Originally published in Colin Campbell Media Works, ed. Bruce Ferguson, Winnipeg, Winnipeg Art Gallery, 1991.

A retrospective is an institutional category which organizes a complex of artistic productions. Its ruling premise is to eliminate paradoxes, ellipses, ambiguities, contradictions, latencies, and deformations to produce a smooth narrative of individual progress and aesthetic development. A retrospective overview surveys the meanings of an artist's work, making the meanings even more meaningful by historicizing art which in turn serves the re-viewer's own authority as much as it does that of the artist's. A retrospective necessarily makes claims for cogency and comprehensiveness.

For almost two decades I have been influenced by the restless spirit of Colin Campbell's work. Making an all-encompassing historical claim for it would be to do it a comfortable textual justice which it neither needs, wants, nor deserves. It would make me an accomplice in a conservative desire that his work refuses to engage. I will instead ‘co-author' this text by respecting a certain incoherency and a lack of control which parallels the split motivations between intuition and social comment in Campbell's own texts. Here, I favor a Campbellesque flirtation with loss of power and a confusion of desires. Such a method, however, is no more capricious than Campbell's, which is always both serious and comedic. When faced with his work I become aware that I can do no more than express why I am engaged by it and why I think this is so. I can do no more than express what a daunting task it is to turn works that have such impact on my psyche into an articulated response, especially since the work's extensive range of objective meanings also spurns easy capture by language.

It is my conviction that for the past two decades Colin Campbell's media work has had no definitive destination—no will to power of its own. Unlike other art which resides comfortably in the collections of museums or individuals or in public spaces, it intentionally travels nomadically on the periphery of respectability, eking out a minimal existence in the economic sphere and barely surviving in the territory of art. Campbell's work is poised so tenuously because it neither tries to create new forms like those of the avant-garde, nor submits easily to an already defined genre of representation. The work crosses the boundaries of art, theory, television, theater and all their attendant histories while remaining deliberately homeless and disobeying their laws. His videotapes, particularly, don't exhibit desires for mastery or for the authority of history. As a result, his tapes, performances, drawings and writings have an ephemeral, and almost exotic status, like a foreign ritual. The work tempts a fate of pure invisibility, surfacing momentarily, only to disappear again in a conscious act of withdrawal.

Campbell's media work thoughtfully avoids what is traditional to art or literature or cinema, to present themselves as full, complete and sufficient statements. It refuses to take a respectable place in the collective imagination. His rhetorical efforts in these works genuinely and effectively contest the normative categorization of works of art, preferring instead to settle for a modest existence beyond genre divisions. Favoring an aesthetic of mobility and subtle difference, Campbell creates temporary disturbances through irony and other quiet transgressions. If his work has any stability, it is to be found in the disquieting consistency of subversion. The work is driven by an almost anarchistic pulse, which traverses predetermined social and artistic values, and acts as a running commentary on the forms such acts of betrayal might take.

Central to feminist aesthetic practices when Campbell made Sackville I'm Yours (1972) was the establishment of the discontinuity between body and image—the problematic relation between subjectivity and representation. Campbell has continued to explore these issues in all of his videotapes and writings. In Janus, for example, he employed the essential ambiguity of television by investigating the relationship between a photograph of himself and his live video representation, in the same way that Lynda Benglis' videotape Now (1973) played her live movements back against a pre-recorded tape of the same movements. Concurrently, the idea of an endlessly deferred truth has functioned as a parallel motif throughout Campbell's career. In True/False (1972), made at about the same time, the artist stated a series of intimate revelations which he then both denied and asserted with exactly the same emphasis.

In Sackville I'm Yours, Campbell's mode of intimate face-to-face expression disconcertingly offers no verification for his statements. Instead, their status is suspect. Both the confessional mode and the interview mode seem to be under interrogation. Campbell presents himself as a character called Art Star. There is nothing on the videotape's soundtrack to affirm or disaffirm anything this character says. Speech from Art Star, and perhaps always, opens onto the possibility of lying. 1 The audience is held in suspense throughout his speculations, the slowly paced revelations of his musings on his place within the Canadian scheme of things. We cannot know if he really has a reserved parking place, if his name is in the phone book as he says, if he really is liked by his colleagues, if he really hangs out with the minority artists in his community or the President of the University, or if he is on a first name basis with the real people he mentions by name. We cannot even know if he is Sackville as he claims because the barren studio background is not identifiable as a somewhere at all.

