PETER CAMPUS

An aspiring painter and student of cognitive psychology, Peter Campus discovered the emerging medium of video in the late 1960s and found there the materials for a rich, career-long exploration of perception and personhood. As video ergo sum, a new retrospective at the Jeu de Paume in Paris, tracks Campus’s investigation of the self from early interactive installations into recent “videographs” of landscapes, key mid-career works are concurrently featured in circa 1987 at Cristin Tierney Gallery in New York. Just as Alfred Stieglitz cultivated links between photography and the unconscious, Campus endows technologically generated images with visual richness and highly personal implications. While his contemporaries under the sway of minimalism often distanced themselves from personal content, Campus, without abandoning minimalist rigor, engaged darkly romantic themes of death and isolation. If sometimes melodramatic, Campus sustains a critical analysis of the phenomenology of perception as mediated by video, particularly as distinctive from film.