-fashioning through what one chooses to tell, or conversely leave out. Therefore the relative `truth' content of what's told is never certain. But historically, confession has always implied truth, the kind that only surfaces under coercive pressure132: it is an operation whereby one submits to an Other and is subjected to a moral code.

The confession is a ritual of discourse in which the speaking subject is also the subject of the statement; it is also a ritual that unfolds within a power relationship, for one does not confess without the presence (or virtual presence) of a partner who is not simply the interlocutor but the authority who requires the confession, prescribes and appreciates it, and intervenes to judge, punish, forgive, console and reconcile; a ritual in which the truth is corroborated by the obstacles and resistances it has had to surmount in order to be
formulated.133


This "virtual presence" lies at the heart of the autobiographic tradition, and finds a fitting analogy with the video medium. Writing about the predominance of the confessional mode within the tradition of autobiographical writing from Augustine to Jean Genet, Jeremy Tambling asks: Does autobiography have an autonomous existence outside confession, or is it one form of confessional writing Naturally, where an autobiographical text flaunts its nonconfessional nature, we may wonder what process of disavowal is taking place. But it may be better to ask whether autobiography can be a possible form of truth telling. If the unity of the self is a fiction and the self writing about itself inevitably constructs a subject divided and different from the writing self, autobiography must too be Fictional. The same issues, of course, haunt confessional discourse.... and means that autobiography cannot claim a special status for itself as a genre, as a form of knowledge. 134

Tambling continues to make a very nuanced, but compelling distinction for modes of autobiography that, by virtue of their acknowledgment of fictional status, become self-fashioning rather than confessional. But he cautions that these two modes should not be defined as polar opposites as they are inevitably intertwined.

True/False calls attention to the place that confession occupies within self-representation or autobiography. Campbell's list of "facts" that he chooses to recite and subsequently qualify as both true and false seem like confessions, especially due to the air of objectivity lent by the bland presentation, and the decision to go through this exercise both facing the camera and in profile. Framed with the conventional head-shot, again shirtless and seemingly naked, Campbell recites a list of approximately twenty pronouncements. This list stays the same for both profiles, and Campbell's tone remains constant. What does vary, however, is the interval between the statement and the subsequent qualification. "I have false teeth. True. False; I snort coke. True. False; I am a homosexual. True. False; My real name is Colin. True. False; I collect pornography. True. False." Campbell's answer, perhaps lies in the pregnant pause. Or this is what he certainly insinuates, knowing full well the viewer's demand for truth. This constructed edge of ambiguity offers the possibility for a direct correlation between the pause and the relative truth of the statement.
As previously mentioned, confessions encourage an essentialist view of the self, one in which secrets are attached to an internal core. This view also posits the confession as the most truthful of statements: The illusion that speech is the speech of the subject (not of the Other), that it belongs, in its displacements and condensations, to the self, and may be examined as closely as other waste products of the body, themselves classed as defilements, for its deep relationship to the self in its subjectivity. The demand for speech which can thus be symptomatized is at the heart of confession.135

Historically the rhetorical function of confession can be traced to the notion of a speaking subject with a clearly defined interior and exterior: the interior characterized as the murky site of impurity and sin. Kristeva traces a historical shift in the location of impurity from Judaism to Christianity. She posits that this location moved from the exterior of the body to the interior; in the New Testament abjection is located chronically and centrally within the subject bringing forth a fully different system of meaning based upon speech acts. Though the threat of abjection is no longer exterior, it does not disappear; rather it becomes absorbed into speech, and thus the emergence "of a speaking being who is internally divided and, precisely through speech, does not cease purging himself of it." 136 Kristeva states her concern "with the ultimate interiorization of sin within discourses, by the final postulate that one does away with offense because of its enunciation before the One. An enunciation that amounts to a denunciation." 137

