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

Colin Campbell came to Toronto after a spell of teaching at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick. There he had some contact with nearby NSCAD and came to know Dennis Oppenheim, who gave his video art its initial impetus. Oppenheim, along with Vito Acconci, had been an important influence in Toronto too, through exhibitions at A Space, so that when Campbell arrived in 1973 his work fit readily into a context of video performance represented by artists like Robert Bowers or Stephen Cruise. But with Colin Campbell there is a more radical shift of focus from the generalities of performance toward the specifics of the personality of the performer; and from the beginning, performance is inextricably tied to the sense of the video medium.

Colin Campbell dates the real beginnings of True/False to 1972. The camera, in a fixed position throughout, shows the artist's head first in profile, then front view, as he slowly repeats a series of statements about himself: "I snort coke..." After each he pauses, says, "True," pauses again, and says "False." The dichotomy of truth and falsehood that forms the external basis of the work interlocks tightly with the internal dualism of the video medium. The question raised by objective understanding of the words seeks a resolution in the expressive sense of sound and image.

True/False marks a breakthrough of great significance. There follows a series of works in which the artist confronts his own body in the nude, but also his soul laid bare in naked truth, as the saying might have it. Two humorous works, Sackville I'm Yours and Smile, both of 1972, are perhaps the most fully rounded achievements, but in retrospect Janus may be more significant... It is constructed around a life-size nude photograph of the artist against which he lovingly presses his body while the camera moves slowly over both figures. At first one may not be aware that the photographic image is not real, and it may become sculptural before finally flattening out onto the surface...

These works were done in Sackville. The new works in Toronto eventually turn the camera away from the artist altogether, yet they seem to hunt out images that are a reflection of the eye that discovered them. In Love-Life of 1974, Colin Campbell reads love letters sent to him by different people as the image alternates between a view of shrubs seen through a wire-reinforced window and another into an apartment across the street, within which a figure is indistinctly seen moving about. The interplay of words and images develops resonances that can be very beautiful.

A group of tapes recently produced in New York with the aid of a Canada Council grant readmits Campbell's own presence before the camera, but compared with the earlier work they seem concerned not so much with the observation of self as with the examination, at one stage removed, of the meaning of the situation of self-observation through the video mechanism.

They all exploit the peculiarities of the plan of his apartment; it has three windows looking out onto one another around a light well. The two layers of glass entail distinct separation of the self that observes and the self that is observed. On the far side, Campbell is seen moving around in the kitchen, lighting a cigarette, reading a letter, or removing an article of clothing (though rather more discreetly than in earlier works). On the near side, only his hands are seen as he draws back a curtain, or his shadow passing over it, or the suggestions of a reflection in the nearest pane of glass. They are the images of self one sees every day.

Glass separates sound from vision, and through the windows the televised self moves silently; from this side the nearer self addresses the other in a whisper or chants, "I'm a voyeur" in a self-consciously homespun mockery of a pop song. The environment generates a strangely confined quality that has to do not just with physical limitations of space, but also with the total dominance of things made by man for human use—walls, windows, kitchen utensils—and bearing the stamp of prolonged human contact; only the stylized forms of plants and animals in the curtains provide a partial relief. The strangeness reads as part of the reality of the place, but the whole is contained within an equally explicit structure of artifice. The camera is seen reflected in the window and, in Secrets, the word 'secret' is stuck up in plastic letters on the glass. The ultimate dualism resides in the contrast of emotional intensity and the exposure of the mechanisms by which it is contrived. Only at the end of I'm a Voyeur do the words of an actual pop record blare out, "When will I see you again?," breaking the tension and contributing an explicit irony.

Secrets and I'm a Voyeur, like the earlier performance works, are constructed out of shots from fixed camera positions. Hindsight, like the later works in that series, develops to moving shots that may pull back through both layers of glass, creating some of the finest images ever produced on a video monitor...