Peter Campus
| Peter Campus | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1937 New York City |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | Ohio State University |
| Known for | Video art, Photography, Interactive art |
| Awards | John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Fellowship, Center for Advanced Visual Studies, MIT, Cambridge |
Peter Campus, (born 1937) is an American born artist, known for his 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 in New York, the Whitney Museum, the Guggenheim Museum, Tate Modern, the Renia Sofia and the Centre Pompidou.
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 movies as a teenager. He decided to study experimental psychology at Ohio State University, where he earned his degree in 1960.
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 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, Nancy Holt, Bruce Nauman, Yvonne Rainer and Joan Jonas were influential figures in his decision to begin making his own art. In 1970, aged 33, Campus purchased his first video equipment.
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.
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