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In the Face of Fire: Peter Campus’s Three Transitions, the Self-Portrait Tradition, and the States of the Arts [Revise-it #2]

This essay is the second piece I wanted to elaborate on, as I think the readings I teased out have not been previously discussed, to my knowledge, by any of the previous scholarship surrounding this videotape by Peter Campus. This was originally “Response Paper 5” for my History of Video Art class in my final semester, a low stakes weekly assignment, meant only to be 250 words, to ensure we were engaging with class materials. However, in my preparatory rewatches of Three Transitions for the assignment, I was propelled to keep riffing and digging further and see where it took me—much past 250 words. When I thought I had said everything I had to say, there was another idea that jumped out ahead of me, necessitating that I push forward. Once more, this text ended up being more ambitious than I had originally imagined: that is, I found myself having much more to say all over again—new angles, new complications—a year and 3,000 words later. So, here is a little something to mark the fiftieth anniversary of one of the most important contributions to the history of video art.

In relation to fine art, Peter Campus’s Three Transitions did not immediately remind me of the standard self-portrait. Campus’s addition struck me as something else, operating by an entirely new set of principles, diverging from the usual artist posing in medium close-up. In my mind, if we were to compare this video to any self-portraits, what seems a more suitable comparison are those paintings that foreground the process of the artmaking within the self-portrait itself, pushing or playing with the genre’s conventions rather than focusing on a realistic re-presentation of artist likeness. Diego Velázquez or Adélaïde Labille-Guiard with their self-portraits in a group, for example: Las Meninas (1656) and Self-Portrait with Two Pupils (1785), respectively. In addition, Pieter Claesz with the combination of self-portrait and allegorical still life in Vanitas with Violin and Glass Ball (1628), or Johannes Gumpp’s two self-portraits (ca. 1646) and Norman Rockwell’s Triple Self-Portrait (1960) that see the artists each represent themselves three times in one painting. In all these examples, the artist is seen at work, creating, within that very work that is now displayed for the viewer. And while the latter three reveal the material supports of their self-portraits upon the canvas itself, Campus, despite working with a different medium with its own set of formal apparatuses, also opts to highlight these same fixtures of two-dimensional art in his work, namely, paper and paint. But to create his own version of a triple self-portrait, Campus superimposes two video feeds, adjusting the alpha channels of the layers to double his likeness for each of the three transitions. (So, is that two-self portraits total; one for each layer? Three; for each vignette? Or six; for the total number of Peter Campuses onscreen over the video’s duration?) Despite the multiplications of himself, Campus’s gesture is not one wholly in line with self-portraiture. Unlike those artists, Campus is picturing his body in order to “destroy” it. Two layers of visual information are glaringly (and repeatedly) fused to form an anti-self-portrait triptych. In Three Transitions, Campus plays on the art tradition of the self-portrait, challenging its celebration of artist identity and individual subjecthood by employing video abstraction, alongside two-dimensional art media, as tools of deconstruction.

In what I see as aligned with typical early video art fashion, Campus is concerned primarily with deconstruction without necessarily planning any sort of reconstruction. In the first scene, after appearing to cut and then step through his own superimposed back, Campus shoddily tapes the ripped paper barrier back together. In the second, he applies paint atop his face, and due to differences in his movement and position before the camera in each layer of footage, reveals a second face that appears to have been waiting underneath the “real” thing. And the third sees Campus burn a piece of paper that holds his own moving image through the same principle of chromatic substitution explored in the second. Across all three of his transitions, Campus is taking fine art media and repurposing them to dis-figure his own image and question assumptions upheld by the self-portrait tradition, a tradition previously only made possible by similar supports. In the scholarship surrounding this video too much attention is paid to Campus himself and the changes undergone by his body-image and what that means he means about subjectivity in the age of instantaneous feedback, etc., etc. I am more interested in the objects at hand. Too much focus on the self and not the portrait, the support, the media that organizes the form.1 The “self-ish” approach seems antithetical to the project of a video centered on breaking down boundaries. Rather, what is the video saying about self-portraiture? about artistic tradition? about itself and its medium within said tradition?

