Shigeko Kubota facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Shigeko Kubota
|
|
|---|---|
Shigeko Kubota in her studio, 1972
|
|
| Born | August 2, 1937 |
| Died | July 23, 2015 (aged 77) New York City, New York, U.S.
|
| Nationality | Japanese |
| Alma mater | Tokyo University of Education New York University The New School |
| Known for | |
| Spouse(s) | |
Shigeko Kubota (久保田 成子, Kubota Shigeko) (August 2, 1937 – July 23, 2015) was a Japanese video artist, sculptor, and avant-garde (meaning new and experimental) performance artist. She lived mostly in New York City.
Kubota was one of the first artists to use the portable video camera, the Sony Portapak, in 1970. She called it a "new paintbrush." She was known for making sculptures that included TV screens playing her own videos. Kubota was an important member of Fluxus, a group of experimental artists led by George Maciunas. She joined the group after seeing John Cage perform in Tokyo in 1962 and then moving to New York in 1964.
Kubota's video and sculpture works are mainly shown in art galleries. She used physical televisions as part of her art. This was different from other video artists who made experimental TV shows. Kubota helped expand video art into sculpture. Her work often explored how technology, especially the TV, affects our memories and feelings. For example, her Duchampiana series and the video My Father explore how deceased loved ones live on in recorded images. Later works like Korean Grave and Winter in Miami honored her husband, Nam June Paik.
Contents
Early Life and Art Journey
Kubota was born in Niigata Prefecture, Japan. She was the second of four girls in a family connected to a Buddhist temple. She grew up during World War II. Her family's Buddhist background influenced the Zen ideas in her later art. As a child, she often saw funerals because her father was a Buddhist monk. These memories of death later appeared in her video art.
Her parents loved art and encouraged their daughters to study it. This was unusual at a time when women were expected to work in other fields. Her grandfather was a calligrapher who also supported his daughters and granddaughters in art. Kubota's mother was one of the first women to study at what is now the Tokyo National University of the Arts and Music.
Kubota moved to Tokyo as a young adult to study art. In high school, an art teacher encouraged her to apply to the Tokyo University of Education. She earned a degree in sculpture there in 1960.
Even early on, Kubota was recognized for her talent. She was also known for her unusual approach to art. One of her paintings won an award in a major art exhibition in 1954. Her high school teacher praised her painting for its "uniqueness characterized by strong lines."
Because of her unique style, Kubota's aunt, Chiya Kuni (a famous modern dancer), introduced her to Group Ongaku. This was an experimental music group in Tokyo. Members like Takehisa Kosugi and Yasunao Tone were experimenting with tape recorders and avant-garde performances. This led Kubota to meet John Cage and Yoko Ono in Tokyo in 1962. She saw how untraditional their performances were. She thought that if Cage's music was accepted in New York, her art should be too.
Kubota felt that the Japanese art world did not appreciate her unusual style. She found a connection with Cage's ideas. Yoko Ono also became an important contact for Kubota and other Japanese artists. They wanted to learn about American art movements like Fluxus. In 1963, Kubota visited Ono's apartment in Tokyo. She saw Fluxus "event scores," which are like instructions for art performances. This inspired Kubota and Group Ongaku members to send their own scores to George Maciunas, the founder of Fluxus, in New York. This is how Kubota became involved with Fluxus. She began to experiment with many different art forms, from written instructions to performances.
In December 1963, Kubota had her first solo art show in Tokyo. It was called "1st Love, 2nd Love..." She filled the gallery with "fragments of love letters" piled high. She covered the pile with a white cloth, making an unstable mound. Visitors had to walk on the paper scraps to see her metal sculptures at the top. This exhibition was an "environmental sculpture," meaning it changed the space around the viewer. Kubota also met and worked with other experimental art groups like Hi-Red Center. However, she found it hard to get recognition in Japan. She later said she "realized that female artists could not become recognized in Japan."
In 1964, Kubota moved to New York. She had been writing letters with George Maciunas about the Fluxus art scene there. She was both nervous and hopeful about the move. She wrote to Maciunas that going to New York was her "only hope to live as an artist." She wanted to "touch, to see and feel something by touching a group of Fluxus." She remained close friends with George Maciunas until he passed away in 1978.
From 1974 until her death in 2015, Kubota lived and worked in SoHo, New York. This neighborhood was a center for experimental art. This was partly thanks to Maciunas's project for affordable artist housing. Kubota lived near other important artists, like Joan Jonas. She also kept in touch with Japanese artists in Tokyo. She helped introduce the work of Hi Red Center to Maciunas and other Fluxus members.
