Shigeko Kubota

Video Installations 1970-1994

Shigeko Kubota

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

Shigeko Kubota

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.

Personal Documentation of Fluxus Soho Tour, May 15, 1976

Shigeko Kubota

Black & White Video

Allan ‘n Allen’s Complaint

Shigeko Kubota, Nam June Paik

Allen Ginsberg, Allan Kaprow

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.

Europe on 1/2 Inch a Day

Shigeko Kubota

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.

Video Girls and Video Songs for Navajo Sky

Shigeko Kubota

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.

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

Shigeko Kubota

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.

My Father

Shigeko Kubota

Shigeko Kubota

"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.