(File Magazine Fall 1975)

It is September 24th, 1974. Colin Campbell, with some trepidation, attends his own opening of recent videotapes at Toronto’s A Space gallery. Colin has reasons for his mixed feelings: a series of difficulties between himself and the A Space staff which have still not been resolved. Nevertheless it is an opening and everyone is on best behaviour and those jagged tongues turn to flapping flesh for an evening of uninterrupted gossip – uninterrupted, in fact, even by Colin’s four excellent videotapes.

The crowd is large and noisy, a record turnout. Peggy Gale of the Canada Council is sitting upright beneath her Sassooned hair watching Colin’s tapes with a concentration that is admirable in the midst of this din. Like all Sassoon hair, hers has a magical softness, a gloss, no, not just a gloss but the glistening aura of health that makes Sassoon cuts the unmistakable style they are. Fernando, Sassoon’s artistic director for North America, recently of the Beverley Hills salon, will explain it thus: it is not the styling but the Precision Cut which characterizes the Sassoon look. Take Peggy, for sample. All she has to do when she get up in the morning is wash her hair, run her fingers through it as it dries, yes comb it with her fingers, perhaps a delicate blow-dry, and there it is – fresh from beneath Fernando’s magic fingers… and every time; it is not the style you see, but the Precision Cut.

Peggy has seen Colin’s tapes before, probably several times, but she is watching with an admirable concentration, and she has made a special trip from Ottawa to pay homage to his remarkable work with her clear thinking and her glossy hair.

Sandy Stagg, jagged proprietor of Amelia Earhart Originals, is finding concentration difficult. Like most people at an opening, Sandy is not too intent on the work. Perhaps she came to see who else had come to see who else was there. Her razor-sharp chin swivels right and left, providing the full-profile view that shows to such advantage Sassoon’s most ambitious cut by Sassoon’s Toronto director, Mary Lou. The cut is daringly aggressive: a two-layered ledge dyed blonde and deep red, in layers, like a Chinese pagoda. Sandy Stagg, delighted by this hard-edge confection has been aggressively promoting this aboriginal vision to her friends and the results are obvious here tonight. The crowd is ell-laced with ex-hippies, now splendid in guises of jagged sophistication. Take Isobel Harry, for example. Her hair is an inverted triangle of tight curls, massed with pyramidal precision (it’s the Precision Cut) fro the base of her flawless neck to the summit of her sensibility. Flat top. Arcane.

One week later, October first, 1974, Isobel Harry nurses her fifth champagne on the second floor of Sassoon’s Toronto salon. Isobel’s eyes sparkle like Brenda Starr’s and her massed hair frames a giddy grin in the midst of this massed concentration of reporters, photographers, models and of course Vidal Sassoon himself. The afternoon proceeds in a succession of charming alarming models descending staircases to execute Tai-chi gestures in a suspicious resemblance to mid-sixties interpretive dance. In fact, at this moment, another faceless model is descending the white staircase into the white room, her hair massed just like Isobel’s but BIGGER!

My God! It stretches out almost a foot to each side, cantilevered with a daring that would have unnerved Frank Lloyd Wright… and it’s jet-black, obsidian-black, AZTEC-BLACK! And edged with blood red, as Fernando explains, to give it softness. Softness? That thing’s so architectonic it could be clipped out of a yew bush! The girl bends her head and gives it a hard shake. The audience holds its breath, then gasps, as the head swings down like an axe and the hair flattens out into its perfect architectonic symmetry cantilevered like hell.

Isobel loves it. She loves the whole thing. She adores Vidal Sassoon. She worships Mary Lou. She’s in love with Fernando. Fernando is Mexican. His Aztec flavour is familiar, exotic, third world. In his purple suit and Cuban heels he’s the perfect counterpoint to Vidal’s Anglo-Saxon dimples. Vidal himself is a bundle of charm, a star with that Liberace grin that leaves the matrons melting under the weight of their geometric precision cuts. His flawless Hollywood smile scatters starbursts in Isobel’s busy camera.

Vidal Sassoon is preparing for the coup de grace, that final touch of theatre which will leave the press-men gasping, like fish out of water. Note now the special brilliance with which he will completely upstage his own staff- the smooth Fernando, the brilliant Mary Lou – without the slightest intimation of a put-down. For Vidal is at his best against a brilliant background. Fernando’s fingers may be deft, May Lou’s vision may be exacting, but Vidal himself is beyond compare, he is not a hairdresser, but the myth of a hairdresser, he is the magician weaving Glamour out of hair.

His pretty apprentice with the long shining tresses is seated on a throne, covered with a vast white sheet. The muzak stops. Suspense rises. Vidal reaches beneath the sheet with his own magic scissors and snips around a bit. He flashes his dimples. He flaunts the artist’s palette, vivid with orange and red. He daubs the magic brush in thick paint and pokes under the cover. He pokes her in the nose, by mistake and she jumps a bit, just to prove she’s there. A bit of abracadabra and the girl is unveiled – a sleek futuristic profile merges from the white cocoon, the hair pulled back in a Buck Rogers flourish, a horseshoe of mustard yellow and fluorescent orange painted like a wound around the ear. The shock is immediate and inspired: the effect I at once pre-Raphaelite and exotic. Her skull screams with a parrot yellow, toucan orange. To her breasts she clasps a blue and orange Bird-of-Paradise. The applause is immediate, thunderous.