In Sackville, I'm Yours, an audience listens to the stories of Campbell and Art Star, unreliable narrators both. Unlike the news announcer on television whose phallic tie symbolically assures us of the presence of the Law and masculine jurisdiction, Campbell or Art Star seem as naked as truth itself. Yet, if the truth be known, a viewer sees only the face and bare neck and shoulders of what may be a half-naked man. Truth, if capitalized, is usually represented visually by a fully nude woman. By remaining a man, however tieless, Art Star denies the guarantee that truth could be objectified as naked and feminine, the female objectified on the horizon of a masculinist perspective. By untying the tie, he, in effect, ties the viewer to a knotty problem; that the knowledge of what masculine membership may be has been left dangling, like the tie off-screen. Renouncing the fashion accessory for the symbolic assurance of patriarchal authority, Campbell further detours the iconic code from its comfortable expectation-the fetishized female. At best, a viewer is introduced to something like a half-truth, or perhaps, to an obscure secret truth, located in the absent lower half of Art Star which is hidden so as to possibly stimulate another drive-to get to the bottom of things. After all, the hidden is more erotic than the visible-the fragment more tantalizing than the entirety. Another way of saying this is that all discourses might be sexed, but only those which leave room for the imagination are sexy. The fragment or the missing part eroticizes Art Star’s speech, turning it from confession to seduction-from truth to persuasion.

By detouring the code of woman as truth into something like man as half-truth, or as half-woman, Sackville, I’m Yours has the first explicit man-in-the-woman, or is it woman-in-the-man, motif in Campbell’s tapes, however diverted its visual image is. Speech, truth and identity are all made androgynous by this digression-all are presented as capable of flirting with the rhythm of uncertainty. Art Star is the founding appearance of a theme of profound uncertainty which is dragged more literally into later tapes, highlighted by ambisexuality that significantly marks other Campbell characters.

In Sackville, I'm Yours, the visual and the oral problematics of defining a ‘self’ are brought together under technological scrutiny. The promising fictive interview of Art Star weaves back and forth between identifiable historical beings and probable lies. It presents always possible but never confirmed stories which blur and weaken its value as either historical fact or narrative satisfaction. Art Star tells a story which might also be a story in the sense of hyperbole—a tall tale. Yet Campbell's persona Art Star's own identity construction is reasonable, being both credible and detailed enough for a viewer to identify with. If it is ultimately undecidable on a register of truth, it shares that condition with any work of fiction and with the media process that might produce a famous person of the kind Campbell is producing in the figure of Art Star.

This twenty-minute videotape includes a set of visual and audio disturbances which force a reconsideration of the familiar format where a person tells a personal anecdote. The answers to a fictive interview which Art Star initiates are subtly interfered with, setting up a field of contradictions which mobilize a rethinking of simple speech acts, the nature of personal identity and video technology's relation to both. A viewer's traditional experience of watching and listening is challenged. The reception of information which is fundamental to personal communication and culture alike, is put under interrogation, becoming almost its opposite-a deception of information. A viewer is made uncomfortable and ironically feels deceived, since Campbell speaks throughout the tape as though he were engaged in intimate self-revelation. The uneasiness which pervades the tape ranges from shifting gender signs within the image of the speaker to obvious deviations in the narrative, all presided over by the conspiratorial role of the video technology. When Campbell announces himself to the viewer as Art Star in Sackville, I'm Yours, he announces a dramatic persona, the first of many unlikely thespian types, characters in disguise, who will appear subsequently in his videos and texts. They include heroines such as: the Woman from Malibu, the suburban American par excellence, Robin, the xerox girl cum punk star of Modern Love, Anna, the Belgian art critic of Dangling By Their Mouths and so on. Importantly, despite the fact that he might look like and sound like Colin Campbell, a very real person, in Sackville, I'm Yours, he is not announcing himself as Colin Campbell, the person who teaches in the art department of Mount Allison University in 1972, graduate of the University of Manitoba and homeboy from rural Reston, Manitoba.

