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 to a "new paintbrush." 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.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), 169-170. She was closely associated with George Brecht, Jackson Mac Low, John Cage, Joe Jones, Nam June Paik, and Ay-O, among other members of Fluxus. Kubota was deemed "Vice Chairman" of the Fluxus Organization by Maciunas.

Kubota's video and sculptural works are mainly shown in galleries – though her use of the television is synonymous with other video artists of the 1960s who made experimental broadcast programs as a move against the hegemony of major networks. Kubota is known for her contribution to the expansion of the field of video into the field of sculpture and for her works addressing the place of video in art history.Jacob, Mary Jane ed. ''Shigeko Kubota: Video Sculpture''. New York: American Museum of the Moving Image, 1991. Includes: Roth, Moria, "The Voice of Shigeko Kubota:' A Fusion of Art and Life, Asia and America,'" and Hanley, JoAnn, "Reflections in a Video Mirror." Her work explores the influence of the technology, and more specifically the television set, on personal memory and the emotions. Some works for example eulogize while also exploring the presence of the deceased in video footage and recorded images such as her ''Duchampiana'' series, the video My Father, and her later works ''Korean Grave'' and ''Winter in Miami'' which eulogize her husband Nam June Paik. Kubota's sculptures also play with ways in which video footage and sculptures utilize videos to evoke nature, as in her ''Meta-Marcel'', ''Bird'', and ''Tree'' series' and in ''River'', and ''Rock Video: Cherry Blossoms''.

Early Life and Professional Activity

Kubota was born as the second oldest of four girls to a family of monk lineage associated with a Buddhist temple in Niigata Prefecture, Japan, where she lived through World War II. She described herself as "of a religious Buddhist family," and familial connections to monastic life would inform later Zen concepts in her work. Because her father was a Buddhist monk, Kubota had often witnessed funerals as a child and spent time alone, supposedly playing with ghosts in a temple room where fresh bones were stored. She drew on these vivid memories of death in her video art.

Her parents appreciated the arts and supported their children in studying them, despite the expectation of women to work as part of the productive force at the time. Her maternal grandfather was a calligrapher and landowner who encouraged his daughter and his granddaughters to pursue various arts. Kubota's mother, for example, was one of the first female students at what is now the Tokyo National University of the Arts and Music. Art brought Kubota to Tokyo as a young adult as well: during her high school years, Kubota met an enthusiastic art teacher who urged her to apply to the Tokyo University of Education, where she earned a degree in sculpture in 1960.

Even early in her career, Kubota won recognition for her skill but was also noted as pursuing unconventional approaches. One of her paintings of flowers won an award in the well-regarded Eighth Annual Exhibition of Nika-kai (1954), one of the major juried-exhibition art associations. Though this painting is no longer extant, Kubota's high school teacher praised it for a "uniqueness characterized by strong lines and brushstrokes that do not appear to be executed by a girl." Perhaps because of such boundary transgressing, Kubota's aunt, Chiya Kuni—an established modern dancer—introduced her to the Tokyo-based experimental music collective Group Ongaku. Members of Group Ongaku included Takehisa Kosugi, Chieko Shiomi, and Yasunao Tone, who were all experimenting with tape recorders, noise music, and avant-garde performances in the early 1960s. This musical interest, in turn, led to her first encounter with John Cage and Yoko Ono at Tokyo Bunka Hall in Ueno when Cage was on tour across Japan in 1962. Kubota observed how untraditional the tour performers, including Yoko Ono, were in destroying every convention of music; she thus thought to herself that if Cage's music was accepted in New York, she should be accepted there, too. Kubota found affinities between herself and Cage because she felt unappreciated in the Japanese art world due to her unconventionality. But Ono also became an important contact for Kubota and other Japanese artists looking to learn more about American avant-garde movements such as Fluxus. Kuboto visited Ono's apartment in Tokyo in 1963 and saw Fluxus event scores, which inspired herself and other members of Group Ongaku to send their own event scores to George Maciunas, the founder of the Fluxus movement, in New York. Through this introduction, Kubota became involved in the Fluxus circle and began experimenting with a wider range of media, from text scores to performance.

