(Originally published in: Performance by Artists ed. By A.A. Bronson and Peggy Gale, 1979)

Here in Toronto, surrounded by the signs of an affluent, middle-class and self-satisfied culture, fed by the enlightened, if contested patronage of the Canada Council, our artists wander, cultural zombies in the land of the living dead. Touched by the fever of perverted eroticism, inverted rationale called ‘sensibility’ and the sibilant persistence of social relevance, they careen through the bohemian-machine of Toronto’s artist-run institutions, meeting expectations like modern kids must with oedipal parents: schizophrenically. Experiencing culture in Canada has always implied the voyeuristic. We experience through the media what the rest of the world takes for granted as reality. Through the applied eye of our television sets we see music, art, film, current events as a succession of fictional events, silent-movie classics impersonating reality. Or is it the other way around? Are we the silent movie masses performing to the instructions of an invisible Cecil B. DeMille, the United States itself?

As artists, as individuals, our sense of reality is unfixed, de-centered, eccentric. One thing could just as easily be true as another. Thus we are the suggestible zombies of which I write in this article, ambisexual, ambimoral, catholic in our experience of life: it is important that we meet all value systems set by the outside world, or that we think the outside world might set. Hence we are socialistic, yet capitalistic, humorous, yet serious, big hearted but practical, intellectual, glamorous, and nice-as-pie. We are zombies. We have moved beyond beat alienation and hip pseudo-involvement to exist quite happily, thank you, in the land of the creatively comatose.

In the last few years writers have been discussing autobiography and narcissism in contemporary art, and now they are writing about eroticism. Each of these themes is but an aspect: the artist is interested neither in story-telling nor confession, but rather in a slow transmutation of the artist himself into an animated object, a machinic conjunction (hence disjunction) of sounds/limbs/histories meant to be observed. This year eroticism too will provide tangential access to the trance-like state of the contemporary artist, onto the surface of his desire.

As the micro-politics of our capitalist lifestyle forces each of us, each part of our bodies, into productive, co-ordinated machines, then there is a natural byproduct. The flip side of the Ford fantasy (computerized nor not) is the desiring machine automaton/auto-moron.

Perhaps it is our generation’s experience of reality through the television set that has set in close union performance and video. With the support of the Canada Council and a long history of performance involvement, it has been possible to act out the theories about which artists in other countries could only speculate.

Canadian artists leapt into the video/performance conjunction as early as the mid-sixties: Intermedia, in Vancouver and Inter-systems in Toronto were both artists’ groups exploring group co-operation and technology/performance conjunctions as distinct relevant working styles/lifestyles. Such early groups have long since transformed into the sophisticated schizophrenia of Canada’s hyperactive performance/video scene, a scene which focuses particularly at the Western Front and Pumps in Vancouver, and in the Queen Street West are of Toronto.

This article is a commentary on the work of five Toronto artists: Colin Campbell, Lisa Steele, Elizabeth Chitty, David Buchan and Susan Britton. The comments are not intended as a thorough critique of their work, but rather as an initial definition of a specific genre of activity.

Colin Campbell

Colin Campbell is not a performance artist. Nevertheless, his videotapes, like those of many Toronto artists, involve eccentric personal performances, in apparently narrative structure. In fact, Colin Campbell’s last eight tapes feature himself as the ‘star’ (sometimes only) performer.

The emphasis on alienated, detached behaviour, which in the earlier ‘New York’; series reached almost expressionistic heights, has not developed into a more complex form.

