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Peter Campus
Peter
Campus is a seminal figure in the history of video art. In a distinguished
career that includes closed circuit installations, photography, and
computer-based images, Campus' work in video is singular in
its theoretical and formal significance. His 1973 tape Three Transitions
is one of the classic works in the medium. In an extraordinary series
of videotapes produced from 1971 to 1976, Campus mapped the technical
and symbolic parameters of the emergent medium as metaphors for the
self. This
rigorous investigation of the psychology of the self was undertaken
as a systematic, phenomenological exploration of video's essential properties
and
formal foundations. Campus' earliest tapes are minimalist explorations
of such effects as spatial dislocation and multiple vision.
Between
1973 and 1976, he produced a body of works at WGBH- TV in Boston that
are landmarks in the medium. In these concise, anecdotal exercises,
Campus the artist constructed a series of precise, formal actions for
Campus the performer to carry out. Focusing on the result of a single
action or
technical effect on a human figure or face, usually seen in close-up,
they depict powerfully symbolic self-examinations. Succinct and witty
in execution, these episodic works are psychological, even philosophical,
in resonance. Engaged in a direct address of the camera, exploiting
video's intimate scale and space, Campus subjects his image (and those
of others) to
the basic technological elements of video -- chroma-key, camera vision,
simultaneity, color systems. He achieves metaphorical signification
by charting video's electronic capabilities of illusion and reality,
its
potential to articulate multiple transformations and displacements of
images. Exploring the symbolic power of technical and visual effects,
Campus' strategies of dislocation and disjuncture of identity serve
to
both exploit and subvert the notion of video as a mirror.
During
the 1970s, Campus also produced a remarkable body of closed circuit
video installations and video projections, which are thematically and
formally related to his tapes. In his live camera installations, such
as mem (1975) and bys (1976), the spectator's physical position and
perceptual experience are integral elements. In an examination of the
self and its
phenomenological extension in space, the human face and body are dislocated
and displaced through mirror and negative images, inversions, shadows
and doublings.
Campus'
investigation of the self led him to explore the inherent properties
of the closed circuit video medium, only to transcend them in a radical
advancement of the art form that announced the medium's metaphorical
potential through a thorough articulation of its basic codes.
In recent
years Campus has focused on photographic and computer-based works. In
the late 1990s, he began working again with single-channel videotape
and video installation.
Campus
was born in 1937. He received a B.S. in experimental psychology from
Ohio State University and graduated from the City College Film
Institute. Among the many awards he has received are a fellowship from
the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, a National Endowment
for the Arts
grant, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He was an artist-in-residence at
the Television Laboratory at WNET/Thirteen, New York, and at WGBH-TV,
Boston. Campus has taught at the Rhode Island School of Design and New
York University. His closed circuit installations, videotapes and photography
have been
widely exhibited internationally, in one-person shows at the Bykert
Gallery, New York; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse; Leo Castelli Gallery,
New York;
The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art,
New York;
Kolnischer Kunstverein, Cologne; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Institute
of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York;
as well as in numerous group exhibitions at festivals and institutions
including Documenta 6, Kassel, Germany; Venice Biennale; Walker Art
Center,
Minneapolis; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.;
and Fukui International Video Festival, Japan. Campus lives in New York.
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Title: Death Threats
Show: The Wounded City
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