It might be possible to say that Campbell is born as an infinitely reproducible art in Sackville, I'm Yours. The question might be what kind of art he is claiming to represent? Does he mean to personify Art with a capital A, no matter how undercapitalized the video production is? Or is this art in its lower case form as a skill or technique or kind of knowledge in the way the art of rhetoric might be understood? A capital ‘A’ would give his Art the significance of a proper noun with an immediate and distinguished heritage. A small ‘a’ would make the noun common and more vernacular, more ordinary, and more subject to casual and even philistinic uses.

By simply rearranging the letters of Art Star, the words Art's art can be established, an anagram which here appears incognito. In its possessive form, Art's art, both the proper and the common nouns are enclosed. There is a reference to Art about art, the reigning subject of formalist aesthetics, but it is an allusion that cannot be sustained because the two words are not equivalent. The doubling of the word art in the name Art Star is an obviously uneven duplication. Doubling, as a device of verbal or written rhetoric, usually is deployed to signal the distance of the narrator from him or herself. It suggests the gap in the telling of a story between any narrator, and his or her narrated self. Narrators use the double to recognize themselves as both one and the other when speaking even to themselves. For even in first-person narratives, the author or teller of the story is also the protagonist of the story, a fictive creation in language outside the self. He or she is talking, at the very least, to him or her 'self. This doubling is unavoidable.

But doubling as a ghostly echo has an even more equivocal and troubled use. Ever since Mary Shelley used it as a dramatic literary device, it can also be associated with the creation of monsters. The canonical version is Frankenstein's humanoid, the first representation of a techno-extension of the self which revealed the self divided in desire. Doubling, then, is both an extension of oneself into another space, like the space of a story and a reversal that turns back to remind the storyteller of the other, and the space within herself. Doubling escapes the self by entering the space of the story and, yet, it is an inevitable reminder of the inescapability of the ‘self’ that is being reproduced.

Campbell's persona, Art Star, participates in this duplication of Campbell as an other. But he is also more complex and perhaps more monstrous than that as well. Unlike the experience of reading a work of literature where a reader will only imagine the author-protagonist, the viewer of Sackville, I'm Yours is caught up in the presence of the images and sounds of Campbell himself. The double found in literature is here not fully achieved because the fictional Art Star is drawn back to the real historical subject called Campbell, who is equally displayed. They occupy each other's televisual space as a kind of culture superimposition—the same and different simultaneously. There is a knot in this presentation, in the name Art Star, akin to the transvestite image in other Campbell tapes where the man-as-woman is also still clearly a man acting as a woman, and vice versa. Art in Sackville, I'm Yours is a kind of surplus of other. Art, or art, is a redoubling but it is also an unfinished doubling which turns on itself, ur-like, perhaps doubled over with laughter at the impossibility of sustaining either a self or a credible fiction. The name Art Star is both a circle and a conundrum. There is an irreconcilable asymmetry here which seems to welcome a distressed duality.

If the idea of a ‘self’ is necessarily a fiction as contemporary psychoanalytic texts forcefully suggest, Campbell in acknowledging Art Star as a role he plays at the same time he is himself, is freely admitting to the construction of identity as a continual dissolution and revitalization. But, as I have said, the disguise of Art Star is only partial and always threatening to conflate with the autobiography of Campbell himself. And Campbell performs this semi-masking under the name of Art which has its own identity problems, being capable of absorption into many uses. With seemingly little reservation Campbell appropriates the name Art to himself and then immediately doubles it by not making clear whether he means art to be a proper or a common noun. He forces art to admit that its name is involved in something like a class struggle. Art could be a name of a person who desires the credibility of the grand discourse of art history or it could be that same discourse asserted as though13 art were just another sign system, just another rhetorical device with no privileged status. Clearly, then, by assigning a name that seems so uncertain of itself that it both repeats itself and questions itself simultaneously, Campbell means not to align himself with art as canon or culture.

