(in Video by Artists, ed. Peggy Gale, Toronto: Art Metropole, 1976.) (excerpt)

Colin Campbell's videotapes seem frankly intimate, an investigation, even confession of personal truths and realities. But underlying and giving support to this revelatory aspect of his work lies a specific formal interest in image structure and a description of the medium itself, a continuing dialogue with that medium and with broader art questions.

Trained originally as a sculptor at the University of Winnipeg and Claremont Graduate School (California), Campbell first came into direct contact with video while teaching sculpture at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick. In February 1972 Dennis Oppenheim had been invited to the university to give a lecture on his sculpture, and to show tapes and talk with the students for a couple of days. Oppenheim made a vivid and lasting personal impression, and his video work lingered as a particular interest, combining as it did the formal and conceptual qualities of his sculpture while demanding an emotional, intuitive response on the part of the viewer to the images on the monitor. The piece Campbell particularly recalls documented a real-time performance, Oppenheim's hands pounding rhythmically on a black table until slowly, gradually, white sand on the flat surface was bounced and vibrated into view on the monitor, and then allowed to subside. Understanding what was happening on the screen seemed to take a long time, but the sound and gradually modulating image maintained the piece's compelling quality over the duration of the work, the "dividing of the darkness."

Campbell did not begin at once to think of video as a medium in which he might be interested personally, but by June of that same year he made his first tape.

Since then he has completed and exhibited some twenty-one videotape pieces, of which fifteen are still shown. (The other six were withdrawn because of image quality diminishing over time, or because the pieces seemed too tied to temporary circumstances to retain their relevance.) The twenty-one may give particular significance to the audio track, or show special concern for the nature and quality of the image, but in fact all the works have some overlap between these two tendencies; often the ones with the most highly-charged "confessional" statements are given the most formal image structure.

Nearly all the tapes feature Campbell's face of body, investigate his defenses or his personal myths. A dramatic performer, Campbell naturally enjoys seeing himself shown to advantage on the television monitor. But there are other issues too, a comparison of different media, a definition of these media in visual terms. These concerns weave through all his work.

True/False (1972) reads at first like a police photo—the artist is seen in full profile, then full face, flatly reciting a long list of potentially embarrassing (or incriminating) statements ("I am heterosexual. I snort coke. I collect pornography.") After each sentence are the affirmations "true...false" so that we are give both confession and denial. We are challenged to be as direct and candid as he has been; after all, he looked us in the eye when he said all that.

Sackville I'm Yours (1972) involves a different sort of comparison, an
ironic play on the television interview format. We meet Art Star, hear him answer (unspoken) questions about his experiences while in Sackville. Sackville is such a perfect name for a town—how could a Sackville have a STAR of any sort? Although the humour of the tales retain undercurrents of bitterness and hurt, the talk-show format is cool and uninvolved. We respond at once to the wit and irony, the implied glamour and urbanity of our elegant guest. He is every inch the successful TV personality, playing to the cameras.

Smile (1972) carries the connotations of Art Star a further step, a frozen parting of the lips in a glassy pleasure-grimace, with a final "thank-you" to the unseen photographers and interviewers. This is a man familiar with mirrors and with the significance of surface.

Real Split, This is The Way I Really Am, Janus and Shoot from 1972 and 1973 all depend directly on surface appearances for their construction as well as their final look; Campbell in each case used the monitor image to direct his position and movements before the camera, and to influence his mood-in-action as the piece progressed.

Real Split shows half the screen filled with a life-size photo of the left side of Campbell's face; the remainder of his face fits appropriately into the rest of the screen. We watch silently as the artist considers his image, keeping his real face carefully in line with the paper one; he lights a cigarette and then slowly, tentatively at first, begins to apply stage makeup to the "live" face; first a white base, to match the pallor of the photo, but then darker sticks to trace out shadows, lines, into a grotesque mask, a Dorian Gray portrait of hideous deformation. A comment on, perhaps, or contrast with, the smoothly handsome photograph abutting the real face, suggesting masks adopted as an everyday protection for an inner self-doubt. He says now that the intention of the work was to make a visual statement comparing appearances/impressions of photography and reality via video, but the Dorian Gray analogy is too attractive to dismiss; many of these early works are indeed acknowledged as dealing at least implicitly with personal trauma.

This is the Way I Really Am implies an answer. This time we see the artist's nude body split down the centre, one half shaved and glistening with oil, the other in its rougher masculine form. Cued by the monitor image, Campbell shows us each segment of his head and body in turn, ordered fragments up and down each side, all the while repeating exhaustingly, "This is the way I really am." It is not for nothing that his zodiacal sign is Gemini, twins, for we have here an explicit visual description of his dual personality.

