The second in Vtape’s series of collaborations with e-flux Staff Picks came sooner than expected! This month e-flux features four works made by Colin Campbell and Lisa Steele during the artists’ Los Angeles sojourn in 1976-77: The Ballad of Dan Peoples (Lisa Steele, 1976), The Woman From Malibu (Colin Campbell, 1976), The Temperature in Lima (Colin Campbell, 1976), and The Scientist Tapes, part 1 (Lisa Steele, 1976-77).

When Steele and Campbell packed their lives into a Volkswagen bound from Toronto for Venice Beach, they saw themselves as “cultural anthropologists,” writes curator Jon Davies. Steele was then best known for her 1974 landmark work of feminist video art Birthday suit – with scars and defects, which, as per its title, revealed the naked artist’s scars, bumps, and bruises. Her self-portraiture as self-inquiry met its match in Campbell’s paradoxical “confessional” style, demonstrated in pieces like This is The Way I Really Am (1973), in which the artist’s nude body is shown in two halves, one shaved and oiled and the other rugged and masculine, as the artist repeats the title ad nauseum. Romantically as well as artistically entwined, in 1976 the two discovered—fittingly, in close proximity to Hollywood—a new role for fiction in their practice. “I never try to distinguish between acting and not acting,” Campbell wrote. “They are the same to me.” Steele’s and Campbell’s respective works in Los Angeles—they conceived of and wrote them separately, working together only at the production stage—again situate the video artist in front of the camera, but engage a new sense of irony and the uncanny, working the blurry boundaries of performance and personal identity with deadpan personas. Shown alongside others from this period in Davies’s 2021 exhibition “I Almost Ran Over Liza Minnell Today“: Colin Campbell and Lisa Steele in L.A., 1976-1977 at ONE Gallery in West Hollywood, these four titles are provocative deconstructions of self, gender, and sexuality. In May 1977, as Davies notes, their Canada Council for the Arts grant had run out, and they were on their way home invigorated with the promise of a new video art.

Image credits: The Scientist Tapes, Part 1, by Lisa Steele (home page); The Woman From Malibu, by Colin Campbell (above)