For instance, one could note several similarities between Campus and Gumpp’s acts of tripled self-portraying (and by extension to Rockwell’s appropriation of the latter as well); however, Gumpp’s goal is one of “defiance . . . by means of art,” an act of preservation from a mysterious, overlooked artist acutely aware of his “impending absence” after the work’s completion (Blasone 3). As scholar Pino Blasone astutely notes, art critic Jean-Luc Nancy and artist Norman Rockwell in their own responses to Gumpp’s portrait omit the symbolic additions of the cat and dog on either side of the artist. As I see it, scholarship surrounding Three Transitions fails to accommodate the significance of Campus’s symbolically reflexive mise-en-scène as well.

The relationship between painting and moving images goes further back than Campus and his critique of the subject and the limitations of self-portraying. Long before video, film took from painting its core language, but film was about real time—images in motion. When consumer-grade video equipment was made available to the public, artists who adopted the new medium (in the mid-60s and into the early 70s) made themselves the objects of their art, many often performing alone in their studios. These video pioneers added the elements of time, motion, and sound to the act of self-portraying as artistic expression. They took advantage of the instantaneous feedback allowed by the advent of video—to see oneself in real time, to interact with one’s own image, and thus, act according to it. Not to mention, analog video also contributed to the destabilization of art as tangible object. At the time, video was stored on a physical tape, but the images were not viewable through this mechanism alone, as on a reel of film. You could not handpaint on magnetic videotape or physically cut it like film. Unlike film, unlike painting, video processes were all electronic. And so, by employing two-dimensional art media, Campus reflexively acknowledges the historical basis of this new form of moving image media in order to produce something aesthetically radical.

By foregrounding paint media, Campus returns to the linguistic basis of filmic cinema in order to forge a new mode of looking, one more adapted and adaptable to the world of screens and simulations.2 After all, video (Latin for “I see”) is an action, while film is a technology. In her “Aesthetics of Narcissism” essay, Rosalind Krauss identified this looking as one directed back on the artists’ self when she prescribed onto video a psychological model of medium: narcissism. She argues that the mainstay motif of nascent video art, that is, the monitor, creates a closed loop of space-time with the camera, and it is within this loop of space-time that the artist operates, manipulating their own image by engaging with their own image (Krauss 50). Put simply, an “investment of energy in selfhood” characterized the video art medium more so than any common material basis (Jurgess). Whenever I engage with Krauss’s assessment, I always find myself agreeing and disagreeing (no doubt a testament to its rhetorical brilliance and academic longevity). For example, while Campus does observe his own image offscreen to direct the movement of his body, by the finale of the video, he begins the move to remove him-self from the image, absorbed into the frame. He allows the viewer a peek into the pregnant nothingness beyond the human. All one needs to participate in the camera-man cyborg is hands—the only parts of his body left. And so, Three Transitions, although largely spotlighting the artist’s corporeality, searches for a new mode of looking that attempts to peer beyond the subject. In the liberal Western world, social institutions—including, and especially, those involving art and artmaking—are centered around the concept of the individual, the subject. Perhaps, we can never escape this narcissism or self-possession, I don’t even think Campus completely does (or can), but he suggests the possibility and necessity for other “models of posthuman distributed subjectivity” not centered around the human (Jurgess). After all, Campus titles this work Three Transitions, not Three Self-Portraits, foregrounding the progression and destruction of his body-as-art-object through time, emphasizing transformation, evolution, moving beyond. But toward what?