Kubota's first show in New York was on July 4, 1965, as part of a Fluxus festival. After this, she showed her work regularly in New York. She continued her studies at New York University and the New School for Social Research from 1965 to 1967. She also studied at the Art School of the Brooklyn Museum from 1967 to 1968. From 1972 to 1973, Kubota worked with artists Mary Lucier and Cecilia Sandoval, and poet Charlotte Warren. They formed a feminist group called White Black Red & Yellow. They put on three "multimedia concerts" at The Kitchen in New York.
Kubota taught at the School of Visual Arts. She was also a video artist-in-residence at Brown University in 1981, and at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago several times. She helped organize the first annual Women's Video Festival at The Kitchen in 1972. From 1974 to 1982, Kubota was the first (and only) video curator at the Anthology Film Archives. She was one of the few women or people of color in such a role. She also worked as a critic for the Japanese art magazine Bijutsu Techo (Art handbook). She wrote articles and took photos of the New York art scene until 1971. This helped connect artists across different countries and cultures.
In 1991, the American Museum of Moving Image in New York held a large exhibition of Kubota's work from nearly thirty years.
Shigeko Kubota passed away in Manhattan, New York, on July 23, 2015, at the age of 77. After her death, Norman Ballard became the executor of her estate. He works to promote her art and legacy. He is also the founding director of the Shigeko Kubota Video Art Foundation, located in her historic home in SoHo. Seven years after she passed, the MoMA in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo held exhibitions dedicated to her life and art. The MoMA exhibition, Liquid Reality, showed her most famous video sculptures. The Tokyo exhibition, Viva Video!, displayed works that had never been shown before.
Artistic Style and Development
Kubota was one of the first artists to focus on video art and new media. She did this long before these art forms were widely accepted. Her early work with Fluxus was around 1965, after she moved to New York City. Then she started exploring new art directions, especially with video.
She was known for using the Sony Portapak, one of the first small, portable cameras. Before this, cameras needed whole crews to operate. She described filming with this camera in a personal way: "Portapak and I travelled all over Europe and Japan without male accompaniment. Portapak tears down my backbone, shoulder, and waist. I travel alone with my Portapak on my back, as Vietnamese women do with their babies."
Her first experiments with a video camera were close-up self-portraits. She made these using the new Paik/Abe Video Synthesizer. This was when she, Paik, and artist Shuya Abe were teaching art at CalArts in 1970-71. One of these videos was A Day at the California Institute of the Arts. This video was later renamed Self-Portrait and used in her sculpture Video Poem (1970–75). From these works, Kubota quickly developed her unique "video diary" style. She used it to record her personal and artistic journeys. She added text or audio and used early image-processing techniques like chroma keying (green screen) and colorizing. This created a "fusion of video documentary and video art."
In the 1970s, Kubota also started making video sculpture. She extended her videos into three-dimensional forms using plywood, sheet metal, and Mylar. She worked with her friend, artist Al Robbins, on these. Kubota wanted to challenge the idea that video art was "fragile," "superficial," or "temporary." She wanted to show it was as strong as other art forms. Her sculptures also hid the TV's hardware. She said, "I used plywood to cover the TV box... I just wanted them to see it as a sculpture." Some of her first video sculptures honored Marcel Duchamp, an artist she felt a strong connection with and met twice.
In the late 1970s, she began making video sculptures that focused on nature. She combined "cool forms" (sculptural objects shaped like mountains, rivers, and waterfalls) with "hot video" (colorful, fragmented, or deconstructed images of these natural features). Kubota's use of video in landscape and topography helped her explore her own identity. She often used landscapes of the American West. She saw it as a vast, wild space that reminded her of people moving around, including herself as a Japanese artist living in America. Works like Three Mountains and River used sculptures and videos to create a sense of place.
Her interest in nature continued with ideas for "structural video" works. These would have embedded video monitors in the mountain ridges of Arizona and New Mexico. Though these were never built, they show her vision of combining nature and technology. In the 1990s, Kubota also used ideas from ecology to create installations like Windflower (Red Tape) (1993) and Videotree (1995). These took the form of twisted metal trees and flowers with small video monitors inside. Her hybrid objects also blurred the lines between video sculpture and Minimalist sculpture.
Kubota's connection to video went beyond just the camera. For her work River, she compared water to video. She said, "A river is replicated in video in its physical / temporal properties... Charged electrons flow across our receiver screens like drops of water, laden with information carried from some previous time." She had great technical skills in video. She added texture and depth by editing, using computer graphics, and resequencing footage. Later, her work explored how memory relates to video. She looked at how technology stores events and how video connects to her own life story.