The show is over. Isobel has another quiche or two, more champagne, a sausage roll, a tiny sandwich so delicate it melts in your mouth, a crispy roll stuffed with smoked salmon and fresh sliced tomatoes. She considers Vidal Sassoon, the dimples and artifice of this extraordinary man. It is not the T’ai Chi, not the Precision Cut, not the geometric coiffures or the Aztec massings the press has come to see, but this single silly stroke of genius. Isobel considers once more that final moment: the pre-Raphaelite whimsy and the head in parrot-profile and the Bird-of-Paradise at the breast. What is about the profile that is so incurably romantic, like a hatchet, like a bird in flight. What is it about the profile that gives it impetus? Direction? Momentum?

Isobel looks around. SandyStagg is there too, talking Tom Oatman and Bernadette Andrews, the gossip-columnist. Bernadette is wearing a hat, perhaps wisely, as her hair is not cut by Sasoons. This girl knows her ethics. Edie Frankel is looking frankly shellacked. Mary Lou has appeared form nowhere and is gliding around the room in tiny Chinese slippers like a cloud of perfume and behind her Isobel hears a matronly figure applauding the parrot-lady: “My dear, you were the Spirit of Truth and Beauty! You have every reason to be proud! You were the essence of Sincerity itself!”

This is all too super. Sandy Stagg, for example, wishes life were always like this. She thinks back to the A Space opening one week previous, the gossip party centered on Colin Campbell’s tapes:

First there was the beer – it costs fifty cents and there were no glasses. Well, that’s all right, they don’t have much money. Besides, it’s a masculine aesthetic: You’re supposed to come in our work boots and even you don’t, its presumed your underwear gave out five years ago and you never replaced it. Sandy is not being cruel. This is not a matter of grooming, but of style. Take marine Lewis, for example, Enfant Terrible of the Canadian art scene, with her nipple hanging out a rip in her koochee granny-dress… yes, by god, it’s plum hanging out. What a stroke of genius! One month later A Space’s bachelor aesthetic will be threatened by an explosion of political hysterics, but for the time being its well entrenched in its own history.

And Colin. Sandy thinks about Colin. Colin looking a little glum. It’s his show, after all, but the delicacy of his tapes is lost in the crowd. His work is intimate work for an intimate medium and it doesn’t stand up well to the ravages of a cocktail party, cocktails or not.

Colin Campbell is not a hairdresser. Nevertheless his videotapes feature his black hair, carefully pressed into a pyramidal profile with a hot iron. Colin, word has it, uses Amino-pon shampoo, the shampoo Mary-Lou favoured until Sassoon emerged with his own superior brand. In Colin’s latest tape California, which is NOT in this show, the profile is repeatedly featured, immobile, interrupting head-on shots of his friends and lover. While the head-on shots are implicitly in an attitude of listening, Colin’s profile is in flight, turning elsewhere, opaque. The profile presents but a single eye.

Let us call Colin a narrative artist. The four tapes featured in this show Love Life, for example, which Peggy is now watching accumulate rather than develop, accumulate the emotional fall-out from the events of his daily life through the strong distancing screen of this intimate medium.

A primitive form of television, ½” video works like a tape recorder and like a tape recorder that’s been around awhile it accumulates a montage of fragmented conversations, gesture, moments. In Colin’s case this assemblage is careful and pre-ordered, built up from a base series of image interrupted by stills and portraits The tapes are not re-edited from “raw footage” but constructed in finished form, layer added upon layer until the final assemblage is complete. There is an edge of craft here which should be appreciated. Certainly Peggy Gale, with her practiced vision, appreciates the craft and sensibility of these tapes. Certainly marine Lewis, with tears in her eyes, appreciates the cunning aesthetic of these exquisite tapes. Certainly Sandy Stagg, as she thinks of Colin Campbell and his resemblance to previous lovers, appreciates Colin’s profile flipping in and out of context in the middle of a gabbling crowd drinking beer they paid fifty cents for. Certainly all those Sassooned profiles – Elke Hayden, Suzette Smith, Tom Oatman, myself and all the others – must appreciate the romantic complexity of Colin Campbell’s recent tapes.

Eight days later, one day after Isobel Harry has downed six champagnes and Sandy Stagg has dropped a chocolate creampuff on my shoe, Colin Campbell sees an extraordinary profile through a bank window, a girl with Buck Rogers hair, parrot streaks of yellow and orange about her ear. Colin has never stepped inside Sassoon’s salon. Nevertheless he recognizes immediately the sensibility: the emphasis on the art, raw with colour, the head turned in flight, one eye blinking in the flattened flesh.

As with video, this concern with the profile flattens and removes the sense of involvement. The distancing is immediate, desirable and poetic.