According to Steven Shaviro, “An artist is somebody who wants to turn the whole world into images; but he usually ends up making more objects instead.” However, Campus with the ending to his most famous video—a video that has overshadowed the rest of his oeuvre, essentially rendering him into an image, in a manner of speaking—typifies this desire to turn the world into images. Video only conjures images, not objects. For Shaviro, an image is nothing like a solid object. By placing his image over paper, by painting his face, and only by videotaping these acts, Campus registers the unique ability of video to flatten the world into images, especially the art world and its traditions of self-representation à la object construction. Why go to a museum to view the works of the Old Masters when the entire canon of Western painting exists free of charge as images online? He burns the old media until its just a camera recording darkness. “Images are premised upon a visibility so extreme that it relegates the world to a state of almost transparency” (Shaviro). Campus accelerates this process toward its logical conclusion, removing art media and artist from the picture—no, from the screen.

In an increasingly visual culture increasingly concerned with surfaces and interfaces, Campus becomes these very things himself. For example, in the final transition, Campus is the only visible thing, placed in the foreground as well to highlight his role as surface, as image (as he also holds his own image in his hands). Of specific importance here as well, the background gets noticeably darker from the first to the second to the third transition, paradoxically adding and subtracting a sense of depth within the frame. Both self-portraiture and Three Transitions convert three-dimensional models to two-dimensional image to create the illusion of depth; now, the camera does most of that work for you, allowing the artist to focus on different, newer questions alongside the age-old quandaries. And so, it is all a flattening into surface: the transfer from 3D to 2D, from life to analog (and once more now to digital). Video is concerned with nothing but surface, that is, with what we can see.

The void is absent, the void is revealed, the void is darkened, and it is here, at its darkest, its most impending and impregnable state, that Campus stages the crux of his critique.

In the first two sections of Three Transitions, things return to how they were, albeit changed: the paper barrier is more or less intact, Campus still has a face (or two?). But in the last episode, the protruding brow of Campus shrinks back out of frame as the paper—as stand-in for classical painting media—withers away. The first two vignettes could be read as a dual-sided repetition of destruction-creation but the last is a destructive gesture toward subject and two-dimensional fine art tradition, especially the self-portrait. Yet destruction seems too harsh a label for this misleadingly simple video short. It is more a change of matter into new forms, as its title implies. The video triptych follows Campus’s phase transitions through the three states of matter. In other words, the first section is solid (paper), the second is liquid (paint), and the third, gas (fire). It should be noted that fire is a chemical reaction: through video, art and the human body are ultimately undergoing a sort of molecular transformation. The reappearance of paper in the finale is not a return to the groundedness of the initial solid phase, as it is not solids or liquids that combust but the gaseous vapors produced once heated.3 After reaching its flashpoint, this chroma-keyed sheet of paper, once ignited, cannot be repaired like the first, destroying the possibility of any ultimate reconstruction.

However, there is a fourth, more elusive state of matter, and I do not believe Three Transitions leaves it out. Without definite shape or volume, plasma as a medium is quasi-neutral, infinitely conductive, and dominated by electrical and magnetic fields. Videotape could be described in much the same way, interacting with both these fields, encoding audiovisual information by magnetically recording electronic signals. Like its first appearance, the paper in this final section once more acts as a barrier, separating the “real” Campus from the black void before him, the camera from the void, viewer from void. As it burns, an indefinite space of possibility is revealed; it makes itself known, finally apparent to the viewer so trained to focus on the artist and art objects. That buck stops here for Campus, with video. No longer is the author the final word on the creation of meaning. For the final four seconds before the credits, the disembodied hands of the artist appear as if those of the camera—the camera now functioning like POV. Campus-as-camera. This final action captures the ready-to-hand synthesis of man and video. Film may have developed the language, but video handed out the paper and pen (or rather, paper and paint) to everyone.

