The New Museum, New York, 1981

Eleanor Antin, Mr. Apology, Colin Campbell, Bruce Charlesworth, Colette, Redd Ekks, Lynn Hershman, James Hill, Martial Westburg.

“Persona” explores the territory of the surrogate self, alter ego, disguise or alias. These concepts, originating with Duchamp’s Rrose Sélavy, have generated a considerable amount of attention from artists who have sought alternative means for self-expression. Whether it involves a process of radical physical transformation or intangible alteration, the acquisition of personae by these nine artists is one indication of a heightened self-awareness and increased use of autobiography in recent art.

Since 1972, the year that he abandoned sculpture for video, Colin Campbell has been evolving several aspects of his sensibility which could be described as Duchampian. In his first two tapes he created and played “Art Star,” a thinly veiled alter ego, an art celebrity “toughing it out in rural New Brunswick.” Campbell, dissatisfied with his university teaching position, used this character to harshly criticize his employers without having to answer directly to them. Strictly speaking, Campbell spoke through Art Star.

The titles of the tapes Campbell made form 1972-74 demonstrate a Duchampian preoccupation with dichotomies, contradictions and autobiography. In 1976, moving from his home in Toronto to southern California for nine months, Campbell produced his first mature works in video. The Women from Malibu Series (1976-77) takes its name from the female persona Campbell evolved over the six tapes, and is based on a newspaper article about a woman who witnessed the death of her husband who was killed mountain climbing in the Himalayas. What struck Campbell was not simply the event, but rather the apparent lack of emotion revealed in the woman’s quoted remarks. Her emphasis on a seemingly irrelevant inventory of details appeared to Campbell somehow paradigmatic of the human condition. He was moved to project the fictional events that might accompany such a severe trauma by assuming her identity and creating a visual and psychological composite of this woman. Campbell interprets her compelling need to try to understand the reality which surrounds her by obsessively cataloging precise observations. Through the artist’s narrative ingenuity, these pieces of information accumulate, not to provide an answer, but to articulate a syndrome of personal incarceration and cultural malaise.

The opening monologue in The Women from Malibu (1976), the first tape in the series, is a verbatim quotation from the newspaper interviews. This documentary data is pointedly contrasted with ambiguous fiction and narrative disjunctions Campbell inserts. In addition, all the tapes are deliberately restrained in form and technique so that the complex verbal dimension is tempered by a minimal number of shots, camera movements, supporting props, and players. This initial tape is comprised of only four shots. The first is a facial close-up of the artist made up as the woman, wearing large earrings, dark sunglasses, and a blonde wig. After her somber monolgue is completed, the camera pans left and zooms out for an extended view of French doors in the interior. The panes are covered by shades. Only a small opening to the outside is made visible by a slight crack in the doors as the Platters’ nostalgic Twilight Time plays in the background.

The second shot shows the woman’s hand in close-up as another lavishly detailed saga verbally unfolds. A title is then inserted reading, “She spent the entire afternoon photographing.” Subsequently, a medium-long shot reveals Campbell, dressed in a dark shirt, posing as a male model with the young woman takes a light meter reading and sets up a self-timed photographs of the two of them. While this refers to the process of making the tape, since the woman is actually his assistant, it is also a way of signing the piece, with his own image out of costume. Simultaneously, it functions as a disclaimer with regard to the authenticity of this transvestite persona.

It should be noted that throughout the series, Campbell’s male identity is never totally inaccessible to the viewer. As one writer described it: “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 element in a perverse collage.” (A.A. Bronson)

Indeed, he made deliberate attempts to preserve the “non-actor” aspects of this video performance. Significantly, although the tapes were scripted, they generally required only a single take.

The narrative impact is compounded as the woman’s quandaries expand over the six tapes. Yet there is never any urgency to her observations. The suffocating anecdotal material, extracted from the southern California milieu, is delivered as caricature, setting her problems into absurd relief. Due to Campbell’s intuitive discipline, however, the melodramatic soap opera qualities which are delineated are never truly achieved.

In The Temperature in Lima (1976), the second tape, the artist narrates a poignantly self-effacing confession of a transvestite’s ambivalence and painful introspection. This extremely subjective narration ends with a close-up of the Woman from Malibu. As she finishes speaking, the camera slowly zooms out, revealing that she is standing at a window inside a motel room. The camera is outside, effectively placing the viewer in the disconcerting position of a voyeur. The window’s Venetian blinds, not visible earlier in the shot, articulate her confinement in an emotional stasis – visually situated in this frame which forms the metaphorical threshold between interior (fictional/subjective) and exterior (factual/objective) spaces.

Similarly, the last tape in the series, Hollywood and Vine (1977) opens with a full-screen shot from the window of a car traveling on a Los Angeles freeway. The movement of the cityscape appears rapid and constant. The camera then zooms out to reveal that the viewer is actually seeing a playback of a tape over a monitor within another scene. As the angle of vision opens up further, the artist is visible to the left, at a mirror applying his make-up, earrings, and other female paraphernalia as he/she begins to narrate another soliloquy on severe alienation and absurd death. Here the voyeuristic metaphor is further reaching than in the earlier tape inasmuch as the viewer is given a choice. The compelling desire to watch what is on the screen-within-the-screen is partially qualified by the need to witness Campbell’s process of sexual transformation. Furthermore, the act of making-up this woman from the artist’s male face is analogous to the process of frame composition and editing which is intrinsic to the conventions of narrative and spatial illusionism in video.

This last tape ends with a poignant shot of the woman walking in to the vast Mojave Desert in search of pony skeletons which represent an aberrant attachment to her late husband. In a sense, the surrealistic ambience of this shot summarizes and works retroactively to establish the mood for the previous five tapes.

Colin Campbell’s Woman from Malibu, a persona that seems to grow directly out of Duchamp’s notion of sexuality as embodied in Rrose Sélavy, is also a pointed portrait of American society. The extension of Duchamp’s pose and activities into a fully realized narrative series, literally acted out by Campbell, marks a significant contribution to video, a medium notable for its distinctly intimate nature.