In December 1963, Kubota had her first solo show, "1st Love, 2nd Love..." at Naiqua Gallery in Tokyo, an alternative/avant-garde space in Shinbashi, Tokyo, housed in a former office of internal medicine (naiqua means internal medicine),Yoshimoto, Midori. "Self-Exploration in Multimedia: The Experiments of Shigeko Kubota." Into Performance: Japanese Women Artists in New York. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press (2005), 173. in which she "piled up fragments of love letters from the floor up to the ceiling of the gallery" and covered the stack with a white cloth, creating an unstable mound. "Visitors were forced to work their way up the pile of paper scraps" in order to see an array of welded metal sculptures placed at the top.Kubota, Shigeko. "Sexual Healing." ''Shigeko Kubota: My Life with Naim June Paik'', exh. cat. New York: Maya Stendhal Gallery (2007), 69. The exhibition, which might be considered environmental sculpture now as inspired by Allan Karpow's notion of "environments," was accompanied by a score: "Make a floor with waste paper which are all love letters to you. Spread a sheet of white cloth on the floor. Skin your lips by yourself. Kiss a man who has a mustache in the audience." Through the gallery Kubota met and collaborated with avant-garde collectives such as Hi Red Center and Zero Jigen (Zero Dimension).Sutton, Gloria. "A Matter of Memory: Shigeko Kubota's Video Sculptures." ''Liquid Reality.'' New York, New York: Museum of Modern Art. pp. 19-35. . However, Kubota noted difficulty in getting recognition and write-ups in newspapers and art magazines in Japan and later recalled that she "realized that female artists could not become recognized in Japan."

Later that year, in 1964, she moved to New York after exchanging letters with George Maciunas about the New York Fluxus scene. In a letter to Maciunas (written just before her departure for New York), Kubota expressed a mixture of anxiety and hope: "In every day I was very worry which is better to be in Tokyo or to be in New York in order to live as an only artist. But now I made up my mind to go to New York... It's my only hope to go to New York in order to live as an artist, but for you, it's no mention without the biggest trouble to you. But I'd like to touch, to see and feel something by touching a group of Fluxus and living myself in New York." She would be lifelong friends with George Maciunas until his death in 1978. Her live-work space in SoHo, which she occupied from 1974 to her death in 2015, was situated in a neighborhood at the center of the avant-garde art scene, due partially to Maciunas's Fluxhouse Cooperative project for affordable artist housing and studio spaces. Kubota's proximity to influential collaborators from this community included her immediate Mercer Street neighbor, the experimental artist Joan Jonas. She also actively maintained close relationships with Japanese avant-garde artists in Tokyo, especially bringing the activities of Hi Red Center to the attention of Maciunas and other Fluxus members. Kubota's first show in New York was on July 4, 1965 at Cinemateque as part of the perpetual Fluxfest, where she performed her famous "Vagina Painting." After this exhibition, Kubota exhibited her works regularly in New York. Kubota continued her studies at New York University and the New School for Social Research (1965–1967). She studied at the Art School of the Brooklyn Museum 1967–1968. In 1972 to 1973, Kubota came together with artists Mary Lucier and Cecilia Sandoval, and the poet Charlotte Warren in the feminist collaborative troupe White Black Red & Yellow (sometimes also rearranged to Red White Yellow & Black as a play on the "red, white, and blue" of the American flag) to put on three "multimedia concerts" at The Kitchen in New York.

Kubota taught at the School of Visual Arts, and was video artist-in residence at Brown University in 1981; at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1973, 1981, 1982, and 1984; and at the Kunst Akademie in Düsseldorf in 1979. She also helped to coordinate the first annual Women's Video Festival at The Kitchen in 1972. From 1974 to 1982 Kubota served as the first (and only) video curator, and one of the few women or people of color, associated with the Anthology Film Archives

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