Toronto Video: challenging forms, channeling change

(Originally published in: The State of the Arts: Living With Culture in Toronto ed. Alana Wilcox, Christina Palassio and Jonny Dovercourt. Coach House Press, 2006.)

Choosing the appropriate opening night gala is a paramount concern for cultural festivals. More attention is paid to that event than any other in an organization’s calendar year. Senior members of the media, government dignitaries, artists and key opinion makers form the public that attends such evenings. All of which made it important for the Images Festival, Toronto’s oldest indie celebration of video, film, new media and installations, to get it right with their choice in the spring of 2006.

The feature screened that first night at the venerable Bloor Cinema, the largest venue used for Images, was Fascination by Mike Hoolboom. Received warmly, though dotted by critiques by some viewers in the festival’s outsized crowd, the work represents a closing of a circle in the city’s film and video cultures. Despite Images’ repeated attempts, over nearly twenty years, to bring together the audiences and artists in these two forms, there has always been resistance from senior members of both groups. Here, though, was Hoolboom, a highly regarded, award winning avant-garde filmmaker and chronicler of the experimental film scene, making a feature inspired by the career of video artist Colin Campbell. It was as if a Conservative Member of Parliament had crossed the floor and decided to join the NDP.

Not content to simply create a homage to Campbell, Hoolboom spent years labouring over Fascination. Reacting to the criticisms he heard after the screening, he has returned to the project and is re-editing the piece again. Clearly, the life and work of Campbell has affected him profoundly, to the point where Hoolboom is insisting on completing the feature as a video, not a film.

What is it about Campbell that has so impressed Hoolboom? Looking back, over the 35-year history of video in Toronto, one sees that Campbell is one of the pioneers, an essential figure who created works that defined a nascent art form. One of Campbell’s earliest videos and arguably his masterpiece, Sackville, I’m Yours, remains an impressive work of video art. In it, Campbell plays Art Star, a cross between a Warhol and Bowie figure, elegant and cool. Reacting to an unseen interviewer, he plays at being glamorous, letting his interrogator and the audience in on a fabulous life-style, which includes eating tuna casserole in a decidedly utilitarian East Coast small town.

In this and many other works, Campbell plays with the idea of “bad acting.” Unlike narrative cinema, which demands of its performers the appearance of reality, video art is about surfaces and fabrication. There’s a lot of craft in Campbell’s deliberately affected performance but the last thing he wants is for the audience to blithely accept his character as real. Like Warhol’s superstars, Campbell could create an over-the-top gay persona, which was simultaneously true to his own art scene while affectionately parodying it.

Campbell analyzed the form of television, dramatizing the way it constructs stars. His work played with notions of theatricality: it often used mirrors, questioned the apparatus that was recording the performances, and starred role-playing gay males, including such Campbell creations as The Woman from Malibu and assorted “bad girls.” Like that of such colleagues as Lisa Steele and Vera Frenkel, Campbell’s videos remain relevant and were almost immediately taken up on the international stage.

From the late ‘70s on, Campbell’s videos were presented at galleries and art fairs throughout the world. His work has been seen in Melbourne, Istanbul and Sao Paulo. He represented Canada at documenta in Germany and saw his videos chosen for shows at New York’s Whitney Museum and the Musee National d’Art Moderne in Paris.

Yet he remained relatively unknown in Toronto, where he lived for decades. Like many video artists, from Lisa Steele to John Greyson to Steve Reinke, Colin Campbell taught in universities and art colleges for decades. Not that teaching can’t be a calling—of course, it can---but it’s one of the ironies of video art that the work, though admired internationally, rarely pays the bills.

When video first became popular in the 1970s, it was far more difficult for novices to work with than it is, today. The makers used portopacks, bulky camera/sound technology invented by Sony. Practitioners were artists or political activists; and oddly, enough, despite a revolution in technology, video making still divides in that way. Early video art, such as Campbell’s and Steele’s, depended on performances that were pitched in a nether region between the theatrical and the real. When done live, much of what is seen in early video could be called performance art, but the best pieces truly were created for the camera.

Lisa Steele, one of Campbell’s closest friends, created work that was tough, confrontational, and yet quite vulnerable. Her signature piece is Body Suit, with scars and defects, in which a naked Steele addresses the camera directly, describing her life through the “stories” on her body. Another impressive early work is A Very Personal Story, in which Steele recalls the day she found her mother at home, dead. Chilling in its authenticity, the video records Steele as if she is in shock, still sorting out the details from a day that can never be forgotten, nor completely remembered.

Vera Frenkel followed in the wake of Campbell and Steele. Her work is more sophisticated, incorporating storytelling and narrative devices more common to literature or theatre. A brilliant early video is The Secret Life of Cornelia Lumsden: Her Room in Paris, which purports to be a documentary on a “lost” Canadian writer of the ‘30s. In more recent years, Frenkel’s work has won international accolades, particularly a video installation/performance piece, From the Transit Bar, which created a public space, which is both “real” in that Frenkel plays in it and “constructed.”

Frenkel, Campbell and Steele were part of a creative ferment in Toronto during the 1970s. Many other artists emerged then, including Randy and Bernicci, Paulette Phillips and Rodney Werden. ASpace, the first artist-run centre in Toronto offered a sense of community then, as did Art Metropole, run by General Art, a trio who made large scale art projects, published a brilliant art magazine, File, and shot, edited and acted in their own videos.