Marriage and Legacy
In 1977, Kubota married the artist Nam June Paik. She had previously divorced her first husband, the composer David Behrman, in 1969. After Paik had several strokes in 1996, Kubota spent a lot of time caring for him and managing his work. This meant she slowed down her own art production. They stayed together until Paik's death in 2006.
Even though Kubota had a big impact on video art, especially video sculpture, her contributions have often been overshadowed by Paik's. While they worked together for thirty years, Kubota said that the idea of video sculpture was her own. She explained, "In the beginning, Paik only used the television set, just like that, bare... Then I told him that a television by itself is not a work... He didn't listen to me, so I decided to do it myself, in the late Sixties. Video Sculptures with all kinds of materials..."
Feminism in Her Art
Whether Kubota's work is considered feminist has been a topic of discussion. Some critics say her references to male artists like Marcel Duchamp challenge traditional art ideas. They see her work as reclaiming art for women. However, Kubota herself did not call her works feminist. In an interview, she said, "People can put me in the Feminist category all they want, but I didn't think I can make any real contribution other than my work as an artist."
It's common for artists who are seen as feminist not to use that label themselves. Some argue that labeling art as "feminist" can separate it from the broader art discussion.
Art historians have also pointed out that Kubota and other women artists were sometimes marginalized in the Fluxus movement. There is also interest in how her career was overshadowed by her husband Nam June Paik's. This is seen as an example of gender bias in the art world.
Kubota also co-founded the feminist video group Red, White, Yellow, and Black. Scholars suggest her video art developed at the same time as second-wave feminism. As curator Emily Watlington suggests, video art was "unburdened by history and thus patriarchal conventions." Its ability to show live, instant feedback allowed women to create their own images instead of being shown by men. This group used this new tool to create a new art form.
Artworks and Videos
1st Love, 2nd Love...
In Tokyo, Kubota became friends with Yoko Ono, who was involved in Fluxus. Kubota and other members of Group Ongaku started creating poetic "scores" (instructions for art). They sent these to George Maciunas in New York. These works were influenced by Fluxus scores, like those by Ono.
Kubota's first exhibition in 1963, titled 1st Love, 2nd Love..., showed these "Happenings" as conceptual artworks. It was at Naiqua Gallery, an alternative exhibition space in Tokyo. Kubota displayed tons of crumpled paper, which she called 'love letters'. These were mounted on the walls and ceiling and covered in white cloth, which she called a Beehive. Her instruction scores, like A Beehive 1 and A Blue Love I, were part of the exhibition. Maciunas later printed these happenings and other items in Fluxus publications.
Duchampiana Series
This series of works spans from the 1960s to 1981. It includes documentaries Kubota filmed when she met Marcel Duchamp in the 1960s. It also features sculptures honoring Duchamp after his death.
- Marcel Duchamp's Grave, 1972–1975: This work shows footage of Kubota visiting the Duchamp family's grave in Rouen, France. The video plays on a freestanding plywood structure with more than twelve small monitors. A mirror on the floor reflects the video. Kubota also presents her blue book, made from film stills of her video Marcel Duchamp and John Cage, to the grave. This installation was first shown in New York in 1975.
- Duchampiana: Video Chess, 1975: A monitor in a plywood box plays Kubota's video of Duchamp and Cage playing chess. Another version shows Kubota playing chess with Nam June Paik. The artwork also includes a glass chessboard, a photo of Duchamp and Paik playing chess, Kubota's book, and painted text on the wall.
- Duchampiana: Door, 1976–1977: This is a small room with two doorways next to each other on a corner. One door can open one doorway and close the other at the same time. Inside the room, two monitors play a video of a photograph of Marcel Duchamp mixed with images of Old Faithful (a geyser). It also includes audio of Duchamp's voice. Artist Al Robbins helped build the doors and wood frames.
- Duchampiana: Bicycle Wheel, 1983 and Duchampiana: Bicycle Wheel One, 1990; Duchampiana: Bicycle Wheel Two, 1990; and Duchampiana: Bicycle Wheel Three, 1990: These works feature bicycle wheels with small, five-inch color monitors attached to the spokes. The wheels are motorized to spin.
Video Poem
In Video Poem (1976), Kubota's self-portrait is shown on a small monitor. Viewers can see it through an opening in a purple bag. A fan inside the bag kept the equipment cool and added pulsing movements. The bag was a gift from her first boyfriend, Takehisa Kosugi. Kubota used to work three jobs to support him. Video Poem challenges male authority by using her ex-boyfriend's bag in her art.
