Fascination

The productive Canadian film maker Mike Hoolboom calls Fascination ‘a meta bio pic about Canadian video drag icon Colin Campbell’, and there’s not much you can add to that. Colin Campbell, a pioneer of video art, has made about 40 video films, including the classic ultra low-budget underground work Modern Love (1979). Until his sudden death in 2001, he was a university lecturer and above all an elegant and fascinating focus of Canadian art life. In his deliberately marginal films, which have been screened at the Dokumenta and the Venice Biennial, he played with an enormous variety of characters, many sexually ambiguous, such as his campy alter ego ‘Art Star’. Usually dressed in women’s clothes, he addressed the viewer directly with a variety of confessions. Hoolboom, who strangely enough only met Campbell twice despite coming from the same city, has made more than an introduction to the work and life of Campbell in Fascination. In a visually inventive and impressive way, he also used the history of the era in which Campbell’s art came to fruition: from the Korean War and the Cold War to the rise of the medium television. ‘His story. I don’t have the right to tell it, to speak the language of ghosts. Instead I am pointing at clues, re-offering moments Colin staged himself, left behind in order to enlarge our memory organs,’ according to Hoolboom. (GT)