Peter Campus, is an American born artist, known for his pioneering interactive and single channel video work of the early 1970s, alongside an extensive body of photographic and digital video works to the present day. His work is widely collected by major museums and galleries, including the MoMA

Museum of Modern Art

The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...

 in New York, the Whitney Museum

Whitney Museum of American Art

The Whitney Museum of American Art, often referred to simply as "the Whitney", is an art museum with a focus on 20th- and 21st-century American art. Located at 945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street in New York City, the Whitney's permanent collection contains more than 18,000 works in a wide variety of...

, the Guggenheim Museum

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is a well-known museum located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City, United States. It is the permanent home to a renowned collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, early Modern, and contemporary art and also features special exhibitions...

, Tate Modern

Tate Modern

Tate Modern is a modern art gallery located in London, England. It is Britain's national gallery of international modern art and forms part of the Tate group . It is the most-visited modern art gallery in the world, with around 4.7 million visitors per year...

, the Renia Sofia and the Centre Pompidou

Centre Georges Pompidou

Centre Georges Pompidou is a complex in the Beaubourg area of the 4th arrondissement of Paris, near Les Halles, rue Montorgueil and the Marais...

.

Childhood

Campus has an eastern European Jewish family background; his father was Romanian, a doctor, while his mother was Ukrainian. Campus was born in 1937 and brought up in New York, but his mother died when he was aged seven, an event that coloured Campus’ youth and family life. Several family members worked in the art world and he developed an early interest in photography, which his father taught him, and painting. Campus cites the influential experience of watching Michael Powell

Michael Powell (director)

Michael Latham Powell was a renowned English film director, celebrated for his partnership with Emeric Pressburger...

 movies as a teenager. He decided to study experimental psychology at Ohio State University

Ohio State University

The Ohio State University, commonly referred to as Ohio State, is a public research university located in Columbus, Ohio. It was originally founded in 1870 as a land-grant university and is currently the third largest university campus in the United States...

, where he gained his degree in 1960.

Early career

After military service, Campus studied film editing and worked in the film industry as a production manager and editor, making documentaries until the early 1970s. During this period he developed an interest in Minimal Art, becoming friends with the sculptor Robert Grosvenor. He worked with Otto Piene

Otto Piene

Otto Piene is a German artist. He lives and works in Düsseldorf and Groton, Massachusetts.-Biography:...

 and Aldo Tambellini at the Black Gate Theatre in East Village, New York. Charles Ross became a mentor and Campus worked as co-editor on Ross’ Sunlight Dispersion. Robert Smithson

Robert Smithson

Robert Smithson was an American artist famous for his land art.-Background and education:Smithson was born in Passaic, New Jersey and studied painting and drawing in New York City at the Art Students League of New York....

, Nancy Holt

Nancy Holt

Nancy Holt is an American artist famous for her public sculpture, installation art and land art. Throughout her career, Holt has also produced works in other mediums, including film, photography, and writing artist’s books.-Biography:...

, Bruce Nauman

Bruce Nauman

Bruce Nauman is a contemporary American artist. His practice spans a broad range of media including sculpture, photography, neon, video, drawing, printmaking, and performance. Nauman lives in Galisteo, New Mexico....

, Yvonne Rainer

Yvonne Rainer

Yvonne Rainer is an American dancer, choreographer and filmmaker, whose work in these disciplines is frequently challenging and experimental. Her work is classified as minimalist art.- Early life :...

 and Joan Jonas

Joan Jonas

Born in 1936 in New York City, Joan Jonas is a pioneer of video and performance art and one of the most important female artists to emerge in the late 1960s and early 1970s.She began her career in New York City as a sculptor...

 were influential figures in his decision to begin making his own art. In 1970, aged 33, Campus purchased his first video equipment.

1970s - 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

Narcissism

Narcissism is a term with a wide range of meanings, depending on whether it is used to describe a central concept of psychoanalytic theory, a mental illness, a social or cultural problem, or simply a personality trait...

.

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.

