Widely regarded as a pioneer of video art, peter campus creates complex installations that engage and amuse, while leading the viewer in a journey of discovery and self-awareness. From the early closed-circuit video installations he began making in 1971 to the more recent work, campus’ entire oeuvre deals with processes of perception and vision, exploiting the specific characteristics of both the electronic and the digital image. His work provides a unique experience for the visitor, who activates the work while exploring their own image. campus’ seminal interactive installations from the 1970s used live camera that reflected the image back to the viewer. campus’ work provides a constant source of mystery and strangeness for the viewer by making the relationship to one’s own image problematic. Indeed, without participation those artworks would not exist.
In 1978, campus devoted his time entirely to outdoors photography, working with nature as his subject. When he returned to video in 1996 after an extended hiatus, the medium had become digital and the equipment much lighter. His video productions from this period are intimate and poetic, yet still as experimental as the earlier work. In 2007, he began creating videographs of landscapes around his familiar environment of Long Island composed of static, unedited shots. campus’ treatment of the images, at the level of the pixel, creates a certain degree of abstraction, engaging the viewer in new exercises in perception and interpretation. His intense connection to site and his attention to light, color and framing may best be seen in his most recent work. Filmed in a natural setting in 4K, ultra-high-definition, the visitor’s gaze intersects with the sensibility and emotion of the artist’s vision.
American artist Peter Campus (born in 1937 in New York) is one of the most influential pioneers of video art, along with artists like Bruce Nauman, Nam June Paik, Joan Jonas, Vito Acconci and Bill Viola. The latter helped Campus install his first major exhibition at the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse (NY) in 1974. Throughout his career, Peter Campus has produced videos, installations, and a large body of photographic work.
In his recent video work, he makes use of digital techniques to work on the image, pixel by pixel, rather like a painter.
Using an extremely high-definition digital camera, Peter Campus pursues his current work. A large number of his works are featured in some of the world’s greatest contemporary art museums.
The exhibition “video ergo sum”—the artist’s first solo exhibition in France— retraces the artist’s career, starting with the experimental video art from the 1970s to his more recent video production.
Following studies in experimental psychology and film, in 1971 Peter Campus began to create videos and closed-circuit installations. Their conceptual and technical skill, combined with their psychological and cognitive dimension, resulted in a great deal of attention by art critics and specialists. Campus’s works have become an important reference and have been discussed in numerous publications examining the video as an art form.
The exhibition at the Jeu de Paume begins with works taken from this seminal early phase of his career. In the videos and installations produced up until 1977, Campus explores issues of spatial awareness, and our perception of the body in the construction of identity through the use of unusual perspectives and multiple timeframes. Thanks to the live transmission of the electronic image, he embarks the visitor on a strange and unsettling experience: the confrontation with his double, separated from him in time and space, thereby challenging notions of the self.
From one installation to the next, there is a progressive sense of constriction as the visitor’s actions are increasingly confined. He is no longer surprised by images of himself but is instead confronted with an unknown face: an enlarged projected image of a man’s face staring directly at the visitor. The result is a kind of blockage, an impasse of sorts, an exhaustion of possibilities… The spectator is once again relegated to his activity as observer.
The artist’s current video production explores the
possibilities of high definition digital video and allow Campus to create a pictorial work that involves another form of perception and spatial memory. A new piece, convergence d’images vers le port, was especially created for this exhibition.