The Visionary Female Video Artist Shigeko Kubota, Who Pioneered Immersive Experience,…

In the early days of television, before CBS had a permanent studio in Manhattan, the network set up cameras on the seashore so that viewers could enjoy a day at the beach. The early experiment in reality TV soon gave way to dramas such as Lassie and sitcoms such as I Love Lucy. But when portable video equipment finally became available to the public in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, artists began to question mainstream taste and to consider alternatives. One of the most radical was a New York-based Japanese artist named Shigeko Kubota, whose visionary video sculptures are currently the subject of an exhilarating retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art.

Kubota was married to another new media visionary, the Korean-American artist Nam June Paik, who is venerated today as the “father of video art”. But Paik’s approach to the medium was too conservative by Kubota’s reckoning. Although he wasn’t exactly showing I Love Lucy reruns, she thought he wasn’t truly thinking outside the box. “In the beginning Paik only used the television set, just like that, bare without anything,” she told an interviewer in 2008.  “Then I told him that a television by itself is not work. It could be found in any store he needed to add something. He didn’t listen to me, so I decided to do it myself.”

In her early video-based work, Kubota sought to transform the physicality of the TV set into and extension of the footage it showed. Ironically she began by revisiting the work of Marcel Duchamp, who was best known for making art by signing store-bought goods. Before Duchamp began to release these Readymades – which provocatively collapsed depiction and reality – he put painting on notice by pushing it to the edge of cinema, the visual technology of his era. In 1912, Duchamp depicted a nude descending a staircase as a set of overlapping stills. In 1976, Kubota filmed a nude woman in descent and showed the processed footage on a set of four TVs embedded in a stepped sculpture approximating the dimensions of a staircase.

With its Duchampian compression of subject and simulacrum, Duchampiana: Nude Descending a Staircase was an important step for Kubota in conceptual terms. But the full potential of her technique was only realized when she left behind art history and took a turn into the natural world. Unlike CBS, Kubota didn’t go to the beach. Instead she started her journey in the mountains and rivers of the American West.

One of Kubota’s most striking works began with footage of her swimming in the Snake River in Wyoming. In 1979, she incorporated this imagery into a video embellished with archival film. The work was shown on three side-by-side TV sets suspended from the ceiling. The TVs were all hung screen-down over a basin of water, so that only the reflection of her video could be seen. The imagery was made to shimmer by the action of a wave machine.

River was not only more visually sophisticated than Duchampiana, but also added new ripples to her conflation of image and reality. The effect of water captured on video was recaptured in water. She remixed her imagery in the medium from which it emerged, which became the primary medium through which it was conveyed to viewers. In other words, Kubota wasn’t merely doubling down on the position taken in Duchampiana (let alone her quibble with her husband). She was creating a hybrid space where distinctions between image and reality lost meaning, pooling in pure experience.

Concurrently with her creation of gallery installations that invited outdoor environments inside, Kubota was making drawings showing televisions embedded in mountains. According to these sketches, video of the environment would be reintroduced into the landscape where it originated, potentially in a closed-loop system. She referred to the effect she sought as an “echo” in one drawing – a good description of the visual one might expect that also captures Kubota’s broader artistic strategy.

Like an echo, or the roar of an ocean, Kubota’s video is everywhere and nowhere. Perhaps this can be seen as a premonition of our own age, in which people are tethered to the mobile technologies that are supposed to set them free. More optimistically, her work can be viewed as an escape we might yet make by privileging experiences over the mechanisms that deliver them.