Campbell opens onto the possible bastardization of art by blurring art's claims to a status of certainty and by underlining the strong desires for propriety and impropriety which are undertaken in the name of art. He hesitates before the name of art, suspending the decision to assign it a specific destination. He places the naming of art somewhere between Duchamp's freedom and the restrictions of institutional power; somewhere between nomination and name calling; somewhere between Rose Selavy and Boy George. If art is not given its proper name, Campbell seems to suggest, then it might well escape the patriarchal affiliation that is often imposed on it. It might well elude the powerful masculine entitlement which authorizes its name. Art Star is an unknown artist asking, "Who is entitled to be called Art Star?" The effect unsettles the accepted assumptions that underlie the status given to art.'

Sackville, I'm Yours is a light theatrical staging of an identity whose relation to reality is rendered complex. The theatricalization guarantees that Art Star's identity is never more than a pretense to identity. Calling himself Art Star has the effect of stripping the `self of Campbell even as it galls attention to the process of constructing the self or selves. Even the fictive reality of self-portraiture, or portraiture in general, to which it might be superficially compared and which has, at least, the historical credibility of art, is skewed by this fictional apparatus. At best Sackville, I'm Yours is a portrait of Colin Campbell as Art Star, at one remove from the ‘original’. A self-portrait or a portrait would have to attempt, whatever its degree of mimeticism, to represent Campbell first rather than Art Star. Campbell's Art Star, then, is a darker techno-version of Oscar Wilde's portrait of Dorian Gray, but Art Star is a reversed version of the famous portrait as Art Star remains today youthfully intact while both viewers and Campbell himself continue to be propelled through time and history. Art Star has a kind of technological immortality, a life recorded to be replayed always in the present. He is as enigmatic today and as life-like as when he first was recorded on videotape.

Art Star generates an impression of multiplicity and strange plurality of character. He is like the description provided by D. and interpreted by F. in Friedrich Dürrenmatt's The Assignment... "there was no self, or rather, only a countless chain of selves emerging from the future, flashing into the present, and sinking back into the past, so that what one commonly called one's self was merely a collective term for all the selves gathered up in the past, a great heap of selves perpetually growing under the constant rain of selves, an accumulation of shreds of experience and memory, comparable to a mound of leaves that grows higher and higher under a steady drift of other falling leaves, while the ones at the bottom have long turned to humus, a process which seemed to imply a fiction of selfhood in which every person made up his own self, imagining himself playing a role for better or worse, which would make the possession of character mainly a matter of putting on a good act, and the more unconscious and unintentional the performance, the more genuine its effect, all of which would go a long way toward explaining why it was so hard to make a portrait of an actor...";

Art Star neither comes together as a narrative figure nor does he come apart. Rather, he does both. As a figure of identity, he hovers in an electronic landscape, maintaining impartiality towards both truth and falsehood, completion and incompletion. On re-viewing today, he is just as laconic and self-amused as he was in 1972, waiting patiently for us to make up our minds. And he is just as equally resistant to our conclusions today as he was then. Although Campbell through his creation of Art Star, seems to have accepted his own dissolution, or undoing, he, through Art Star, has electronically defied aging, which has the curious, elliptical effect of looping back on himself, or some version of that self to us, over and over again almost two decades later.

Campbell's work is located in the aesthetics of poverty4 which is called video art, an aesthetic project which can be characterized as the poor cousin of television and art. But, like television, the video work has more than a hint of anti-academicism and anti-linguistism to it. As texts, Campbell's work necessarily participates in the knowledge of language and of speech acts. But his work, like television itself, operates differently from, say, postmodern literature which inevitably performs its own deconstruction from within literary devices, while at the same time claiming a loss of faith and a desire to elaborate the unreliability of language. Campbell's controlling technique is perhaps closer to John Gardner's notion of "jazzing around" than it is to any self-conscious ideas of deconstruction. Yet Campbell's work often achieves the power of poetry and it is obviously informed by recent theories of language. He is perhaps too skeptical to believe in either the pure intellectual work of deconstruction or the accidental aesthetics of television. His work is always closer to scatalogical pataphysics than to the ethereal metaphysics of academic considerations or even television's endlessly reproduced formats. As a result, his marginal representations and humor in video risk being judged as too capricious. This is a risk that Campbell is willing to run in order to remain vigilant.

