The exhibition in the Gallery and the accompanying retrospective in the cinemas offer a rare opportunity to appraise the work of an artist who has contributed greatly to the development of the creative use of video and whose work has influenced two generations of practitioners. Campus' work is particularly relevant in the context of the Gallery at the BFI because he was crucial in developing the potential of video within a gallery space, placing the visitor in the leading position of 'activator' of the work, subverting the passive role that video (through television) had given to the viewers up to that point.
Born in 1937, in New York, Campus first came to prominence as an artist in the early '70s with his close-circuit works, three of which - Kiva (1971), Stasis (1973) and mem (1975) - are included in the exhibition alongside a new six-screen work commissioned by the BFI, Inflections: changes in light and colour around Ponquogue Bay (2009). Campus' close-circuit works subvert the viewer/work relationship; it is only when the visitor enters the field of the work's apparatus that the piece is actually activated. Far from being interactive in the better known sense of the term, Kiva, Stasis and mem are fully realised only through the visitor's movements within the space; but while we observe and explore a different, yet live and highly recognisable portrait of ourselves, such physical engagement soon becomes mental and emotional. In mem for example - showing in London for the first time – as one approaches the projection surface, the image becomes smaller to the point of receding and disappearing. This work, like all of Campus', ask the existential question of what is a true image and it is this concern that places campus' work within the history of the visual arts as much as within that of the moving image.
Such engagement with a broader history of the arts and in particular painting is what's particularly striking about the artist's new series of works. In Inflections: changes in light and colour around Ponquogue Bay (2009), static, slowed down videos shot on the Ponquogue Bay - on the south shore of Long Island, New York, where Campus lives - are digitally altered to create abstract landscapes. In the work we find Campus' distinctive interest in technological experimentation coupled with a strong concern for formal composition, the result being hypnotic images, suspended between painting and video, stillness and movement. The work not only confirm Campus' ongoing preoccupation with new technologies but most importantly it creates new, unexpected possibilities of painterly abstraction for video.
Inflections: changes in light and colour around Ponquogue Bay (2009) is commissioned by the BFI. With thanks to Albion, London.
The exhibition version of mem is courtesy of Kunsthalle Bremen - Kunstverein Bremen.Kiva and Stasis are courtesy of Albion, London.
November calendar (PDF)