Although confession usually implies an oppressive moral authority, and the tale of a deed socially or religiously unacceptable, confessional discourse has also been granted a kind of therapeutic status in terms of its basic function: putting into words repressed feelings and ideas. Of course, as Foucault notes, the confessional mode lies at the heart of psychoanalytic practice, which, in its therapeutic variants, has taken the central place once occupied by the church in the domain of confessional discourse. From a Foucauldian perspective, the confession functions solely in terms of submission to an exteriorized source of power. However, the value granted to confessional discourse in psychoanalytic practice need not take on the insidious proportions that Foucault implies. Working in the 1920s, German psychoanalyst Theodore Reik declared confession a cultural tendency that simultaneously served two somewhat contradictory needs: one masochistic, and the other, more positively, as "the unconscious urge to achieve the loss of love." 138 In the Compulsion to Confess, Reik states that "verbal representations are necessary to make consciousness possible ... By the confession we become acquainted with ourselves. It offers the best possibility for self understanding and self-acceptance." 139 Reik's view of confession still carries moralistic undertones, but offers a more balanced position, one less severe than the historical convention of religious confession as the submission to an omniscient Other. This notion of psychoanalysis as the talking cure takes its lead From the self-fashioning that results through verbalization. In constructing an account of an experience it becomes part of consciousness and thus part of identity. Stating "this is how it happened" does not fix identity but provides a temporary construction, one that continually shifts through ongoing self-narration.

While not a confession in the conventional sense, Lisa Steele's A Very Personal Story (1974), acts to document the performative process of developing an awareness of an event: "until I did this tape, I had never completely recounted this experience. The tape is an attempt to remember as accurately as possible one day in my life."140 In A Very Personal Story, Lisa Steele laconically recounts the events of the day her mother died, eleven years previously. She walks into the room and sits facing the camera at close proximity. As if in direct conversation with the camera/viewer, the cropped shot reveals only Steele's face and hands which fidget about as she proceeds through her story. Steele tells us immediately that her mother died in 1963 when she was fifteen, beginning at the end, "so that there won't be any punch line." After quickly outlining the factual details she punctually states: "so, we can start now." Her direct, almost clinical approach proceeds like a kind of investigation. Not emotional or melodramatic, but not entirely cool either, Steele recounts in exacting detail many of the seemingly unimportant details of the day her mother died, including "grilled-toast breakfast" with her friend, Mary Kay.

Clive Robertson refers to Steele's approach as direct and secure, one that requires a degree of participation from the viewer: "you will be looked at through the lens of the camera. You will be treated less like a consumer and more like an accomplice." 141 Michael Renov makes reference to the easy accommodation of first-person narratives that video facilitates, noting that in many cases the substitution of the video apparatus abates the difficulty of verbalizing certain events in one's past. The presence of the camera or recorder is sufficient to spur self revelation. In the case of video confessions, the virtual presence of a partner-the imagined other effectuated by the technology-turns out to be a more powerful facilitator of emotion than flesh and blood interlocutors.

In A Very Personal Story Steele succeeds in producing a tape that is not necessarily about expressing anxieties or disclosing secrets. However, she does allude to the private nature of her specific story at the end of the tape when she states: "I felt like David Copperfield or Jane Eyre...I knew that I was really alone then. In a larger way too. But nobody really wants to hear about it-too much." If Colin Campbell draws on the genres of twentieth century fiction, Lisa Steele draws on those of the nineteenth, referencing the tradition of the apprenticeship novel in her work.142 A Very Personal Story foregrounds the performative aspects of narrating past events which are inextricably entwined in the present moment. Steele is very specific in her approach to using memory and narrative.

When I say personal narrative I do not mean anecdotes, and when I say memory I do not mean reminiscences. I try to transform memory into the present tense so that the act of remembering becomes the tape itself. I have done many tapes that are autobiographical in content, for which I never prepare a script and consequently never know the end when I start working. 143

Steele proceeds through this day in chronological fashion, coming back to the present to add the occasional remark. Recalling the trip home from Murrel Humphries' house, she states, "I didn't remember for years and years what happened that afternoon." She refers to the weather: "it was cold," but she also asserts that the temperature didn't bother her as she was young, and "had good circulation." When Steele reaches the point in the story where she arrives home to find an unusual scenario she casually remarks, "it was obvious that she was dead-just gone. I just knew, though I'd never seen a dead person. I thought about checking her pulse because I used to watch a lot of TV., and that's what they did. But it seemed silly. I guess I felt more like myself right then than I ever had before."