His consistent strategy, one might even call it anti-sacristy, throughout the work is to tell stories in an amateurish, bawdy manner, with no real respect for the conventions of literature or television. Such representations immediately disembody him as an historical subject before the myth of authorial control can even be put into place, before viewers can be seduced by the cultural power that attends the myth of artistry. He treats his content with a similar irreverence. No subject is exempt from his sardonic gaze. For instance, despite the fact that contemporary feminisms have had a profound effect on Campbell, they too are treated agnostically, or even irreverently, by characters in No Voice Over and Fiddle Faddle. In Dangling By Their Mouths, as well, Anna, a Belgian critic and model of Eurocool, played by Campbell, says in reference to a former lover of one of her friends, ... "She would have been better off going to bed with a book by Fuck - Oh", thus implicating the books sexually as well as playing with Foucault's name phonetically rather than engaging a theory of sex and power. And by playing and replaying with a surfeit of identities which question the possibility of full control and the seriousness of art's revelatory capacities, Campbell swiftly and consciously places an audience somewhere in a circle of deceit which makes no promises of knowledge. Sacrilege is no small part of these projects.

Cross-sexuality, which pervades Campbell's characters, offers an instable, incomplete, already alienated image whose seriousness is partly mock. It allows a motile criticality to emerge, unconstrained by habitual probabilities. To cross genders is to cross genres.5 Like video itself, which is a kind of trans or cross-television, all of Campbell's representational efforts to disguise identity may be necessary for any understanding of the function of identity. The admission of the theatricality of self may be, as in therapy, the first step toward a recognition of the necessity of the self's responsibility toward shifting roles. Reversing the expected produces the unexpected which is in turn somehow re-reversed in a medium whose alienating mediation ironically produces a clear picture. As Edward Said has said in writing about Glenn Gould, Canada's first techno-ascetic... "The paradox is that something as impersonal as a text, or a record, can nevertheless deliver an imprint or a trace of something as lively, immediate, and transitory as a 'voice' ". And despite, or perhaps because of Campbell's movements of masquerade, his voice comes through.

Campbell's method of producing the undecidable document, Sackville, I'm Yours, provides a strong thesis on the nature of the discourse produced when photographic means are combined with text. Photographically produced representations can and must be grounded by textuality or by contextuality. A verbal or written text serves to position any image in an attempt to secure its meanings. The text and the image are then further positioned in a system of distribution which contextualizes them even more securely, in books or newspapers for example. The distribution systems reproduce identifiable conventions called genres. Each genre, image and text, is intertextualized by others, joined in an anxious menage a trois which is always struggling to be stable. Although a text can never be more than an interpretation of the already technologically interpreted camera activity which produced the image, a text and an image can, and perhaps must, be married in what Roland Barthes calls an "anchor-relay" system, providing a momentarily secured meaning within any system of meanings' exchanges. In a positivist society, such conjunctions of text to image have even been given the power of legalistic force, for instance, despite the dormant unease which is instilled at the core of both images and language.

But the uneasiness produced by video technology, Campbell seems to be telling the viewer, is even more intensely felt because of the perceived instability in its relations between images, sound, context and genre. The existence in the present tense does not seem to allow even the illusion of a secure meaning, no matter how provisional. Television's texts seem more impatient and harrassed, less able to intertwine with others; more mercurial and sinister than traditional texts. Television seems to be the postmodern environment par excellence because, as an industrial collage machine, it produces something more transient and inaccurate, almost like memory. It is more vulnerable to the vagaries of subjective inclinations than a photograph, say, which can be re-seen and restudied like the inert text of printed language or even a film which can be approached frame by frame and attached to the authority of language. Although it is a projection of texts out to a viewer, in Campbell's eyes television appears more like a screen for projections, a place for unconscious desires to twist and turn. Television might be an updated version of Bentham's panopticon and one could paraphrase Foucault by saying that television "...must not be understood as a dream building: it is the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form; its functioning, abstracted from any obstacle, resistance or friction must be represented as pure architectural and optical system: it is in fact a figure of political technology that may and must be detached from any specific use. " Television is implicitly undecidable.