In the Women from Malibu series of 1977. Colin Campbell plays the part of a caricatured middle-aged woman from California. Almost all the tapes follow the same visual format: head and shoulders conventional framing, in which the woman from Malibu looks out upon us, as if into a mirror. Her obsessive monologues juxtapose eccentric detail in lengthy series, not so much to describe either her character or a plot, as to map out the culture surrounding her, as if to see her in negative relief. And with each word spoken, phrase after phrase assembled with acute deliberation, the portrait that is painted is an almost Martian construct of femininity: the insistence upon, for example, salads in which one finds a strict mathematical (but verbal) order of natural elements in almost Japanese artificiality: one cherry tomato, two squares of green pepper, three green onions, and so on. The salad and the woman from Malibu each consist of a linear assemblage of natural elements added in time… a strictly limited vocabulary of gestures and objects: the wig, the lipstick, the false eyelashes like quotation marks, all on the traditional modernist background of white walls and white make-up. Cultural details provide the spots of colour on this flat ground; the Mojave Desert, pony skeletons, leisure suits and Farrah-Fawcett-Majors are dropped into the monologue in nasty little anecdotes actually taken from California newspapers.

In the last tape in the series, Colin Campbell is revealed at the dressing table, putting on his feminine guise as he talks. Beside him sits a video monitor showing the desert highway from a moving car window. The artist is not so much revealed as a drag queen, a man in disguise, as he is revealed as a video artist. In the final scene, he walks out into the desert and disappears into the horizon, a scene which signified more romanticism than it actually contains, thus setting the tone for all that precedes it.

Colin Campbell cross-dressing is not a drag queen. He doesn’t try to become, or even impersonate, a woman. Rather, he wears the clothes and gestures as individual significations, each article of clothing, each gesture, each intonation a discrete elements in a perverse collage. He never attempts illusion, acting, but rather places in disjunction male and female elements. The result is, on the one hand, humour; on the other, the inhuman, the macabre.

In his most recent videotape, Modern Love, Colin Campbell appears as Robin, a much more subtle form of androgyny: note the bisexual name. the make-up too is more subtle, as are the gestures. But everything signifies innocent femininity while in fact portraying nothing of the kind. Colin’s true age and sex are all too visible behind the transparent mask… no, not mask, but behind the sparse vocabulary of gestures and visuals which signify his alteration. It is this conflict between image and signification that creates the skeleton upon which the story hangs.

Robin is a ‘punkette.’ She works a Xerox machine by day and hangs out at the Beverley Tavern at night, listening to Martha and the Muffins, a local punk band. Now in fact Colin Campbell works at a stock brokerage and his work involves operating a Xerox machine, and he does occasionally hang out at the Beverley Tavern, a Toronto locale, especially when Martha and the Muffins are playing. (As an aside, it’s interesting to note that Martha herself is an art student working in video.) It is here that Robin/Colin meets La Monte del Monte, broadly-painted show-biz hustler, who seeps Robin off her feet and empties her of money, food and sex before abandon her in the name of ‘modern love’ an hour and a half of video later. La Monte del Monte is a character created by and played by David Buchan, in fact a recurring character in his own work, as we shall we see later.

The soap opera scenes, very dryly played, are interrupted sporadically by odd-ball love scenes between two sexual clichés: the German blond Bombshell, played by Rodney Werden, and the suave French playboy, played by Susan Britton. These two dally on screen in a constant struggle to find a common language of their love, quite literally, as she speaks pidgin German while he speaks pidgin French. Like cuckoo clock characters, they can never come together.

Both Rodney Werden and Susan Britton are video artists themselves, and both have incorporated elements of performance into their own work. Through cross-dressing, Colin removes them from the context of their own work, while heightening the violent struggle between actuality and signification: Heidi wears a man’s watch, Pierre’s mustache is patently attaché, and neither of them can speak a word in their supposed mother tongues. Nonetheless, their performances are brilliant. The terse articulation of cultural signifiers is framed and accented by the lack of atmospheric or ambient detail.

While Heidi and Pierre can find no words for their love, Robin and Monte can do nothing but talk. The bloated rhetoric of love and sex transactions builds through the main body of the tape, and ends in a rapid fizzle, in which the rhetoric unwinds itself into damp little strings of platitudes. It is this attention to the signifiers and conventions of sex and love in our society that keep the tape from veering into pure camp.