Meta Marcel: Window Series
This series refers to Marcel Duchamp's wood-framed 'Fresh Widow'. This series includes four separate video works. These are projected behind a plywood box with glass windows framing a twenty-four inch monitor.
- Meta Marcel: Window (Snow), 1976–1977: Kubota met Duchamp during a snowstorm on a flight in 1968, the year he died. The video screen is filled with "snow," an effect made by distorting the image on a TV. The window pane is replaced with black leather. The video is called Snow.
- Meta Marcel: Window (Flowers), 1983: This work features video footage of flowers.
- Meta Marcel: Window (Stars), 1983: This work shows video footage of stars.
- Meta Marcel: Window (Snow With Computer Writing), 1991.
River, 1979-1981
This artwork has three monitors hanging screen-down over a crescent-shaped metal structure filled with water. The videos playing on the monitors reflect in the water and the structure. Kubota described the moving images in River: "Once cast into video's reality, infinite variation becomes possible... freedom to dissolve, reconstruct, mutate all forms, shape, color, location, speed, scale... liquid reality." It was first shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The Shigeko Kubota Video Art Foundation restored it in 2017. It was later installed at MIT and SculptureCenter in New York.
Other Installations and Sculptures
- Fluxus Suitcase, 1964: An aluminum suitcase sent from Japan to George Maciunas in New York as mail art. Kubota has shown it as a memorial to George Maciunas and Al Robbins.
- Fluxus Napkins, 1965: Original paper napkins with collage made for a Fluxus dinner organized by George Maciunas.
- Fluxus Pills, 1966: Empty gelatin pill capsules in a plastic box made for George Maciunas.
- Video Poem, 1968–1976: Kubota's color-synthesized video Self-Portrait is inside a nylon bag with zippers. The bag rests on a wooden stand. The bag was made by Japanese artist Takehisa Kosugi (1963).
- Three Mountains, 1976–1979: Three freestanding plywood structures. Two are mountains with monitors inside, and one is a pyramid with a monitor inside. The videos include footage of a Grand Canyon helicopter trip, a drive on Echo Cliff, Arizona, and a Teton sunset.
- Video Relief, 1979–1981: Two plywood panels with round lenses and one with painted calligraphy. Each shows the video Shigeko in Berlin (1979).
- Rock Video: Cherry Blossom, 1981
- Berlin Diary: Thanks to My Ancestors, 1981: A sheet of pink crystal with Japanese calligraphy of Kubota's ancestors' names is fastened to a five-inch monitor with wood rope.
- Video Haiku– Hanging Piece, 1981: A round television with a closed-circuit camera hangs over a round, concave plastic mirror (42 in diameter). The image is visible in the mirror.
- Green Installation, 1983: A large plywood structure that looks like a two-sided, freestanding staircase. It has five monitors on each side playing a color videotape of the Arizona landscape.
- Niagara Falls I, 1985;Niagara Falls II, 1987;Niagara Falls III, 1987: A freestanding wall with many monitors showing images of the four seasons. It is covered in mirror shards. A speaker plays a recording of the waterfall at Niagara Falls. A sprinkler system pumps water over the wall into a basin below.
- Rock Video: Cherry Blossoms: 1986, 12:54 min, color, silent: A five-inch monitor is embedded in a boulder and shows a single-channel video of cherry blossoms. Shards of mirrors are placed around the rock.
- Dry Mountain, Dry Water, 1987–88: Seven plywood sculptures covered with Mylar mirrors. They are shaped like rocks and abstract 3-D geometric shapes. Video projectors on the wall and floor show a two-channel video of cherry blossoms.
- Adam and Eve, 1989–1991: Two life-sized robot figures with eight monitors embedded in total. They are placed near each other. Behind them is Video Byobu II (Cherry Blossoms).
- Video Byobu I (Cherry Blossoms), 1988; Video Byobu II (Cherry Blossoms), 1991; Video Byobu III (Cherry Blossoms), 1991.
- Bird I, 1991, and Bird II, 1992: Videos of birds in a sculptural installation.
- Study for Wheel, 1990
- Jogging Lady, 1993: Footage of women running marathons playing on monitors stacked to look like a human form.
- Tree I and Tree II, 1993: Sculptures of a tree whose branches hold television monitors.
- Nam June Paik I and II, 2007: An installation of metal pipe sculptures with video monitors attached. They suggest Nam June Paik's body. Footage of Kubota and Paik on vacation in Miami in 1996 plays on these monitors. The video is a tribute to Paik.