Under television's watchful eye, fiction and fact can be easily blurred. When Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball, an authentic couple, play Ricky and Lucy Ricardo, a fictional couple, representation collapses or conflates into a set of systems of overlapping realities which are impossible to reconstruct accurately with an older epistemology of truth. The whole history of Ronald Reagan's media career from Borax promoter to President is nothing more than a history of television's power to dissassociate images from context—to erase history over and over. It is no coincidence that television's major contribution to the extension of genres is the docudrama: half fiction, half fact and all rhetoric. Television appears to come from nowhere. Sackville in the case of one tape by Campbell, is a place which is as convenient a center as anywhere. It would seem that its stories can be told or made up by anyone; by Art Star, for instance, a person who may or may not be a Canadian artist with any of the attributes he claims for himself. There might be an interviewer off-screen without a microphone whose questions draw out Art Star's answers or he/she might only be a necessary narrative fiction. There is simply no way for a viewer to know. There is no anchor-relay system because there is no purchase for an anchor, or perhaps an anchor-man, in the electronic wonderland. Dan Rather may be showing footage of the same war he is describing or the footage may be from another war entirely. There is only, like the identity which Campbell has constructed in Art Star and other memorable characters, a system of relays, a system of slippages and floating signifiers—a fragile and mobile fabrication of reality. And whereas some modernists rail against this disconnection from a center and from a text, Campbell clearly relishes it with a cultivated appetite for the skewered self, the abandoned identity.

Sackville, I'm Yours can, for instance, be read against the grain of the predominant discourses in television or video. While television is still blamed as the cause of all societal ills, video, at the time of making Sackville, I'm Yours, was being explained in modernist terms of reflexivity, granting it the status of art. If television was seen as the most recent residence of the devil, Rosalind Krauss' early article entitled "Video: the Aesthetics of Narcissism" set some equally pessimistic terms for an understanding of video as well. Krauss read early video as "narcissistic". It was a medium, she said, which relied on an image feedback in collapsed time which provided a kind of self-love unrelated and in fact alienated from both a viewer's position and the artist's own ability to perceive change. Like the myth of Narcissus itself and the mirror image trope of Lacan and his followers, a misrecognition of self was said to involve the death of something. In Greek mythology Narcissus drowns in his own image. In Lacanian theory, in an agonizing moment of introduction to the symbolic world, the child is unsettled in the mirror by the recognition of him-or herself as something ‘other’. Krauss' argument with much early video was that "the nature of video performance is specified as an activity of bracketing out the text and substituting for it the mirror reflection. The result of this substitution is the presentation of a self understood to have no past and, as well, no connection with any objects that are external to it." To Krauss, a body severed from text is an example of pure narcissistic reflection in a "double repression." There is no wall for modernist reflexivity to distinguish itself from as there is with a painting, for instance, and no contextualizing text to recount a history from. There is no way for criticality to take place.

But Krauss' scenario of video's loss of criticality depends heavily on a strict adherence to the metaphor of the mirror-stage and an equal adherence to the procedures of much avant-garde art in the past. Her text is deeply immersed in only American examples of video, which may themselves be, as Christopher Lasch has suggested, also deeply immersed in a "culture of narcissism." But the metaphor of the mirror accounts only for a uninterrupted image reflected back directly to an unknowing subject. The analogy of the mirror and its consequences are immediately diverted if the metaphor includes concave, convex, circular, rear-view or multiple mirrors, each of which skews an image differently. Or, it is again skewed if the viewer is already aware of self-alienation. Campbell's video mirror of identity, if it can be called that, participates in a more complex metaphor and assumes a more complex viewer. For Campbell, the state of otherness generated by video feedback is to be celebrated as one of the many ironic conditions of being.