1980s and early 1990s – photography and digital imaging

There is a radical shift in Campus’ work from 1979 through the 1980s. He stopped working with video entirely and took up traditional still photography. There is also a major shift in subject matter as he moved away from the body and self and begun to look outside, to nature and landscape photography. “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…. 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.”. These photographs feature many images of stones, plus buildings, bridges, landscapes, trees and sticks, subjects that persisted in his work throughout the 1980s. Campus describes his search in these works as “looking for what I called “resonance” in what I was feeling.”

In 1982 Campus began teaching at the Rhode Island School of Design

Rhode Island School of Design

Rhode Island School of Design is a fine arts and design college located in Providence, Rhode Island. It was founded in 1877. Located at the base of College Hill, the RISD campus is contiguous with the Brown University campus. The two institutions share social, academic, and community resources and...

, and moved to New York University

New York University

New York University is a private, nonsectarian research university based in New York City. NYU's main campus is situated in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan...

 in 1983.

In Inside Out (1987), Campus worked with photographed ‘floating’ stones using enlarged photo-projection from a slide projector. This work superimposes the light of the projector upon the natural light of images of stones. It reflects Campus’ desire to poeticise the everyday, to “discover timelessness in everyday life. ”

In 1988 he started working with computer imaging, producing a series of still works, renewing an interest in experimentation with the structural characteristics of the digital imaging medium, using photo-montage, digital drawing and digital image manipulation. Many of these experimental techniques would lead into his next period of work with a series of new moving image video pieces.

1995 to 2010 – a return to video

In 1995, Campus began to work with video once again, producing Olivebridge and Mont Desert, working for the first time with digital video and non-linear editing. This marked the beginning of a series of significant new video works throughout the 1990s and 2000s, many presented in multi-screen monitor formations. These include Winter Journal (1997), By Degrees (1998), Video Ergo Sum (1999) Death Threat (2000), Six Movies (2001) and Time’s Friction (2004–2005). These works explore a complex range of personal themes – loss, memory, death, nature and landscape, the passing of time. Their formal characteristics are marked by Campus’ highly experimental approach to the digital video medium. He uses a range of techniques including multi-layering, superimposition, colour inversion, vanishings and appearances, chroma keying, colourisation, image mapping, pixelation and time manipulation.

In 2009, Peter Campus had a major retrospective show, Opticks at the British Film Institute

British Film Institute

The British Film Institute is a charitable organisation established by Royal Charter to:-Cinemas:The BFI runs the BFI Southbank and IMAX theatre, both located on the south bank of the River Thames in London...

 in London. Alongside several earlier works, he showed Inflections: changes in light and colour around Ponquogue Bay (2009), a high definition multi-screen installation consisting of digitally transformed natural landscape studies, reflecting Campus’ aim to “to abstract from reality and leave just colour, movement and light.” These techniques have continued into Calling for Shantih (2010), described by his representing gallery, Cristin Tierney Fine Art, as “floating between expressionist painting and pixelated animation.”

Peter Campus is currently Clinical Associate Professor of Art and Art Education and Artist in Residence at NYU Steinhardt.

