Peter Campus (born 1937 in New York, NY), often styled as peter campus, is an American artist and a pioneer of new media and video art, known for his interactive video installations, single-channel video works, and photography. His work is held in the collections of numerous public institutions, including

The Museum of Modern Art The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. MoMA's collection spans the late 19th century to the present, and includes over 200,000 works of arc ...

Whitney Museum of American Art The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is a Modern art, modern and Contemporary art, contemporary American art museum located in the Meatpacking District, Manhattan, Meatpacking District and West Village neighbor ...

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, often referred to as The Guggenheim, is an art museum at 1071 Fifth Avenue between 88th and 89th Street (Manhattan), 89th Streets on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City. It hosts a permanent coll ...

, Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart,

Tate Modern Tate Modern is an art gallery in London, housing the United Kingdom's national collection of international Modern art, modern and contemporary art (created from or after 1900). It forms part of the Tate group together with Tate Britain, Tate Live ...

Museo Reina Sofía Museo may refer to: * ''Museum'' (2018 film), Mexican drama heist film * Museo station, station on line 1 of the Naples Metro {{disambiguation ...

Albright-Knox Art Gallery The Buffalo AKG Art Museum, formerly known as the Albright–Knox Art Gallery, is an art museum located adjacent to Delaware Park, Buffalo, New York, United States. The museum shows modern art and contemporary art. It is directly opposite Buff ...

Walker Art Center The Walker Art Center is a multidisciplinary contemporary art center in the Lowry Hill, Minneapolis, Lowry Hill neighborhood of Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. The Walker is one of the most-visited modern and contemporary art museums in ...

, and the

Centre Georges Pompidou The Centre Pompidou (), more fully the (), also known as the Pompidou Centre in English and colloquially as Beaubourg, is a building complex in Paris, France. It was designed in the style of high-tech architecture by the architectural team of ...

. The artist works on the south shore of

Long Island Long Island is a densely populated continental island in southeastern New York (state), New York state, extending into the Atlantic Ocean. It constitutes a significant share of the New York metropolitan area in both population and land are ...

Early life and career

Born and raised in New York, Campus has an eastern European Jewish family background. His mother was Ukrainian, and his father was a doctor of Romanian descent, born in the U.S. to immigrant parents. Campus' mother died when he was aged seven, an event that dramatically affected the artist's youth and family life. Inspired by several family members who worked in the art world, he developed an early interest in photography, which his father taught him, and painting. Campus cites watching

Michael Powell Michael Latham Powell (30 September 1905 – 19 February 1990) was an English filmmaker, celebrated for his partnership with Emeric Pressburger. Through their production company Powell and Pressburger, The Archers, they together wrote, produced ...

movies as a teenager as an influential experience. He studied experimental psychology with a focus on the development of the senses and cognitive studies at

Ohio State University The Ohio State University (Ohio State or OSU) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Columbus, Ohio, United States. A member of the University System of Ohio, it was founded in 1870. It is one ...

, earning his degree in 1960. After military service, Campus studied film editing at City College Film Institute 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 (, 18 April 1928 – 17 July 2014) was a German-American artist specializing in kinetic art, kinetic and technology-based art, often working collaboratively. He lived and worked in Düsseldorf, Germany; Cambridge, Massachusetts; and G ...

and

Aldo Tambellini Aldo Tambellini (29 April 1930 – 12 November 2020) was an Italian-American artist. He pioneered electronic intermedia, and was a painter, sculptor, and poet. He died at age 90, in November 2020. Childhood Aldo Tambellini was born in Syracus ...

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 (January 2, 1938 – July 20, 1973) was an American artist known for sculpture and land art who often used drawing and photography in relation to the spatial arts. His work has been internationally exhibited in galleries and mu ...

Nancy Holt Nancy Holt (April 5, 1938 – February 8, 2014) was an American artist most known for her public sculpture, installation art, concrete poetry, and land art. Throughout her career, Holt also produced works in other media, including film and photog ...

Bruce Nauman Bruce Nauman (born December 6, 1941) is an American artist. His practice spans a broad range of media including sculpture, photography, neon, video, drawing, printmaking, and performance. Nauman lives near Galisteo, New Mexico. Life and work ...

Yvonne Rainer Yvonne Rainer (born November 24, 1934) is an American dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker, whose work in these disciplines is regarded as challenging and experimental.

and

Joan Jonas Joan Jonas (born July 13, 1936) is an American visual artist and a pioneer of video and performance art, "a central figure in the performance art movement of the late 1960s".Bykert Gallery in New York, and his first solo museum exhibition at the

Everson Museum of Art The Everson Museum of Art ( ) in Downtown Syracuse, New York, is a major Central New York museum focusing on American art. History The museum was founded in 1897 by art historian George Fisk Comfort (who also helped found the Metropolitan Museu ...

in 1974. In this early period, his works consisted of single-channel videos and interactive closed-circuit television installations. Campus' first video, ''Dynamic Field Series'' (1971), features a camera suspended above the artist, which he moved up and down using a rope pulley as he lay on the floor below. In ''

Double Vision Diplopia is the simultaneous perception of two images of a single object that may be displaced in relation to each other. Also called double vision, it is a loss of visual focus under regular conditions, and is often voluntary. However, when occ ...