The question as to whether self-representation is even possible is at the heart of Campbell's investigations. To be a famous artist in Sackville is like being a famous dentist, a contradiction in terms, but perhaps not in Canada. Although other tapes of Campbell's like Real Split (1972) or This is the Way l Really Am (1973) might be more easily subsumed by Krauss' terms, Campbell, beginning with Sackville I'm Yours, inserts the devious device of a pseudonym, presenting himself as a false identity to begin with. The persona Art Star is an admission of self-estrangement which deliberately avoids the illusion of complete identity, a complete identity which can only be realized in the vision of an authority constructing him as `other'. If we can only be recognized as the ‘other’ by a dominant discourse, perhaps it is inevitable that a Canadian artist would choose the evacuation of the self rather than narcissism in the first place. Campbell holds on to an imaginary relationship to identity just as he does to an imaginary role in the art world. Such a marginal position is the only one available to video artists, even today, and perhaps to Canadian artists in general. Art Star's confessions reveal a considered indifference to a master discourse which is powerfully indifferent to him. For Campbell, like other Canadian artists at the time, the pseudonym expresses both the desire to be other than oneself and the irony of a condition in which one can't help but be oneself, however deviously, doubly and incompletely constructed.

The role of Art Star reinvents Campbell. Despite all these efforts at splitting and undependable self-projections, Campbell has become an art star in Canada, a real-life twin to his persona's premature claims. He is a full fledged professor at a university, a recipient of many grants and awards, a participant in major exhibitions, with his work collected by international museums and now, the subject of a retrospective. By taking another's voice, Campbell seems to have clarified how deeply anyone is enmeshed in his or her own history-the most profound dilemma of subjectivity and theater both. Artifice only intensifies the subject. The mask is not as enigmatic as what it hides. In Campbell's use of roles it is not an escape then that we attend, but the birth of a desire, a desire not to believe in a single or complete identity. It is not self-loathing which motivates his appeal for misrecognition, however deliberate its misrepresentations are. Rather it is a kind of marginal realism which can only be arrived at by a complex restructuring of an imaginary self, in much the same way that video art shadows the twin discourses of art and television, and in much the same way that male anxiety lies just below its projections of stability.

But it is not just television or modernist conceptions of video that Campbell's work refuses to resemble. Sackville, I'm Yours could easily be retitled Colville, I'm Not Yours. By that I mean that the tape can be read against the school of `Magic Realism' which is identified with Alex Colville and Christopher Pratt, both graduates of Mount Allison University in Sackville and both `famous' artists within a nationalized context. At the time the videotape was made, as they are today, both were artists who deliberately sought identity in images of the Atlantic region. `Magic Realism' is a localized form of modernism which endeavors to describe the local from within formal structures of classicism as though the rural image will reveal a universal circumstance. Both Colville and Pratt rejected abstraction for hyper-real images of the local masked as the universal. Both use a Protestant ethic of labor intensive brushstrokes as an elaborate structure to secure an image which is based in the circumstances of the rural landscape of Atlantic Canada. Their aesthetic speaks to a dream of a world that will recognize them, not for their difference, but for their universal significance.

This is not Campbell's dream for art. Campbell's ‘local' is Sackville. But it is transformed via video mediation to the international or at least transnational, or more to the point, unlocatable. Campbell points not to the authoritative history of Western painting as Pratt's and Colville's works do. He points instead, to the gossip of a network of dealers, artists and art journal editors. He is on a first name basis with a career, not a crusade for meaning from an historical perspective. While Colville and Pratt envelop their work in false modesty, Campbell disguises his modesty in false ambition and overriding pretensions.

And Sackville, I'm Yours can be read against the tradition of modernist abstraction in Canada as well; against the work of Lawren Harris Jr., son of the theosophical Lawren Harris who ushered abstraction into the existing provincialism within Canadian painting. Lawren Harris Jr. was head of the fine arts department at Mount Allison University when Campbell taught there and the videotapes made in the basement of the Physical Education department can be seen to dislocate the authority of painting from this marginal position within the campus and its department of Art. More importantly, Sackville, I'm Yours shows clearly how Campbell has been able to continue to work from outside the dualistic model of modernist painting's forms; from outside the Canadian debate on national identity; from within the debates on gendered subjectivity and politics; from within the distresses of a masculinist culture; from outside the ideological and technological determinations of dominant cultures. As Campbell has said of all of his female roles, "Check out her MANnerisms", a statement which alerts us to the complexity and ambiguity of any image or text which is presented as stable and complete.

If doppelgangers, with their projected passions and fantasies, can short-circuit the straight line and straight mind of representational order, then we should turn to the words of Campbell's creation "Both" to confuse and contest this text as well.

