Peter Campus

Year of birth, place
1937, New York City, United States
Role at the ZKM
in the collection
Biography
Peter Campus was born in New York in 1937. He studied (1976-78) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and (1982-83) at the Rhode Island School of Design. Since 1983 he has been an Associate Professor at New York University. In the academic year 1992-93 he taught at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung, Karlsruhe. He lives in New York.
 
Peter Campus has worked with video since the early 1970s. Often using images of himself as a starting point, he first turned his attention to processes of perception and the phenomenon of pictorial representation. During the 1970s he extended the scope of such work and started creating large installations, in which the spectator was included by means of a closed-circuit television system, and so became both protagonist and object in a system that registered reality and reproduced it in an alienating, distorted form. Although Campus stopped making video installations at the end of the 1970s, projection as a medium remains an important element in his method of working. Since the early 1980s he has, however, turned increasingly to photography, his works including series of digitally manipulated or computer-generated photographic images that propose a new, digitalized form for the classical genres of the landscape or the still-life.

Individual exhibitions (selection)
 
1976 Leo Castelli Gallery, New York
1977 The Kitchen Center for Music, Video and Dance, New York
1979 Paula Cooper Gallery, New York; Kunstverein, Cologne; Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin
1988 »Film and Video«, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
1990 »Projections«, Städtisches Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach
1992 »Peter Campus«, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA
1994 »Grayscale Fields«, Inaugural Internet Art Gallery Exhibition; »Peter Campus Shadow Projection«, Center for Curatorial Studies, Video Gallery, Bard College, Anandale-on-Hudson
1996 Paula Cooper Gallery, New York; Baxter Art Gallery, Maine College of Art, Portland; Bohen Foundation, New York
1997 Tower Air Terminal, John F. Kennedy International Airport, New York
 
Group exhibition (selection)
 
1973 Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; »Circuit: A Video Invitational«, Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, subsequently at Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Henry Gallery, Seattle, Greenville, Boston, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Köln
1974 »Project 74«, Kunstverein, Cologne
1975 São Paulo Bienal, São Paulo
1977 documenta VI, Kassel
1978 Biennale di Venezia, Venice
1986 Ars Electronica, Station ORF, Linz, Wien
1989 »Video-Skulptur retrospektiv und aktuell 1963-89«, Kunstverein, Cologne, subsequently at Kongresshalle Berlin, Kunsthaus Zürich
1990 »Passage de l'image«, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, subsequently at Fundacio »la Caixa«, Barcelona, Power Plant, Toronto, Wexner Art Center, Columbus, San Francisco, Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco
1993 »Mediale«, Deichtorhallen, Hamburg; Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
1994 »Pictures of the Real World (In Real Time)«, Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, subsequently at Le Consortium, Dijon, Le Capitou, Centre d'Art Contemporain, Fréjus, Städtische Galerie Göppingen, Mailand, Tokyo
1995 3. Biennale de Lyon, Lyon
1996 »Reinterpreting Landscape«, Maier Museum of Art, Randolph Macon Women's College, Lynchburg; »New Art on Paper 2«, Philadelphia Museum of Art

[Frauke Syamken, 1997]