'' (1971), Campus used two cameras and superimposition, beginning a more formal experimentation with the medium itself—a characteristic that recurs in his work to this day. Other 1970s video work includes the influential ''Three Transitions'' (1973), in which the artist transforms his recorded image in three different sequences, using superimposition and chroma-keying technology. In ''Third Tape'' (1976), Campus manipulates a virtual self-image into an abstract self-portrait by filming the performer John Erdman's 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." His interactive closed-circuit video installations include ''Kiva'' (1971), ''Interface'' (1972), ''Optical Sockets'' (1972–73), ''Anamnesis'' and ''Stasis'' (1973), ''Shadow Projection'' and ''Negative Crossing'' (1974), ''mem,'' ''dor,'' ''cir,'' and ''sev'' (1975), and ''lus,'' ''bys, num,'' and ''aen'' (1976). 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 close-circuit live feedback television, projection, mirroring, image distortion, and the projection of shadows. 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 versus virtuality, self-transformation, presence and absence, the relationship of the viewer to the work of art, passivity and activity in the viewer, existentialism, the uncanny and egology. Toward the end of the 1970s, Campus began to move away from interactive work toward large scale projection and an investigation of faces and heads as subject matter. ''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 dark inner contemplation. Two further pieces, ''Man's Head'' and ''Woman's Head'' (1979), consisted of stark photo-projections of heads. Several radical shifts occurred in Campus' work from 1979 through the 1980s. He stopped working with video entirely, taking up traditional still photography instead. He also moved away from the body and self and began to look outside, to nature and

landscape photography Landscape photography (often shortened to landscape photos) captures the world's outdoor spaces, sometimes vast and unending and other times microscopic. Landscape photographs typically capture the presence of nature but can also focus on human-ma ...

. Describing these changes, the artist stated, "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." Photographs from this period feature many images of stones, buildings, bridges, landscapes, trees, and sticks. Campus describes his search in these works as "looking for what I called 'resonance' in what I was feeling" and an effort to "discover timelessness in everyday life." In 1988 he started working with computer imaging, producing a series of still works. This renewed Campus' interest in experimentation with the structural characteristics of the digital imaging medium, and he drew from photo-montage, digital drawing and digital image manipulation. Many of these experimental techniques would be carried over into the artist's next body of work, and his return to moving image. In 1996, Campus began to work with video once again, producing ''Olivebridge'' and ''Mont Désert'', 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, and 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, color inversion, vanishings and appearances, chroma keying, colorization, image mapping, pixelation, and time distortion. Campus has continued to work with video and video installations. Campus' 21st century works reference both the history of film and painting, with the artist digitally manipulating his videos on a granular, pixel-by-pixel level. Commonly featured are seascapes and life in coastal communities located around eastern Long Island, Massachusetts, and the French Atlantic coast—a continuation of Campus' longstanding search for personal harmony in nature. Other important influences in recent years are the advance of 4K technology, which has further enabled the artist's experimentation with the video format, and the cinematic concept of the "sequence," or the order that images appear in. Major gallery exhibitions from the past decade include ''Calling for Shantih'' (2010), ''dredgers'' (2014), ''circa 1980'' (2017), and ''pause'' (2018) at Cristin Tierney Gallery and ''Now and Then'' (2012) at Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery. In 2017, a survey exhibition of the artist's work, entitled ''video ergo sum,'' opened at the

Jeu de Paume ''Jeu de paume'' (, ; originally spelled ; ), nowadays known as real tennis, (US) court tennis or (in France) ''courte paume'', is a ball-and-court game that originated in France. It was an indoor precursor of tennis played without racquets, ...

in Paris. Curated by Anne-Marie Duguet and featuring Campus' work from 1971 to the present, ''video ergo sum'' included a new four-channel video installation commissioned by the museum, ''Convergence d'images vers le port.'' ''video ergo sum'' has traveled to Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Sevilla, Spain (2017); Fundação Caixa Geral de Depósitos - Culturgest in Lisbon, Portugal (2018); The Bronx Museum of the Arts in Bronx, NY (2019); and Hanes Art Gallery at Wake Forest University, SECCA, and

Reynolda House Museum of American Art The Reynolda House Museum of American Art is an art museum located in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Built in 1917 by Katharine Smith Reynolds and her husband R. J. Reynolds, founder of the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, it displays a collecti ...

in Winston-Salem, NC (2019). There was a solo exhibition for Peter Campus at the Christin Tierney Gallery in New York (2023).