Janus is even more specific, as Campbell confronts face-to-face a full-length, full-size nude photo of himself, slowly running his hand over the (cardboard) surface. As in Real Split we find ourselves comparing a live image to a paper image, and find both of them shallowly but equally sculptural on the television screen. The formal, visual comparison is as interesting as the apparent narcissism and sexual innuendo of the gently stroking, the final kiss.

Real Split, This is the Way I Really Am and Janus all give us a
comparison of two apparently equal halves, a split in the visual or verbal information. The construction of the works is rigorously clean and formal, while the ideas being probed are of desperate personal importance. The dichotomy continues throughout Campbell's work.

Shoot deflects the personal references, considers broader issues of tension buildup and patterns of prediction. We see both the apparently nude Campbell and a partially-hidden (clothed) photographer, facing themselves in a mirror we cannot see. Campbell tries to anticipate the 'click' from behind him indicating that a photograph is being taken, so that he may move to cover his nudity; the video camera records this mind-game interplay between the two. Once again we have an exchange between mirrors, monitors, and recording cameras... on both actual (physical) and psychological levels.

It is as if recording a situation will reveal something otherwise invisible, or exorcise some natural demon: offering a choice of realities (two halves of a live self, or one half self, one half photo) was a way of getting at truths about himself he would otherwise have to hide. Yet the potential emotional content never overshadows the spare and elegant structure of the pieces; form and content interact but each retains its strength and forcefulness.

This Is An Edit/This is Real (1974) is less highly-charged personally, but its levels of meaning are presented no less knowingly. The piece traces Campbell's biography through old snapshots, descriptions, lists of names, views of the artist today, and the whole is interspersed with the written signs "This is an edit" or "This is real." We are left with a general confusion of information, a jumbled order of events, with words and images not necessarily corresponding, and with a fragmentary tinkle of piano music further breaking up the continuity. Overall we are reminded again and again that even the "real" facts have been edited, reassembled, annotated, perhaps modified, for our consumption. It is a perfect commentary on mediation, on history and news, on the notion of "real" itself. Reference to critics' views on the nature of video, on its praiseworthy ability to capture and record "real-time" and "simultaneity," and further underpinning for this sly and witty commentary; visual experience validates nothing.

I'm a Voyeur continues these themes though now the action is seen through two sets of windows, as if a telephoto lens were focused on an apartment across the street. We see ordinary activities: a man (Campbell himself) typing, reading, going about daily personal tasks as an insinuating, singsong voice-over coaxes "Come on, show me. I can see you but you don't know I'm here." The story is ostensibly one of a peeping-tom getting a kick out of spying on his neighbour but, more interestingly, we are also made aware of the video artist using his tools to investigate himself. By a quirk of the floor plan in his apartment at the time, Campbell was able to be both star and cameraman for the piece: as director, editor and cast, he shows the circularity and self-referentiality of the situation to be all the more complete. Irony is used to its fullest extent.

Until the end of 1973 photographs (usually of himself) played a key role, Campbell's video work acting either as foil to a 'live' image or as commentary to the video image. Photographs are a part of everyone's memory and vocabulary today, tangible records of a moment seen. But we must accommodate the distorted perspective, the removal of context, as a fragment of 'then' is brought into 'now' for evaluation.

During 1974, Campbell's video camera was turned outwards onto the passing world as he sought to exteriorize his work, become an observer of others. Toward the end of the year, with such works as I'm a Voyeur, the windows through which he viewed the world had themselves been incorporated explicitly into the view; these windows have remained both a formal and metaphorical device in all of his work since. Somehow, seeing events through a window seems more revealing than seeing them directly. On the other side of the glass, people become actors for us, unaware of any audience, unreservedly revealing themselves through their actions. They are framed, separated from their daily context; each is self-contained, self-referring, without history or future. Formally, the window frame outlines the image, the crossbars locating the centre, dividing the view into quadrants, focusing like the sightlines of a rifle or periscope.

Mirrors can act similarly, giving objectivity and distance, permitting a 'third-person' quality. Mirrors offer an implied ongoing judgment, and are a visible record of transience. The video monitor is itself a mirror although it does not reverse its world as would an ordinary reflective surface. All our illusions of reality are given back to us whole, and equally.

Windows are used as tools, as a means of seeing through a situation, yet their formal beauty is an important factor as well. Their clean right angles, edges and bars dividing the monitor's surface, give an almost painterly quality to recent works such as Secrets and Hindsight (1975), while the use of light itself to create forms and texture recalls Campbell's origins as a sculptor.

Windows and mirrors: framing, piercing, enlightening, reflecting. offering a revised context. Campbell's continuing dialogue with his medium, his comparison of video form/light with photography, with sculpture, with the concerns of conceptual artists and image-makers,
all combine to strengthen and substantiate his work. The compelling intimacy of the medium is matched by its coolness—as the personal revelation and dissection of Campbell's content is offset by the elegant formalist and structure of its form. Two halves working in tandem.