Shigeko Kubota

Birth : 1937-08-02, Niigata, Japan

Death : 2015-07-23

History

Shigeko Kubota was a Japanese video artist, sculptor and avant-garde performance artist, who mostly lived in New York City. She was one of the first artists to adopt the portable video camera Sony Portapak in 1967. Kubota is known for constructing sculptural installations with a strong DIY aesthetic, which include sculptures with embedded monitors playing her original videos. She was a key member and influence on Fluxus, the international group of avant-garde artists centered on George Maciunas, having been involved with the group since witnessing John Cage perform in Tokyo in 1962 and subsequently moving to New York in 1964. She was closely associated with George Brecht, Jackson Mac Low, John Cage, Joe Jones, Nam June Paik, and Ay-O, other members of Fluxus. Kubota was deemed "Vice Chairman" of the Fluxus Organization by Maciunas.

Profile

Movies

George Maciunas With Two Eyes 1972, George Maciunas With One Eye 1976

Director

In this rare portrait of Fluxus founder George Maciunas, Kubota pays homage to a mentor and fellow Fluxus artist. Maciunas is also recognized as the force behind the transformation of New York's SoHo neighborhood into an artists' district. In Kubota's ongoing video diary, she observes Maciunas as he tours SoHo buildings with Fluxus artists and friends, including Nam June Paik, Barbara and Peter Moore, and Yoshi Wada. Each discusses a building in his or her own language. The second part of the tape documents Fluxus artist Ben Vautier's 1976 opening at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Video Installations 1970-1994

Director

Over the past several decades, Shigeko Kubota has produced a significant body of video installation work. Kubota's sculptural installations include works that recast the iconography and theories of Marcel Duchamp, and those that focus on landscape and nature. In each work, her signature electronic image processing plays a central role.

Rock Video: Cherry Blossom

Director

A single-channel version of Kubota's installation of the same name, Rock Video: Cherry Blossom is a lyrical fusion of nature and technology. Branches of pink cherry blossoms etched against a vivid blue sky are the starting point for this sensual visual haiku. Through a fluid application of electronic processing, Kubota layers, digitizes, slows, colorizes and ultimately abstracts the cherry blossoms, creating poetic transmutations of space and image. The mesmerizing and unexpectedly witty confluence of serene blossoms and energetic imaging effects—the transformation of the organic into the electronic—is quintessential Kubota.

Allan ‘n Allen’s Complaint

Director

The influence of Jewish fathers on their sons and the complexity of familial relationships are explored in a witty, poignant portrait of two artists. Beat poet Allen Ginsberg (whose father Louis was a poet in his own right) and performance artist/sculptor Allan Kaprow (whose father is a high-powered lawyer) are the sons who struggle with and against the influences of these patriarchal figures.

Personal Documentation of Fluxus Soho Tour, May 15, 1976

Director

Black & White Video

My Father

"Father, why did you die?" With this deeply intimate statement of grief, Kubota mourns the death of her father. Video and television are central to her ritual of mourning, and allow her father to assume a presence after death. Kubota and her father, who was dying of cancer in Japan, are seen watching television together on New Year's Eve. The suffering of father and daughter is rendered even more poignant when contrasted with the everyday banality of the pop music and New Year's celebrations on TV. After his death, Kubota weeps alone in front of a video monitor. Awash with tears and personal pain, My Father is a cathartic exorcism of grief, with video serving as witness and memory.

My Father

Director

Suite 212

Co-Director

Suite 212 is Paik's "personal New York sketchbook," an electronic collage that presents multiple perspectives of New York's media landscape as a fragmented tour of the city. Paik critiques the selling of New York by multinational corporations and the city's role as the master of the media and information industries; Collaborators Yalkut, Davis and Kubota contribute their own vibrant and punchy segments.

Video Girls and Video Songs for Navajo Sky

Director

Kubota narrates this surrealistic video diary of her month-long sojourn with a Navajo family on a reservation in Chinle, Arizona. Captures footage of tribal songs and dances, children's pranks and a local rodeo.

Marcel Duchamp and John Cage

Director

In elegiac work, Kubota explores the relationship between two of the most influential figures in 20th century art and music. The core images are Kubota's own photographs of the famous 1968 chess match between Marcel Duchamp and John Cage, in which the board, wired for sound, functioned as a musical instrument. Recordings of Cage's compositions accompany the stills and video footage, which Kubota electronically processes to abstraction.

Europe on 1/2 Inch a Day

Director

This early video document is Kubota's answer to the question, "What happens if you travel with a portapak instead of American Express through Europe?" Spontaneous, low-tech and infused with a spirit of uncensored adventure, Kubota's video travel diary is a personal and cultural time capsule of Europe and its subcultures in the 1970s. Among the taped entries in Kubota's journal: an Amsterdam street musician/beggar, a Parisian sex cabaret, a gay theater troupe in Brussels, a ritualistic performance art piece, and a hallucinatory video trip along the Champs Elysees. The diary culminates in Kubota's homage to Marcel Duchamp at his grave in Paris.