Academic career

Campus taught at the

Rhode Island School of Design The Rhode Island School of Design (RISD , pronounced "Riz-D") is a private art and design school in Providence, Rhode Island. The school was founded as a coeducational institution in 1877 by Helen Adelia Rowe Metcalf, who sought to increase th ...

in 1982. From 1983 to 2014, Campus was a Clinical Associate Professor of Art and Art Education and Artist in Residence at NYU Steinhardt.

Awards

Awards that Campus has earned include: a

Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are Grant (money), grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, endowed by the late Simon Guggenheim, Simon and Olga Hirsh Guggenheim. These awards are bestowed upon indiv ...

(1975), Massachusetts Institute of Technology Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (1976–79), a

National Endowment of the Arts The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) is an independent agency of the United States federal government that offers support and funding for projects exhibiting artistic excellence. It was created in 1965 as an independent agency of the feder ...

grant (1976), and a grant from the

Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst The German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD; ), founded in 1925, is a joint organization of German universities and student bodies to foster their international relations. Since 1 January 2020, the president has been Joybrato Mukherjee. Organis ...

(1979). In 1974 he was the Artist in Residence at the Television Laboratory, WNET-TV, New York, supported by the New York State Council on the Arts.

Selected public collections

Campus' work is held in several institutional collections, including: *

, Buffalo, NY *

Allen Memorial Art Museum The Allen Memorial Art Museum (AMAM) is an art museum located in Oberlin, Ohio, and it is run by Oberlin College. Founded in 1917, the collection contains over 15,000 works of art. Overview The AMAM is primarily a teaching museum and is aimed at ...

, Oberlin, OH *

Bowdoin College Museum of Art The Bowdoin College Museum of Art is an art museum located in Brunswick, Maine. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the museum is a part of Bowdoin College and has been located in the Walker Art Building since 1894. The museum is ...

, Brunswick, ME *

The Brooklyn Museum The Brooklyn Museum is an art museum in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. At , the museum is New York City's second largest and contains an art collection with around 500,000 objects. Located near the Prospect Heights, Crown Heights, Fla ...

, Brooklyn, NY *

Carnegie Museum of Art The Carnegie Museum of Art is an art museum in the Oakland (Pittsburgh), Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The museum was originally known as the Department of Fine Arts, Carnegie Institute and was formerly located ...

, Pittsburgh, PA * CCS Bard Hessel Museum, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY *

, Paris, France * Centro Cultural Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City, Mexico * The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH *

Dallas Museum of Art The Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) is an art museum located in the Arts District of downtown Dallas, Texas, along Woodall Rodgers Freeway between St. Paul and Harwood. In the 1970s, the museum moved from its previous location in Fair Park to the A ...

, Dallas, TX *

Hamburger Bahnhof Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart is the former Train station#Terminus, terminus of the Berlin–Hamburg Railway in Berlin, Germany, on Invalidenstrasse in the Moabit district opposite the Charité hospital. Today it serves as ...

, Berlin, Germany *

Harvard Art Museums The Harvard Art Museums are part of Harvard University and comprise three museums: the Fogg Museum (established in 1895), the Busch-Reisinger Museum (established in 1903), and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum (established in 1985), and four research ...

, Cambridge, MA *

High Museum of Art The High Museum of Art (colloquially the High) is the largest museum for visual art in the Southeastern United States. Located in Atlanta, Georgia (on Peachtree Street in Midtown, the city's arts district), the High is 312,000 square feet (28, ...

, Atlanta, GA *

Kunsthalle Bremen The Kunsthalle Bremen is an art museum in Bremen, Germany. It is located close to the Bremen Old Town on the "Culture Mile" (). The Kunsthalle was built in 1849, enlarged in 1902 by architect Eduard Gildemeister, and expanded several more times, ...

, Bremen, Germany *

Kunstmuseum Bern The Museum of Fine Arts Bern (German: ''Kunstmuseum Bern''), established in 1879 in Bern, is the museum of fine arts of the de facto capital of Switzerland. Collections Its holdings run from the Middle Ages to the present. It houses works by Pa ...

, Bern, Switzerland *

Los Angeles County Museum of Art The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is an art museum located on Wilshire Boulevard in the Miracle Mile vicinity of Los Angeles. LACMA is on Museum Row, adjacent to the La Brea Tar Pits (George C. Page Museum). LACMA was founded in 1961 ...

, Los Angeles, CA *

List Visual Arts Center Established in 1950, the List Visual Arts Center (LVAC) is the contemporary art museum of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is known for temporary exhibitions in its galleries located in the MIT Media Lab building, as well as its admin ...

, Cambridge, MA * Middlebury College Museum of Art, Middlebury, VT *

Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum The Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum is an art museum located on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis, within the university's Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts. Founded in 1881 as the St. Louis School and Museum of Fine Arts, i ...