Then, Campus cuts the video short. The paper is never fully allowed to burn. He will eventually have to let it go; an action that we will never see. The edit does not allow the viewer to witness the artist dropping the old media/tradition nor does it allow any legitimate destruction to the artist’s body. As I work through the problem of this video over and over, the self-portrait reasserts itself more than originally considered. Yet, there is a cut. That is the brilliance of Three Transitions: it is both humorously deadpan and disorienting, it is self-portrait and not all at once. Shaviro affirms this paradox more broadly: “images have a weightlessness that is both mysterious and soothing.” Campus’s career aside, as a standalone text, the video and the state of the artist end ambiguously (i.e., what becomes of the artist and his hands, previously tasked to rip, tape, and paint?). Nothing. The paper is always still there, even if it is burning, but the face is always erased by the end, however, the perpetual loop of the gallery will always be sure to bring it back; the gallery monitor and canvas work in tandem after all, preserving the order of things. Like postmodernism to medium specificity, video interrupts, but it does not undo. Yet no video since has captured the potentially deconstructive, emancipatory power of video as succinctly as Peter Campus’s Three Transitions. Video is the next state; the void, its reflection. Video was the next state, but it is not the final state.4 Nonetheless, video still has the power to move art and subjecthood effortlessly between each phase of matter until there is nothing left but two sets of pinched fingers clenching ashen paper in a void, perhaps where something new can spring forth.

Notes

  1. It would seem that the current direction of Campus’s career (i.e., opting to work in the vain of what he refers to as “videographs”—static long shots of natural landscapes recorded with a digital video camera—which followed his period as a nature photographer from the late 70s to mid-90s) and the choice to now stylize his name and works without capitalization spells a move that aims to de-privilege the subject. ↩︎
  2. According to André Bazin in “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” the essence of photography is centered on its realism, taking over the realistic function of painting maintained up until the late nineteenth century. As a result, cinema took over as the primary arbiter of realism, producing the richest imitation of reality: “André Malraux has described the cinema as the furthermost evolution to date of plastic realism, the beginnings of which were first manifest at the Renaissance” (Bazin 10). Campus makes uncanny the realism once proclaimed to be embodied in the photographic arts. To paint one’s face to reveal the same face via chroma key technique figures the fledgling video medium as markedly and consciously departing from realism, or, at the very least, concerning itself much less with such notions while reflexively operating within this filial thread of the (moving) image. (And so, it can be said that video has the baggage of two other art forms to carry.) However, and/or for example, the locked, static framing in Three Transitions recalls the “simplicity” of silent cinema tableaux, in turn derived from the landscapes and genre painting of nineteenth-century French Realism. Even the videographs mentioned in the previous note also invoke this historicity. So, maybe Campus is not all that far off? ↩︎
  3. Additionally, paper serves a different function between the first and third transition, appearing in the latter to behave almost like a monitor or even a mirror. Ironically, the next and now current stage of video in its digital iteration has been regarded by scholars like Lev Manovich as more akin to painting than traditional cinema or videotape (3). Not to say that Campus predicted digital video, but he certainly foresaw and/or ushered in the conditions that allowed the (post-)medium to literally supplant itself over physical media, overtaking those cultural spaces once dominated by print and paint before the Information Age. ↩︎
  4. But what will supersede video and the digital? This article suggests the quantum, which oddly enough returns in some sense to the analog model. The difference between digital status and quantum state is also perhaps relevant—something to think about and develop later. I don’t know anything about science, but it all sounds very exciting. Even further reading: https://www.inc.com/thomas-koulopoulos/the-end-of-digital-revolution-is-coming-heres-whats-next.html. ↩︎

Works Cited

Postface

What is left in a world in which we have burned our images?

Perhaps, in fact, we have reached the void that Campus foresaw, having walked face first, full of excitement for all its promises only to find there was no global village, there was no more counterculture, and there was nothing beyond our selves. We only got more images. The digital revolution changed everything and nothing. We are unhappy not because we have become images or because images have been exposed as always having been the “real” thing, but because we mistake the images as anything other than what they are. An image is an image is an image.

La vague (1869/1870, Gustave Courbet)
The Unchanging Sea (1910, D. W. Griffith)
a wave (2009, peter campus)
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    Anonymous

    ·

    Rosalind Krauss’s article was written as she was starting october magazine, which took the marxist stance against individualism. my mother was a real marxist. i found myself reacting against this strict doctrine, which i found as repressive as any religion. i believe in the individual, relative to the tao. so, right you are. more to come. peter campus

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