Video Excrement 2004-2006 vol. 1-8
Campbell Patterson >

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While rollerblading around his pants at 2.20am on 13th September 2006 Campbell Patterson, in an effort to better understand his artistic practice, decided to stop making new work and concentrate on his past failures and rejects - the ideas that didn’t make the cut.

The eight monitors that comprise Video Excrement 2004-2006 vol. 1-8 screen every thing Campbell has filmed in the past three years, minus the artwork. It is a negative edit, a retrospective of all that is left behind in the process of art-making, the residue of ideas that ‘worked’, the misses as opposed to the hits.

Echoing the stringent processes of conceptualism and minimalism, Campbell’s is a rule-based practice, yet instead of exclusion he values inclusion, and the results are far from austere. The videos purposefully lack any logical order; they chaotically skip from project to project, remaining true to the raw process by which they were made.

This self-reflexive presentation not only exposes Campbell’s working method, it makes public what would usually remain private. Campbell has ‘cleaned out his art closet’ of all the often-embarrassing failed works, and despite the humiliation, the effect is therapeutic. Seeking to address his artistic practice as a whole before progressing, Video Excrement is at once a record of a period in his development and an acknowledgement and exploration of value judgements he passes on his artistic production.