, St. Louis, MO *

, New York, NY *

Musée National d'Art Moderne The Musée National d'Art Moderne (; "National Museum of Modern Art") is the national museum for modern art of France. It is located in the 4th arrondissement of Paris and is housed in the Centre Pompidou. In 2021 it ranked 10th in the list of ...

, Paris, France *

National Gallery of Art The National Gallery of Art is an art museum in Washington, D.C., United States, located on the National Mall, between 3rd and 9th Streets, at Constitution Avenue NW. Open to the public and free of charge, the museum was privately established in ...

, Washington, DC *

National Gallery of Canada The National Gallery of Canada (), located in the capital city of Ottawa, Ontario, is Canada's National museums of Canada, national art museum. The museum's building takes up , with of space used for exhibiting art. It is one of the List of large ...

, Ottawa, Canada *

Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art is an art gallery, art museum in Kansas City, Missouri, Kansas City, Missouri, known for its encyclopedic collection of art from nearly every continent and culture, and especially for its extensive collection of A ...

, Kansas City, KS *

Norton Museum of Art The Norton Museum of Art is an art museum in West Palm Beach, Florida. The museum has a collection that includes over 8,200 works, with a concentration in Western art history, European, Visual arts of the United States, American, and Chinese art ...

, Palm Beach, FL *

Parrish Art Museum The Parrish Art Museum is an art museum designed by Herzog & de Meuron Architects and located in Water Mill, New York, whereto it moved in 2012 from Southampton Village. The museum focuses extensively on work by artists from the artist colony o ...

, Water Mill, NY *

Philadelphia Museum of Art The Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) is an List of art museums#North America, art museum originally chartered in 1876 for the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. The main museum building was completed in 1928 on Fairmount, a hill located at ...

, Philadelphia, PA *

Princeton University Art Museum The Princeton University Art Museum (PUAM) is the Princeton University gallery of art, located in Princeton, New Jersey. With a collecting history that began in 1755, the museum was formally established in 1882, and now houses over 117,000 work ...

, Princeton, NJ *

Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía The ''Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía'' ("Queen Sofía National Museum Art Centre"; MNCARS) is Spain's national museum of 20th-century art. The museum was officially inaugurated on September 10, 1992, and is named for Queen Sofía. I ...

, Madrid, Spain *

RISD Museum The Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design (RISD Museum) is an art museum integrated with the Rhode Island School of Design, in Providence, Rhode Island, US. The museum was co-founded with the school in 1877. It is the 20th-largest art m ...

, Providence, RI * The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA *

Smithsonian American Art Museum The Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM; formerly the National Museum of American Art) is a museum in Washington, D.C., part of the Smithsonian Institution. Together with its branch museum, the Renwick Gallery, SAAM holds one of the world's lar ...

, Washington, DC *

, New York, NY * Stadtisches Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, Germany *

, London, United Kingdom *

University of Michigan Museum of Art The University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA) is one of the largest university art museums in the United States, located in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with . Built as a war memorial in 1909 for the university's fallen alumni from the Civil War, Alu ...

, Ann Arbor, MI *

, Minneapolis, MN *

Weatherspoon Art Museum The Weatherspoon Art Museum is located at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and is one of the largest collections of modern and contemporary art in the southeast with a focus on American art. Its programming includes fifteen or more ...

, Greensboro, NC *

, New York, NY *

Yale University Art Gallery The Yale University Art Gallery (YUAG) is an art museum in New Haven, Connecticut. It houses a major encyclopedic collection of art in several interconnected buildings on the campus of Yale University. Although it embraces all cultures and period ...

, New Haven, CT

External links

Campus' 2009 Opticks show
at the BFI, London
Shadow Projection
- Peter Campus talks about ''Shadow Projection''

- Curator David A. Ross talks to Peter Campus and Douglas Gordon at

April 2008
Interface
A short piece by Ralph Ubl i
Tate Etc
on Peter Campus' ''Interface'' (1972), pub. 2007
Peter Campus faculty page
a
New York University SteinhardtPeter Campus biography on ArtnetPeter Campus interviewed by John Hanhardt
- published in BOMB 68/Summer 1999 * for 2007 show at Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York

- 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

From the

Whitney Museum The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is a Modern art, modern and Contemporary art, contemporary American art museum located in the Meatpacking District, Manhattan, Meatpacking District and West Village neighbor ...

website
Peter Campus
in th
Video Data BankPeter Campus biography on Media Art Net

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Campus, Peter 1937 births Living people American video artists American conceptual artists American experimental filmmakers American people of Romanian-Jewish descent American people of Ukrainian-Jewish descent Jewish American artists Artists from New York City 21st-century American Jews

Early life and career

Academic career

Awards

Selected public collections

External links

See also

References

External links