Skip to main content

Three Transitions

 

What would it look like to destroy one’s own body or, more radically, one’s own face? Such is the question posed by Peter Campus in this seminar piece of video art, released as part of a laserdisc called ‘Persistence of Vision’, in 1973. The Three Transitions in question are essentially three pieces of separate footage, in which Campus appears to attack his own image, in various ways, using the chroma–key effect. In the first, we watch as he saws simultaneously through a paper wall and through his own spine. In the second, Campus appears to flay the skin from his face through a corrosive cream; yet from the gaping cavities inflicted in this masochistic act oozes neither blood, nor musculature, but further footage of his face untainted. In the third, a sheet of paper is transformed into Campus's face – before being burnt, eradicated, immolated.

In an academic chapter, Robert Pincus-Witten has described Three Transitions as mirroring ‘Camper’s long fascination with self-loss, an experience he interprets as a psycho-physical dislocation, manifested as the sense that one is one’s own double, inhabiting the sensate [living] world but experiencing it without affect’ – that is to say, without feeling’ (13). From loss of self to loss of body, above all, what Campus does, in ‘Three Transitions’, is to show us what happens when we manage to peer behind the ‘mask’ we erect in society, only find another mask: a hidden face.

Want to know more?

Read about Three Transitions here

Watch Three Transitions here

Listen to Campus talk about his work here