As a tape, A Very Personal Story provides an example of the type of intimate exchange the video medium can bring about. Steele did a series of four non-scripted tapes (1974-76) which were all informed by her interest in Proust's concept of involuntary memory and the recovery of a lost reality through a chance event, situation, or object. In this series Steele plays her characters: Tom Sherman, Dan Peoples; or accounts for them: herself, her mother; in all cases these tapes involve a process of spontaneous recall. In an interview with Clive Robertson, Steele states that she was specifically interested in the type of memory that "you don't have access to under normal circumstances." She continues:Proust was interesting in that he didn't use any extraordinary circumstances to call it up. I sometimes think that I have been able to do it, I think that anyone does it. It's memory that's been filed, memory that you can't normally remember. But the body remembers it, and it is completely unstructured in that it is not a smooth package of what you think you remembered ... [it is] frequently uncomfortable the effect being somewhat like psychological pimples. 144

Steele refers to this video process as an "arduous task," stating that she attempted to make A Very Personal Story a total of eight times over a period of three weeks. Recording in a corner of her apartment, Steele eventually cleared the background environment, took off her shirt, sat on the floor and propped her hands in front of her face. This particular situation seemed to work, so she turned on the camera, sat down in front of it, and proceeded without pause.145

Two of four tapes in this series are about Steele's mother, and she took up this theme again in A Life's Story of 1976. However, if A Life's Story serves to provide an account of Steele's deceased mother, A Very Personal Story provides Steele with an account of herself, through the narration of an event that left an indelible mark on her psyche.146 When not playing `herself,' Steele plays out her history through her own body, inhabiting characters and telling their stories, taking on their voices and speech patterns in the process.

A Very Personal Story is certainly indicative of a symbolic separation and its effect in transforming or altering Steele's own subjectivity: "I knew that my mother had gone away from her body-she'd never be back ... and no matter what anybody says, when somebody dies they really die, they never come back.. .I knew I was really alone then." Recounting the moment of loss seems to be Steele's central concern (consciously or unconsciously) in this tape. Similarly though, like any meander through the past, it functions as search to provide answers, and it invokes the desire for narrative. 147 This desire is most clearly expressed when she "looked around," trying to find something to tell her what had happened. She continues: "The dogs knew that something was wrong, but they didn't have the answers either. So, I went and got a mirror to check to see if she was dead, and she was."

Strategies of dissemblance/Strategies of coherence

If it can be stated that the structuralist mistrust of narrative and the pleasure of the text informed many early video practices, such mistrust did not necessarily lead to a wholesale avoidance of narrative genres, as Steele's and Campbell's tapes attest. However the narrative genres that each artist draws upon come from different places and their engagements serve different ends. Perhaps nascent in early works, Steele and Campbell both moved increasingly toward more complex narrative strategies in subsequent projects of the late seventies, hence taking up narrative "with a vengeance" (to borrow a phrase from de Lauretis). The suggestion implicit in de Lauretis' call for "Strategies of Coherence" was one that claimed the narrative genre for women as subjects, not simply by inserting women in the roles of the classic male protagonist, but rather through taking up narrative as a site of paradox and contradiction.148 The link that Barthes draws between narrative and Oedipus at the close of his essay of 1966, not only underscores narrative and narrativity as a function of the patriarchal symbolic, but also as a function that is (logically) heterosexually biased.