Both woke up.
The television was on.
Both lit a cigarette and looked at the screen. Both was_ on the screen looking back at Both.
Waiting.
Both said, "So create your own fiction.
You can be anything you want."
Both answered. "There is no fiction."
Both reached for the knob on the television set and depressed it. Both disappeared.'

Black and Light, 1987


1. A more general formulation of the “truth-functon” of “sign language” is to be found in Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1979. He writes... "Thus semiotics is in principle the discipline of studying everything which can be used in order to lie. If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth; it cannot be used ‘to tell’ at all. I think that the definition of a ‘theory of the lie’ should be taken as a pretty comprehensive program for a general semiotics.” (pg. 7)
2. See especially the chapter "Tales of Love and Desire" in Stuart Schneiderman,
An Angel Passes: How the Sexes Became Undivided, New York University Press,
New York, 1988.
3. Friedrich Dürrenmart, The Assignment or On the Observing- of the Observer of the Observers, Vintage International, Random House, (trans. Joel Agee), New York, 1989, p. 24, 25. The preface to the book begins with a quote from Soren Kierkegaard... "What will come? What will the future bring? I do not know. I have no presentiment. When a spider plunges from a fixed point to its consequences, it always sees before it an empty space where it can never set foot, no matter how much it wriggles. It is that way with me: before me always is an empty space; what drives me forward is a consequence that lies behind me. This life is perverse and frightful, it is unbearable."
In Dangling by their Mouths, a Campbell videotape of 1980, it is a long quote by William Faulkner from As I Lay Dying, the voice of an already-dead woman, quoted by Kerri Kwinter playing a woman who is about to die, which is performed as an exemplary piece of anti-literature, stylistically close to Dürrenmatt in its excessively anti-grammatical form and controlled by the same metaphor... "but that we had to use one another by words, like spiders dangling by their mouths from a beam, swinging and twisting and never touching and only through the blows of a switch could my blood and their blood flow as one stream..." Deirdre Summerbell has pointed out to me that earlier, the great ironist Jonathan Swift wrote in Thoughts on Various Subjects... "It's a miserable thing to live in suspense. It's the life of a spider." The self, in each of these cases—Campbell, Faulkner, Dürrenmatt, Kierkegaard and Swift-is nothing more than the web of identity spreading out behind the subject. The spider, ostensibly the subject of the narrative web, can only be caught on the fly.
4. In an earlier essay I have elaborated a "Politics of Poverty" as... "video's relation to television is simple. It is television. It is a member of the same family. But it is remittance television, sent away as a black sheep to the exotic countries of Art, Education or Local Concerns, where it won't be an embarrassment. It does have two major differences from its sibling television: video is determined in form by the technology available and the low funding for production, and its distribution system is determined by noncommercial and nonconventional social technics. In other words, it is not allowed on the airwaves. This is what I would call its Politics of Poverty. Not being allowed to wear the same clothes, it is not invited to dinner; not speaking the same language, it is not allowed to speak, or, at least, to be heard." In "Making Airwaves", Prime Time Video, Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, 1984, p. 16.
5. For an elaboration of cross-vision as an index of the postmodern, particularly in Canada, see my "Barbara Steinman: The Art of Memory: The Memory of Art", Vanguard, Volume 18, Number 3, Summer, 1989, Vancouver, p. 10-15. For instance... "Stereoscopy, of course, is a deliberate disabling of the privileged monocular vision which supports most Western epistemological and theoretical projects. The single point of view is primarily metamorphized through the art of painting-its most visible form-and individualism is its political counterpart. A bi-vision problematizes the singularity at both figurative and literal levels."
6. Edward Said, "The World, the Text and the Critic," in The World, the Text and the Critic, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1983, p. 33.
7. Michael Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, Vintage Books, Random House, New York, 1979, p. 205.
8. Rosalind Krauss, "Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism", reprinted in New Artist's Video: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock, New York, E. P. Dutton, 1978, p. 43-64.
9. Colin Campbell, “Both,” Toronto: A Play of History (Jeu d’Histoire), The Power Plant, Toronto, 1987, p. 58-62.