Peter Campus - 1970s - Video Installations and Tapes

Video Installations and Tapes

Campus achieved rapid acclaim for a series of seminal video works that explored issues of identity/reality and subversion of the relationship between the viewer and the work. In his early period, Campus made both single channel video tape works and interactive closed-circuit television installations. Campus’ first video tape Dynamic Field Series (1971), used a camera suspended far above the artist as he manipulated its movements with ropes while lying down beneath it. In Double Vision (1971), Campus used two cameras and superimposition, marking the beginnings of a more formal experimentation with the medium itself, a characteristic that recurs in his work to this day. These first works also show Campus’ developing interest into the questioning of reality.

His critically acclaimed interactive closed circuit television works include Kiva (1971), Interface (1972), Stasis (1973), Shadow Projection and Negative Crossing (1974), mem and dor (1975), Mask Projections, lus and num (1976) and aen (1977). In A History of Video Art, Chris Meigh-Andrews describes these as works that sought to “deliberately confront the viewer with a self-image that defied or challenged normal expectations. In an important sense, these works were participatory and sculptural in that they invited or even required audience participation.”. They employed a wide variety of installation formats, which included the use of close-circuit live feedback television, projection, mirroring, image distortion and shadow projection. Campus’ interactive works have received significant critical attention and a wide range of different critical interpretations. These perspectives include discussion of the complex issues of body identity, reality and virtuality, self-transformation, presence and absence, the relationship of the viewer to the work of art which he/she completes, passivity and activity in the viewer, existentialism, the uncanny and narcissism.

Other 1970s video work includes the influential video tape Three Transitions (1973) in which the artist transforms his image in three different sequences. In this tape, Campus experiments with ‘blue screen’ technology, superimposing one image of himself upon another, with one image bleeding through into the other. The artist can be seen climbing through his own body, or breaking through his own image. In Third Tape (1976), Campus constructs and manipulates his own virtual self-image into an abstract self portrait by filming his reflection as he progressively throws a disordered array of small mirror tiles upon a table. Campus says of this work "This man tries to abstract himself using age-old methods reminiscent of German Expressionism, Cubism and Surrealism. Art issues of line and plane are dredged up. Perhaps to be subtitled: the war between man and man-made objects."

Toward the end of the 1970s, Campus had large solo shows in Cologne and Berlin, but it was also at this time he began to move away from interactive work toward large scale projection and an investigation of the head as image. Head of a man with death on his mind (1978) is a 12 minute video of the face of a man looking directly into the camera. Both the title of the work and the image itself invite viewers to a confrontation with dark inner contemplation. A further piece Man’s Head and Woman’s Head (1979) consisted of stark photo-projection of heads. At this time Campus had a personal crisis and stopped producing video work until 1995.