As a site of paradox and contradiction, narrative is similarly taken up and explored by Campbell as a strategy of dissemblance.149 In Campbell's work truth is endlessly deferred, self and identity are concepts to be questioned rather than reference points within which subjectivity can be located. Stuart Marshall finds that Campbell's work becomes most radical in "its challenge to the established order of storytelling where our subjectivity is fixed in the limited range of ideological positions..." He continues on a somewhat utopian note with reference to Campbell's larger `oeuvre': "[Campbell's] videotapes lead us towards the possibility of other social orders, other types of relations between the sexes, other economies of desire, other experiences of self-hood and other worlds of representation." 150

Though Steele may engage in a strategy of coherence, while Campbell engages in one of dissemblance, the viewer, in all of this, does not emerge unscathed. In both cases, she is situated in an active position, becoming the addressee, interpellated and made to bear witness. A passive viewing situation is precluded: it is not possible to merely follow the narrative as it unfolds, rather one participates in a narrative through completing it. In the three tapes discussed, the viewer becomes implicated within the work; she is asked to play out typically `invested' roles: the examiner (True/False); the interviewer (Sackville,I'm Yours); and the confidante (A Very Personal Story). As unscripted performances in front of the camera, these tapes are as much about the process of telling stories as they are about the stories themselves. Hence they echo Roland Barthes' statement of 1966: "...today to write is not "to tell," it is to say that one is telling, and to shift the entire referent ("what one says") to this act of locution." 151





NOTES
1121nterview, Feb. 1997.
113Lacan, p. vii "Preface to the English-Language Edition"
114 Preceding this remark Cameron states: "The tubular form of the lens fitting gives it more the resemblance of a finger (or a penis) than of the eye which its function seems to duplicate." He continues: "Modern art has often developed by refocusing our attention in ways which previously seemed inconsequential or perverse, and the anxiety caused by admitting this reply to consciousness ay be more likely to indicate its validity than otherwise," p. 107. See also p. 48 , chaps. 2 for for related concerns. Krauss similarly refers to a type of video art that undertakes a modernist ‘physical attack' on the camera.
115Work in this vein often presupposed the viewer's familiarity with these codes and the ways in which they operated. Roland Barthes' Mythologies, published in English in 1972, had a profound effect on video art and its engagement of the codes of media and spectacle. This type of work is perhaps best represented on the Canadian scene by General Idea. Michael Morris and Vincent Trasov. Similarly, somewhat earlier, Colin Campbell's `Art Star' in Sackville I'm Yours (1972) called up the related notion of glamour. Sackville I'm Yours clearly prefigures `The Woman from Malibu' series. and Campbell's continued play with notion of the media persona.
116Peggy Gale. Videote.xts (Toronto: The Power Plant, 1995), p. 36. Despite the relation between "truth claims" and narrative, Fiction is not necessarily narrative, and narrative can also be nonfiction. Concludes Barthes: "Hence we must discount the "realism" of narrative." Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), p.134. See also Hayden White, The Content of Form (Baltimore: John Hopkins University, Press, 1987): "The idea that narrative should be considered less as a form of representation than as a manner of speaking about events, whether real or imaginary, has been recently elaborated within a discussion of the relationship between discourse and narrative that has arisen in the wake of structuralism..." p.2.
117Autobiography and the truth/fiction dichotomy has undoubtedly been a central concern in video from the late seventies and into the present: however, unlike the spontaneous, unscripted performances that characterized much of the work in the early seventies, this genre moved toward increasingly complex scripted narratives which became standard in the late seventies and eighties. Editing techniques became much more sophisticated and thus enabled a different type of engagement with these ideas. Vera Frenkel's and Colin Campbell's work of the late seventies and into the eighties) indicates an ongoing interest in narrative codes and the truth/Fiction split in video work. However, there is quite clearly a shift in the use of narrative from 19`onward: this later work employed scripted narratives and expanded ideas through series.
118See intro
119See John Bentley Mays, "Lines on Video Art" Only Paper Today (4.3, 1977).
120John Bentley Mays, "Video Show Off to Promising Start" Globe and Mail ,Wed. March 19. 1980.
121Sara Diamond, "Sex Lies with Videotape" in Resolutions: Conremporary Video Pracrzces eds. Michael Renov and Erika Suderburg (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p.192.
122The doubled image in Janus, is also like Campbell's doubling of the self through the creation of another persona, Art Star, in Sackville I'm Yours. Like the photographic double of Campbell in Janus, Art Star is both a fake and a duplication of Campbell himself. Bruce Ferguson refers to this inescapable condition: "Doubling, then, is both an extension of oneself into another space, like the space of the story and a reversal that turns back to remind the storyteller of the other, and the space within herself. Doubling escapes the 'self' by entering the space of the story, and vet, it is an inevitable reminder of the inescapability of the `self that is being reproduced." Bruce Ferguson, "Otherwise Worldly" Colin Campbell.• Media Works (Winnipeg: Winnipeg Art Gallery, 1990), p. 12-13.
123This series spanned six tapes. Campbell later remarked in an artist's talk at the Power Plant in 1991, that "she just wouldn't shut up".

