Shigeko Kubota — video sculpture and Duchamp series

1971

Artists: Shigeko Kubota · Year: 1971 · Medium: Video sculpture — monitors embedded in sculptural armatures · Substrate: CRT monitors, plywood and other sculptural materials, tape-delay and video-processing equipment · Place: New York, USA · Institution: Independent; MoMA (collection) Shigeko Kubota began making video in 1970 with a borrowed Sony Portapak, having arrived in New York from Niigata, Japan in 1964 with a degree in sculpture and an invitation from Yoko Ono to participate in Fluxus events. By 1971 she had become Fluxus Vice President, videotaped the elderly Marcel Duchamp playing chess in the final months of his life, and begun the long practice of video-sculpture that would define her career: monitors buried inside plywood cabinetry, boxes, ladders, and stairways, each playing processed tape of natural motion — water, clouds, snow. Her 1971 Marcel Duchamp's Grave remains the founding work. It is a stepped plywood structure twelve feet long and eight tiers high, each tier containing a recessed monitor. The tapes on the monitors are treatments of the one-minute color-bar signal from a video signal generator, processed through the Paik-Abe synthesizer Kubota had access to via her husband Nam June Paik, mixed with footage of Duchamp's grave at the Cimetière Monumental in Rouen. The work is, operationally, a Fluxus tribute: Duchamp as ancestor, videotape as memory-container, sculpture as the vessel that holds both. It is also the first significant work in which a video monitor is treated as a material for constructed sculpture rather than as a display for a separately-conceived tape. Kubota's practice over the next twenty years would expand the vocabulary: staircases whose treads are monitors (Duchamp-Nude Descending a Staircase, 1976); sealed wooden boxes with monitors embedded behind glass holes; ladders ascended by video of bodies. Every piece argues the same thing — that video, as a material, is properly neither cinema nor painting but a new kind of sculptural substance, one whose internal time is part of the piece. This archive tracks Kubota's line forward into every video-sculpture lineage: Tony Oursler's projected faces, Gary Hill's language works, the immersive video rooms of Doug Aitken. She died in 2015. Her estate, administered by the Shigeko Kubota Video Art Foundation, restored and re-exhibited Marcel Duchamp's Grave at MoMA in 2021. Lore Kubota's marriage to Paik, which began in 1977, has historically overshadowed her independent practice in English-language criticism — a bias the Japanese critical tradition never shared. She supported both of them for decades by teaching video at The New School. After Paik's strokes in the mid-1990s, she became his full-time caretaker while continuing to make and exhibit her own work, insisting — in interviews of the period — that the dismissive framing of her as "Paik's wife" was a category error. She once said, in a 1996 interview with the Japanese magazine Bijutsu Techo, that the real truth was that Paik learned his wooden-box vocabulary from her sculpture practice, not the reverse. After his death in 2006 she spent the remaining nine years of her life completing their shared projects and her own. Sources • Rush, Michael — Video Art (Thames & Hudson, rev. 2007). • Museum of Modern Art — Shigeko Kubota: Liquid Reality (exh. cat. 2021). • Shigeko Kubota Video Art Foundation — archive.