The Artist's Voice Since 1981 Bombsite
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THE ARTIST’S VOICE SINCE 1981 BOMBSITE Peter Campus by John Hanhardt BOMB 68/Summer 1999, ART Peter Campus. Shadow Projection, 1974, video installation. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery. My visit with Peter Campus was partially motivated by my desire to see his new work, a set of videotapes entitled Video Ergo Sum that includes Dreams, Steps and Karneval und Jude. These new works proved to be an extraordinary extension of Peter’s earlier engagement with video and marked his renewed commitment to the medium. Along with Vito Acconci, Dara Birnbaum, Gary Hill, Joan Jonas, Bruce Nauman, Nam June Paik, Steina and Woody Vasulka, and Bill Viola, Peter is one of the central artists in the history of the transformation of video into an art form. He holds a distinctive place in contemporary American art through a body of work distinguished by its articulation of a sophisticated poetics of image making dialectically linked to an incisive and subtle exploration of the properties of different media—videotape, video installations, photography, photographic slide installations and digital photography. The video installations and videotapes he created between 1971 and 1978 considered the fashioning of the self through the artist’s and spectator’s relationship to image making. Campus’s investigations into the apparatus of the video system and the relationship of the 1 of 16 camera to the space it occupied were elaborated in a series of installations. In mem [1975], the artist turned the camera onto the body of the specator and then projected the resulting image at an angle onto the gallery wall. Thus, the viewer was confronted with a distorted and ambiguous portrait that mysteriously shimmered in the darkness. Such work forged a complex phenomenological inquiry into the ontology of materials and the personal experience with aesthetic text. Campus also made a series of videotapes produced by the New Television Workshop at WGBH-TV in Boston. Three Transitions [1973] explored portraiture through the use of chroma-keying. One of the “transitions” uses chroma-keying to show a burning sheet of paper being replaced with Campus’s own live image—so that the artist observes an illusion of his face being burned—a combination of Magritte-like Surrealism and self-referential minimalism. Campus has also pursued portraiture using large-scale projected video. In Head of a Man with Death on His Mind [1978] the artist video-recorded the still face of actor John Erdman. Through framing and lighting, the face is subtly transformed to become a stark dramatic presence. The vaguely threatening quality is enhanced by the barely visible movement of the recorded image. Thus the portrait has a heightened psychological power, breathing life of its own. These large-scale video projections build a bold synthesis of the video portrait and the installation format. Over the following 10 years Campus produced a remarkable series of photographic works. His slide projections provided a dramatic contrast to the projected video portraiture: Murmur [1987] for example, featured a form from nature—a rock, a vegetable, or a shell—undergoing a transformation through the subtle lighting and photographic flattening of the object. When the image is enlarged to a projection on the gallery wall, it becomes a silvery, ghostlike presence. In the early ‘90s, Campus turned to digital photography, and then in 1996 returned to video. In these works he handles objects directly and translates them into digital imagery, thereby making technology an integral and organic part of his creative process. Shadowmaker is a 1995 self-portrait “superimposed onto a German newspaper review of a 1979 exhibition of his work; also depicted here, a stone in the shape of a heart partially obscures Campus’s image, a snakeskin, a leaf, pieces of tree bark and a waterfall. These various elements freely associate with moments from the artist’s life, and compose a portrait of the artist as a shadow maker. These personal, self-reflective objects all float through Campus’s digital assemblage technique. The gathering of the objects breaks down the surface meaning of “self-portrait,” while the compromised terminology itself provides a fundamental tension within the work. The videotape including Olivebridge [1996] and Mont Désert [1996], return to direct camera shots and editing to compose multilayered moving images. As I wrote in an essay for the program to Campus 1996 solo exhibition at the Bohen Foundation, “The videotape works immediately engage the viewer on the level of their beauty: the images are exquisitely composed with a subtle treatment of color and composition that draws out the details with a representational directness. The complexity within these works emerges through the editing, the sequencing, and relationship of the images to each other as Campus builds an associational montage that creates a multidimensional text. Structural relationships between sequences are punctuated by the manipulation of specific sequences through the freezing of the image, compression of time, and addition of sound. These strategies highlight a personal dimension of self-reflexive complexity, as our attention is drawn to the images as sites where figures, animals, rocks, and buildings make up a landscape that is a map of the self, and follow the path of the desires, losses and dreams that define the unfolding traces of the artist’s life.” 2 of 16 Peter Campus, Sandpipers 02, 1999. Courtesy ZUMA Digital. JOHN HANHARDT Peter, it’s wonderful being with you and renewing our past conversations. When you lived in the city, I was able to walk over to your studio and talk with you about your new work. I’ve just seen your installation videotapes, Video Ergo Sum, at your house here in Bellport, Long Island. I know that nature has been an important reference in your work, your life, and your art. Perhaps you could say something about this idea of leaving the city and being here by the sea. PETER CAMPUS I left the city because I was born and grew up in New York City and I have lived there most of my life. At some point it gets to be too much: too many sirens and too much air pollution. I needed to leave, and not on a temporary basis. For the last eight years I’ve been spending three or four days a week away from the city. This year, for the first time, we’ve moved entirely—I commute in to teach. For me to get away from where I was born has been a very needed change. Nature is a different issue—it’s hard to figure where and how nature has played into my life. Certainly, by being born in New York, I had very little to do with nature. My earliest experience with camping out was a disastrous one—Chef Boyardee warmed on a Sterno stove. At some point, more or less at the time I gave up video in early 1979, I got very interested in nature. A lot of it was an escape from what was going on in the city. It was a place where all the things that were bothering me would disappear. Then, very quickly, about 1982, it became the subject of my work. 3 of 16 Peter Campus, Steps 4, Steps 3, Steps 2, and Steps 1, 1999, video stills. JH Those black-and-white nature photographs were your first stills after the video work. PC Yes, taken with a 4×5 camera. I was in awe of 19th century photography. JH Do you feel there was a movement from the exploration of the inner self in the Three Transitions videotapes, for example, to an exploration of the self as a reflection, to a cognitive exploration of the self as in the series of installations: mem and Shadow Projection? It would be interesting to know how you locate that shift from video to still photography. PC For me what was important was not the switch from video to photography, but from the interior to the exterior. The interior examinations became overwhelming. Particularly the photographic series I did of faces that showed in Cologne and Berlin—which were very stark and severe. They came after Head of a Man with Death on His Mind, this projected, silent, barely moving, black- 4 of 16 and-white image of a man’s face staring at the camera. I went from that video projection piece to photo-projection pieces called Man’s Head, and Woman’s Head [1979], high contrast black-and-white Polaroid photographs produced in the studio. They continued that idea of confrontational imagery and it just became too much for me. I had to stop. So I started looking at an industrial, burned-out landscape. I found the exploration not so different in a way: those first landscape pictures were harsh. Then I turned to bridges, Bear Mountain Bridge, the Roebling Bridge on the upper Delaware River. Finally, from there, I went into nature. But I was still looking for what I called “resonance” in what I was feeling. I wouldn’t go out to photograph a tree or a stone or a rock; I never felt that the subject of my work was trees, rocks, or stones—I felt that they were in many ways a continuation of my internal examination, that they were reflecting my mood in nature. The difficulty is that often that’s not what’s communicated. It is subtle and not direct. Often people misunderstand work, or, let’s say it’s expected that people have different interpretations than I do of my work. The nature pieces with the 4×5 camera were received very differently from the way I saw them. JH I remember the response was that they recalled 19th century photography and its rhetorical form of image making, black-and-white photography of the natural landscape shot with a large-format camera.