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 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.