Solo exhibitions

• 1971 Finch College Museum of Art, New York
• 1972 Bykert Gallery, New York
• 1973 Bykert Gallery, New York
• 1973 Whitney Biennial, New York
• 1974 Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York
• 1974 Kolnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, Germany
• 1975 Bykert Gallery, New York
• 1976 Leo Castelli gallery, New York
• 1967 Hayden Gallery, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge Maassachusetts
• 1977 The Kitchen, New York
• 1977 Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio
• 1977 documenta 6, Kassel, Germany
• 1978 Whitney Museum, New York
• 1978 Atlantic Gallery, Boston
• 1978 Venice Biennale, Italy
• 1979 Kolnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, Germany
• 1979 Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin, Germany
• 1980 Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France
• 1982 Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
• 1983 Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
• 1985 Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
• 1986 Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
• 1987 Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
• 1987 Freedman Gallery, Reading, Pennsylvania/Institute of Contemporary Art, Pennsylvania
• 1988 Heath Gallery, Atlanta
• 1988 Whitney Museum, New York
• 1988 Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna, Ferrara, Italy
• 1989 Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
• 1990 Genovese Gallery, Boston
• 1990 Museum Abteiberg, Monchengladbach, Germany
• 1990 Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
• 1991 Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
• 1992 Cleveland Centre for Contemporary Art, Ohio
• 1992 MIT List Visual Art Centre, Cambridge, Massachusetts
• 1993 Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
• 1993 La Box, Bourges, France
• 1993 Whitney Biennial, New York
• 1994 Video Gallery, Bard College, New York
• 1994 Inaugural Internet Art Gallery
• 1996 Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
• 1996 The Bohen Foundation, New York
• 1997 Rena Bransten, California
• 1997 John.F. Kennedy Airport, New York
• 1998 Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
• 2002 Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York
• 2002 Whitney Biennial, New York
• 2003 Kunstalle Bremen, Bremen, Germany
• 2003 Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso, Mexico City
• 2005 Galerie Volume, Rome, Italy
• 2005 Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
• 2007 Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York
• 2008 Albion Gallery, London
• 2009 British Film Institute, London
• 2010 The Power Plant, Toronto
• 2010 Cristin Tierney, New York

List of works – video and installations

• Dynamic Field Series (1971)
• Double Vision (1971)
• Kiva (1971)
• Interface (1972)
• Mer (1972)
• Optical Sockets (1972/1973)
• Three Transitions (1973)
• Stasis (1973)
• col (1973)
• Anamesis (1973)
• Negative Crossing (1973)
• Shadow Projection (1973)
• Set of Coincidence (1974)
• R-G-B (1974)
• mem (1974/1975)
• dor (1975)
• mir (1975)
• sev (1975)
• cir (1975)
• bys (1975)
• aen (1975)
• Four Sided Tape (1976)
• East Ended Tape (1976)
• Third Tape (1976)
• Six Fragments (1976)
• lus (1976)
• num (1976)
• Olivebridge (1996)
• Mont Desert (1996)
• Winter Journal (1997)
• By Degrees (1998)
• Video Ergo Sum (1999)
• Death Threat (2000)
• Six Movies (2001)
• divide (2001)
• The Material of Shadow (2002)
• Moments (2002)
• Karneval und Jude (1999–2002)
• Edge of the ocean (2003)
• el viejo (2004)
• red tag (2004)
• hammer (2004)
• Kathleen in grey (2004)
• Baruch the blessed (2004)
• Time’s Friction (2004–2005)
• Searching deserted places (2005)
• ponquogue bay (2006)
• forgetful snow (2006)
• lost days (2006)
• still wind (2006)
• in water (2007)
• the future of oil (2007)
• the reluctance of trees (2007)
• seines (2007)
• the blinds (2007)
• agenesis (2007)
• Inflections: changes in light and colour around Ponquogue Bay (2009)
• Calling for Shantih (2010)

External links

• Campus' 2009 Opticks show at the BFI, London
• Cristin Tierney Fine Art - representing Peter Campus
• Shadow Projection - Peter Campus talks about Shadow Projection
• Interview with David A. Ross - Curator David A. Ross talks to Peter Campus and Douglas Gordon at Tate Modern
  Tate Modern
  Tate Modern is a modern art gallery located in London, England. It is Britain's national gallery of international modern art and forms part of the Tate group . It is the most-visited modern art gallery in the world, with around 4.7 million visitors per year...
  
   April 2008
• Interface A short piece by Ralph Ubl in Tate Etc on Peter Campus' Interface (1972), pub. 2007
• Peter Campus faculty page at New York University Steinhardt
• Peter Campus biography on Artnet
• Peter Campus interviewed by John Hanhardt - published in BOMB 68/Summer 1999
• Exhibition details for 2007 show at Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York
• Campus' work at Electronic Arts Intermix - film distributor for Campus' works
• Interview with Oliver Basciano Art Review, 2010
• Technological Constructions of Space–Time Aspects of perception Heike Helfert article on Media Art Net
• Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism Rosalind Krauss
• Whitney Biennial Program 2002, From the Whitney Museum website
• Peter Campus in the Video Data Bank
• Peter Campus biography on Media Art Net