Videography
- Marcel Duchamp and John Cage: 1972, 28:27 min, b&w and color, sound: Shigeko Kubota recorded the Reunion performance of Marcel Duchamp and John Cage. It was a chess match where music was made by sensors under the chessboard, triggered by game moves. Kubota used her own photos and video to create this videotape. Reunion was the last public meeting of these artists. Kubota also made a video-sculpture and a book called Marcel Duchamp and John Cage from this footage. She reportedly placed the book on Duchamp's grave in Rouen, Normandy.
- Broken Diary: Europe on 1/2 Inch a Day: 1972, 30:48 min, b&w and color, sound: This was the first of Kubota's video diaries. She used a Portapak to create this video travel diary of her trips through Amsterdam, Paris, and Brussels. It includes footage of underground performances, her meeting with Joseph Beuys in Düsseldorf, graffiti, and a visit to Marcel Duchamp's grave in Rouen, Normandy. This visit inspired her later sculpture, Video Chess. The video also showed the challenges of budget travel for women.
- Riverrun– Video Water Poem: 1972: This video installation has six different video channels. Four show footage she shot while filming Broken Diary: Europe on 1/2 Inch a Day, featuring the Seine, the Rhine, the Venice canal, and the Amsterdam canal. A fifth monitor showed the Hudson river. The sixth monitor showed a live feed of visitors drinking orange juice from a fountain in the installation. The video includes audio from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake.
- My Father (Shigeko Kubota), 1973–1975: In this film, Kubota explains that when her father died of cancer, she filmed herself mourning. She says, “Father, why did you die?” In the video, Kubota cries while watching videos she recorded of herself and her father watching TV at his home in Japan. Kubota contrasts everyday pop music and New Year's celebrations with the sadness between father and daughter. By showing how a video image can be both real and unreal, Kubota makes the viewer think about the meaning of death.
- Video Girls and Video Songs for Navajo Sky: 1973, 31:56 min, b&w and color, sound: In 1973, Shigeko Kubota experimented with image processing equipment. She produced Video Girls and Video Songs for Navajo Skies. This video is a surreal diary of Kubota's stay with artist Cecilia Sandoval and her Navajo family on a reservation in Chinle, Arizona. It includes footage of the family and the surrounding landscape.
- Allan 'n' Allen's Complaint: Nam June Paik and Shigeko Kubota: 1982, 28:33 min, color, sound
- Trip to Korea: 1984, 9:05 min, color, sound: This video tells the story of Nam June Paik's first trip to Korea after thirty-four years in the USA. It includes footage of Nam June Paik's family and his visits to a Korean village and a graveyard where his ancestors are buried.
- SoHo Soap/Rain Damage: 1985, 8:25 min, color, sound: A video of Kubota's co-op studio at 110 Mercer Street, New York, and rain damage during a storm.
- George Maciunas With Two Eyes 1972, George Maciunas With One Eye 1976 :1994, 7 min, b&w, sound
- April is the Cruelest Month: 1999, 52 min, color, sound
- Winter in Miami: 2005 2006, 14 min, color, sound
- Korean Grave: 1993 (A tribute to Nam June Paik)
Exhibitions
Shigeko Kubota's work has been shown in many important exhibitions and museums around the world, including:
- Documenta 8, Kassel, Germany
- Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
- The Kulturhuset, Stockholm
- Japan Society (New York)
- The Kitchen, New York, 1972, 1975
- Rene Block Gallery, New York 1976, 1977
- Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, 1979
- Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany
- Kunsthaus, Zurich, 1982
- White Columns, 1983
- New Langton Arts, San Francisco, 1986
- Documenta 6, Kassel, Germany, 1987
- Kongress Halle, Berlin, 1989
- Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
- Venice Biennale, 1990
- Sydney Biennale, 1990
- Retrospective: "Shigeko Kubota, Video Sculpture," American Museum of the Moving Image, Astoria, New York, 1991
- "Shigeko Kubota," Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1996
- "Duchampiana (1968–1995)", Galerie de Paris, 1996
- "Shigeko Kubota: Liquid Reality," Museum of Modern Art, 2021
Collections
Her works are part of permanent collections in major art institutions, such as:
- Hara Museum Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan
- Gino di Maggio, Fondazione Mudima, Milan, Italy
- Jorge Santiano Helft Fundacion San Telmo, Buenos Aires, Argentina
- The Museum of Modern Art, New York
- The Museum of Modern Art, Toyama, Japan
