Pantheon

Retrospectve exhibition of Ken Campbell's books and other works
The Herzog August Biblothek,
Wolfenbüttel, Germany, 17 March-30 May

Reviewed by Emma Hill
Art Review, February 2001 issue, London, page 66

Shadows and light

Ken Campbell's Pantheon is possibly the most austere and uncompromising of the 20 publications he has made over the last 25 years and a homage to one of the architectural wonders of the world. Around 2,000 years old, the windowless Pantheon in Rome allows the sun to pass a shaft of light through an oculus in its dome, illuminating the internal darkness and showing coffering and architraves. The light reveals the fabric of the man-made structure and, in lighting it, is changed by it - a transference that forms the central metaphor of the book.

The brutal yet beautiful structure of the building dominates Campbell's book and he sets his themes within a framework that makes constant reference to the letterpress printer's tools: there is a series of architectural photographs, a sequence of computer-manipulated images of the artist's head and a group of repeated texts worked into a grid of wooden blocks.The grid is repeated in some form on almost every page, establishing a rhythmic undertone.

The patina of the many overprints Campbell uses to achieve infinite variations of colour and depth is highly seductive. In Pantheon, however, seduction is held in check by the unprinted edges of the page. While the grid suggests the geometric order of Roman design, the insistence on marking the threshold of the image makes this book more self-referential than previous work. Within this grid Campbell builds up a work that speaks of desolation and of belief. Repeated brooding details of the building are set against the photo-negative portraits. The head is manipulated to resemble a mask, a bust, a phallus and, in one central image, the skull of the great black dome. The face of the artist is shown as a dead thing; as Campbell announces, this Pantheon is both temple and "Last House".

Campbell's texts function in complex ways; there is seldom a linear narrative. Texts are set as images, and in tandem with images They are broken up and meaning accumulates gradually through the pages. Words arc repeatcd and fragmented; understanding them becomes an act of excavation.

In this dark book, one recurring image brings relief - the artist's hands hold an open book, its delicate pages repeated at intervals. Birds' wings, angels' wings? Their flurry through the brutal underpinning of blocks is taken up in the mirrored text of a poem 'sWngs, 'sWings.