(Originally published in: Globe and Mail, February 26, 1985)

The scene is inside the Toronto-Dominion Centre. Robin, a Xerox machine operator and the heroine of Colin Campbell’s videotape Modern Love, is musing befuddledly about her kinky night with the arch-sleazo, La Monte Del Monte. “All those little machines and instruments,” she wonders aloud. “And I always thought a French tickler was some kind of bilingual joke.”

Then Robin (played by the artist himself) fecklessly pulls at her long ponytail and purses her face into an expression that’s wistful and bewildered – and which could serve as a non-verbal caption for all Campbell’s work in the selection now available for viewing at Artculture Resource Centre, 658 Queen Street West.

Since coming to Toronto fifteen years ago, the Manitoba-born artist has created some 40 videotapes in various keys and modes – conceptual and narrative, talky and not, sometimes featuring a cast of actors and sometimes only himself. But like Robin’s quizzical look, one theme keeps coming up again and again in Campbell’s work. That theme is innocence.

This survey of five tapes, organized by Toronto artist Kim Tomczak and ARC co-ordinator Derek Dowden, doesn’t encompass all of Campbell’s tapes about innocents abroad in the wicked world. The official line-up here includes parts of a longer work called The Woman from Malibu series (1976-77) which features a California matron (played by Campbell) groping through the clichés of her suburban existence for some understanding of her husband’s mysterious death – only to find her own, equally enigmatic death at the end of the line.

As well there are all three parts of the deadpan Modern Love (1979) in which Robin, the office temp from Thornhill, Ontario, gets treated mean by La Monte Del Monte. Missing, however, is a wonderful tape called Bad Girls (1980). A souvenir-album from the late 1970s, when Toronto’s video artists hung out at the grubby Spadina Hotel, the tape follows Robin through her rise to rock stardom, and through much mean treatment by her vicious, drug-snorting manager (Susan Britton).

Even if it doesn’t have everything, this selection does offer a lot – in a package that excluded technical slickness and surface glitz. Like Toronto’s other video pioneers launched in the early 1970s – one thinks of Tom Sherman, Lisa Steele, Rodney Werden and John Watt – Campbell has deliberately kept to informal styles and scripts, cheap and homespun sets and casts often made up of the artist’s friends. Such tactics continue to give Campbell’s work a freshness and freedom too often missing from elaborate studio productions of video art.

But the show does give some excellent, key results of Campbell’s long involvement with his chosen topic. The tapes here offer concentrated views of innocent people who, with only old habits to support them, have been thrown into crisis by some force or another. In Robin’s case, that force is a sexual predator; for the Woman from Malibu it’s the crazy city from which husband and home once protected her. Much of the humour and ironic vitality in these tapes comes from Campbell’s attention to the all-too-familiar sexual and personal complicities at work among all parties in every intimate relationship.

For Campbell, woman represents the tender, vulnerable, passionate side of human life, which sex stereotyping denies to men. Feminists may be dismayed by his choice of accident-prone, rather empty-headed women – played by the artist in a marvelously campy way – to be his exemplars of vulnerability. Be that as it may, Colin Campbell has over the years created a funky, homemade, smart body of work on this hard topic. A survey of the artist’s tape more complete than this one is surely in order.