''My Father'' (14:26) is a black and white video recorded on a Sony
Portapak
A Portapak is a battery-powered, self-contained video tape analog recording system. Introduced to the market in 1967, it could be carried and operated by one person.
Earlier television cameras were large and heavy, required a specialized vehicle ...
produced between 1973 and 1975 by the Japanese
Fluxus
Fluxus was an international, interdisciplinary community of artists, composers, designers and poets during the 1960s and 1970s who engaged in experimental art performances which emphasized the artistic process over the finished product. Fluxus ...
video artist, sculptor, and performance artist
Shigeko Kubota
(2 August 1937 – 23 July 2015) 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 1970, likening it ...
.
Description
''My Father'' begins with text that explains that Kubota's father died of cancer on the day she had bought a plane ticket from
New York City
New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...
to see him in
Japan
Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north ...
. That day, she called a friend, who suggested that she film herself while mourning. Images of Kubota's father watching television, one of his favorite pastimes, are dispersed in the video, as are images of Kubota grieving alone in her house. Kubota explains during the video that she took the footage of her father two years earlier in Japan when she visited him after he had first been diagnosed with cancer.
The video emphasizes that television compliments memory and that TV monitors are sites of memory and of emotionality, a theme that is suggested in ''Shigeko Kubotas video eulogies to Nam June Paik in the 1980s and 1990s, ''Korean Grave'', and ''Winter in Miami''. Also, Kubota's ''Duchampiana'' series eulogizes
Marcel Duchamp
Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp (, , ; 28 July 1887 – 2 October 1968) was a French painter, sculptor, chess player, and writer whose work is associated with Cubism, Dada, and conceptual art. Duchamp is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso ...
, while exploring the presence of the artist in recorded images of him. ''My Father'' is an
elegy
An elegy is a poem of serious reflection, and in English literature usually a lament for the dead. However, according to ''The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy'', "for all of its pervasiveness ... the 'elegy' remains remarkably ill defined: sometime ...
, and a video diary, reflecting on the influence of the technology, and more specifically the television set, on her personal memory of her father, and her emotions of simultaneously grieving and seeing him on a television monitor. Ann-Sargent Wooster argues that ''My Father'' explores the ironic duality of the image of a person appearing on a TV screen after they have died– in a sense, bringing the dead to life. In the video, Kubota touches the screen of a monitor with her father's image as if reaching out to him.
''My Father'' also has been interpreted as
performative
In the philosophy of language and speech acts theory, performative utterances are sentences which not only describe a given reality, but also change the social reality they are describing.
In a 1955 lecture series, later published as ''How to D ...
. As Andrew Parker describes the term, "
performativity
''Performativity'' is the concept that language can function as a form of social action and have the effect of change. The concept has multiple applications in diverse fields such as anthropology, social and cultural geography, economics, gender st ...
has enable a powerful appreciation of the ways that identities are constructed iteratively through complex citational processes. ''My Father'' has been linked to performativity because of its disruption of the viewer's sense of space and time as Kubota's mourning appears to take place as the figure of her father lingers on the television, both present and absent, as a ghost incarnated.
Collections
*
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) is a modern and contemporary art museum located in San Francisco, California. A nonprofit organization, SFMOMA holds an internationally recognized collection of modern and contemporary art, and was ...
*
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues.
It plays a major role in developing and collecting modern art, and is often identified as one of ...
The Collection, MoMA
Retrieved 16 April 2013.
References
Additional sources
*Goldberg, RoseLee. 1998. ''Performance: live art since 1960.'' New York: Harry N. Abrams Publishers.
*O'Dell, Kelly, 1997. ''Fluxus Feminus'', MIT Press (TDR) Vol. 41. No. 1, 43-60.
*Wark, Jayne. 2006. ''Radical gestures: feminism and performance art in North America''. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press.
*Warr, Tracey, and Amelia Jones. 2000. ''The artist's body''. London: Phaidon.
*Wooster, Ann-Sargent, “Shigeko Kubota: I Travel Alone,” High Performance, Winter 1991, 28.
*Yoshimoto, Midori."Self-exploration in multimedia : the experiments of Shigeko Kubota," in ''Into performance: Japanese women artists in New York.'' New Brunswick, N.J., Rutgers University Press. 2005.
{{Refend
External links
Worldcat
"My father." Video Data Bank.
KINEMA NIPPON. Excerpts from Vital Signals: 1960 and 70’s video from Japan.
Fluxus
1975 films