1261n "Strategies of Dissemblance," Stuart Marshall refers to "high modernist video" as a type of video practice that took as its primary aim the "demystification" of the seductive forms and images of broadcast television. Published in Colin Campbell: Media Works, 1972-1990 (Winnipeg Art Gallery, 1990), p. 25.
127Peggy Gale, p. 39.
128Campbell also appears, again with his shirt off and seemingly naked in True/ False. In retrospect, Campbell surmised : "I also think it had something to do with exhibitionist/voyeuristic dynamic: what if the camera slips, then what would you see?" Interview with author, Feb. 1997.
129In his essay, "Colin Campbell: Otherwise Worldly," Bruce Ferguson refers to the particularly Canadian predicament of producing work on the periphery: "For Campbell, like other Canadian artists at the time, the pseudonym expresses both the desire to he ocher than oneself and the irony of a condition in which one can't help but be oneself, however deviously, doubly and incompletely constructed." in Colin Campbell. Media Works, p. 8.
130Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume I (New York: Random House, 1978), p. 59.
131 Michael Renov. "Video Confessions" in Resolutions, p.82.
132Confession has been traditionally brought about through torture and executed under the law. Foucault articulates this relationship in both Discipline and Punish, and the History of Sexuality.
133Foucault, p. 61.
1351b 'd. p. 4.
I36Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 113. 137Ibid., p. 131.
138Theodore Reik. The Compulsion to Confess (New York: Farrar. Straus, and Cudihv, 1945), p. 206.
1391bid., p. 205.
140Lisa Steele, Artist's statement from Artists With Their Work series Art Gallery of Ontario. 1976. 14! Clive Robertson. "Lisa Steele: recent tapes" Centerfold vol-3 =5, June/July, 1979, p. 248 .
142Steele draws upon a type of fictional autobiographical novel in which the author narrates his or her own youth. Here I must thank Barbara Godard for this point of comparison.
143Lisa Steele. "Artist's Statement" from Artists With their Work series Art Gallery, of Ontario. 1976.
144Steele as quoted in Robertson, pp. 248-249.
145As explained in an interview I conducted with Lisa Steele, March 8, 1997.
146The idea of the body as a site for memory and personal history is central to most of Steele's early work. Steele is best known for her early tape, Birthday Suit with Scars and Defects(1974). Here she functions as the tour guide of her own body in, tracing her history through each of her scars.
1471t should be noted that both of these tapes could quite easily be read in light of a line of autobiographical film and video work (Chantal Ackerman, Mona Hatoum, Sara Diamond). This strain of work articulates the importance of the site of mother-daughter relations as one that potentially disrupts the primacy of an Oedipalized symbolic order. As productive as this type of analysis would be, I feel that this is a topic that would require another essay to develop properly. Furthermore, an elaboration of these issues within the scope of this paper veers too far away from the topic at hand.
148Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender (Bloomington and Indiana: Indiana University Press. 1987), p. 108.
149Stuart Marshall refers to Campbell's strategy as one of "dissemblance." referencing Christian Metz's statement about modernism's sadistic impulse to `break open the toy in order to see how it works.' Marshall suggests that if most modernist video attempted to demystify the conventions of broadcast television, through "presenting the viewer with the broken parts of the toy, Campbell's tape reassembled the parts, but put them back slightly out of place.", p. 24.
150"Marshall, p. 30.