Trinity Square Video, the first co-op video production facility in Toronto, started during that time; Charles Street Video, a more “professional” organization, followed in the ‘80s. Both institutions are vibrant to this day, as is VTape, the video distribution service set up—and still run by---Steele and her partner Kim Tomczak, who continue to make award-winning videos together.

As the ‘80s progressed, video changed in many ways. The technology became much more sophisticated. Cameras became lighter weight and easier to operate. Sound recording improved. Non-linear editing devices really freed up the form, making the moving imagery in video as technically powerful as cinema.

Thanks to the continuity in technical and distribution services, which offered workshops, cheap video equipment and collegial advice, Toronto’s video scene grew stronger as the 80s progressed. Two makers who married form to challenging content were (and continue to be) Richard Fung and John Greyson. Both work out of a gay sensibility, informed by the AIDS crisis. Fung’s videos are informed by his heritage as a Chinese-Trinidadian-Canadian. The Way to My Father’s Village, a personal piece, is extraordinary as an indictment of colonialism and a look at the differences between two generations of immigrants, that of Fung and his father.

Greyson, who was Campbell’s lover and protégée, has created work in a variety of genres: political activism, musicals, dramas, docu-dramas. His work bursts with energy and a flair for hybridity. The ADS epidemic, just one of many fine early pieces, manages to parody music videos, advocate for safe sex, and be provocatively sexual in less than five minutes. Like Mike Hoolboom, John Greyson has worked in both film and video. His feature film Lilies was a Canadian art house hit but rather than parlay that success into a standard directorial career, Greyson has continued to work both sides of the turf, teaching at York University and making features like the politically engaged Proteus, which uses a video aesthetic—a charged surface-dominated mise-en-scene, with a script that conflates historical and contemporary details—while garnering recognition denied vid-artists: a slot at the Toronto International Film Festival and a broadcast deal on specialty TV channels.

Another Toronto artist who has achieved a large measure of success while maintaining her own sensibility is Floria Sigismondi. A graduate of the Ontario College of Art (now OCAD), Sigismondi has managed to move out of the financial constraints of the art world through her ability to create extraordinary images for music videos. She has worked, mainly through Revolver, a Toronto-based company, on videos for Sigur Ros, Leonard Cohen, Fiona Apple, Robert Plant, David Bowie and Bjork. Her images, which come to her in dreams, have the passionate, subversive quality of surrealists. Devastated industrial landscapes, goth clothing and bizarre puppets dominate the videos. Turn off the soundtrack on a Sigismondi tape; it’s still fascinating. In Bombs Below, a video which she directed for her husband’s band, The Living Things, Sigismondi references kids with guns, blasted brick buildings and bursting bombs: all images she derived from tales she heard from her Italian parents, who, as children, survived the carnage at the end of the Second World War.

Video artists working in Toronto don’t have to go Sigismondi’s route to access an astonishing range of superb technical equipment. Both Charles Street and Trinity Square Video continue to offer low rates for artists who want to explore the form. Charles Street, still the more commercially minded of the two, offers Sony equipment, including a broadcast digital camera, a fluid head tripod, batteries, a monitor, and a lighting and grip package For sound, they offer wireless mics, boompoles and field microphones.

What’s fascinating is that, despite all the technical changes, it is still quite easy to spot a video sensibility. The work being done by such contemporary artists as Jubal Brown, Daniel Cockburn and Leslie Peters use strategies that hearken back to Campbell and Steele’s generation. That’s not so surprising, given that the current crop of video makers often were taught by the first wave of vid-artists.

Narrative still is utilized to convey ideas rather than concretely dramatize a script. Take Daniel Cockburn’s Metronome, for example. A narrator, played by Cockburn, wakes up and finds himself moving through the day to the beat of his heart, pulsing like a metronome. Black comedy has rarely been better than this devastating critique of modern life. Instead of a standard story line, Cockburn uses sound, image and text to create an essay, not a novel. You can almost dance to Metronome. Almost.

Leslie Peters produces beautiful single channel, photography and installation work. In a series of videos created in the late 90s, she recreates the attitude and visual locus used by people when they drive. 401:01, for ever more, thinking of you and more and more all explore life in the fast lane. Images either flow or pulse in a colourful McLaren-esque style, throughout many of her videos. Others utilize the visuals of the road, shooting footage literally from car windows, revealing the trees, shrubs, vans and signs that one encounters while driving a truck. Country music or electronica accompany the visuals on the soundtrack; both work well with images of highways.

Jubal Brown, a bravura practitioner who studied with Steele, made Deathday Suit in homage to her. His work is highly edited, menacing, bombastic and often quite funny. Teletubbies Rising incorporates the ultimate dysfunctional family, the Mansons, into a critique of kids TV. Star Wars assaults your senses for sixty seconds, while taking on pop culture, the info-age and ADD syndrome. To call the work brilliant is an understatement, though it’s frightening to imagine some of Brown’s mini-broadsides cut to 25-minute length.

Video continues to operate as a political tool, not just as a device for art making. The Toronto Video Activist Collective compiles and creates work, showing images, scenes and situations that won’t be seen on television.

Toronto video has grown in 35 years but it continues to be rooted in community and experimental art and activist—and multi-cultural—political expression. Whether in galleries, festivals, community gatherings or the Internet, video is a form that people can embrace and use for creative expression. Perhaps that’s why Mike Hoolboom continues to be fascinated by Colin Campbell. You never know where video’s implacable gaze will take us to, in the future.