(Catalogue, 1980/1981)

The three videotapes made by The Toronto artist Colin Campbell Modern Love (1978), Bad Girls (1979), He’s a Growing Boy-She’s Turning Fourty (1980), show the evolution of the artist’s personal life as well as the evolution of the trends he – or we all – are living in, and the evolution of the videotape scripts.

Modern Love is the story of Robin and Lamonte, Heidi and Pierre, all trying to have a non-involved relationship; a very immature and phony situation set in a New Wave frame. The two Modern Love women left alone by their respective old men become in Bad Girls – produced for the Cabana Room bar in Toronto – very successful as ‘The Robots.’ Campbell’s latest video He’s a Growing Boy-She’s Turning Fourty shows the loneliness of the woman, played by Martha of Martha and the Muffins and the homosexual. Visual: he on roller skates. Sound: Saturday Night Fever. Movement: a dancing scarf.

The three tapes duplicate the vulnerability of the modern music world and the creatures that call it home. The static images – look for the stills of the gay anti-hero – depict more their solitude than their exquisite beauty.

Colin Campbell’s tapes demand an unpredictable audience, not just an audience interested in art. The movie-smoothness of the video does not question art itself but life. Rather than equating the questionable value of the excessive spread of information on cable television with the solarized video-image of, for example, a bull in a Spanish town, it is perhaps more revealing to watch freaked-out creatures, not solarized, but real in black and white or colour, having to cope with their own information systems and other people’s interruptions.