Edited with text by Erica Papernik-Shimizu. Text by Gloria Sutton.
An illuminating introduction to a visionary figure in the history of video art and video sculpture
Published in conjunction with an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Shigeko Kubota: Liquid Reality sheds new light on the multilayered practice of Shigeko Kubota (1937–2015), who broke new ground with her intrepid video sculptures combining “the energy of electrons” with raw materials like plywood, sheet metal, mirrors and the natural element of water. At the forefront of a generation of artists drawn to the nascent medium of video for its freedom from precedent, Kubota likened newly available portable video technology to a “new paintbrush.” She employed early image-processing tools to create otherworldly portraits and landscapes that explored journeys both personal and artistic. Essays by curator Erica Papernik-Shimizu and scholar Gloria Sutton provide an in-depth look at a selection of Kubota’s key video sculptures from the early 1970s to the mid-1980s, which pivoted from her Duchampiana series to a foregrounding of nature as a means of examining her medium, the world, and her place in it. This richly illustrated publication further contextualizes the artist’s work through her writings and drawings, as well as archival ephemera. Viewed through the lens of today’s digitally interconnected world, Kubota’s revelatory sculptures continue to astonish through their economy of means and poetic juxtaposition of the organic and the electronic. Shigeko Kubota (1937–2015) was a key protagonist in the Fluxus movement before her four-decade career as a video artist began in the early 1970s. She became a pioneer in the medium of video sculpture, working collaboratively to encase video monitors in volumetric forms. In doing so, she liberated video from the constraints of the “TV box” and explored nature as a metaphor for video technology. In parallel, she served as Video Curator at Anthology Film Archives between 1974 and 1983, and facilitated a critical exchange between video artists in New York and Tokyo.
“Video Haiku–Hanging Piece” (1981)—showing Kubota in the reflection at her exhibition of the same year at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago—is reproduced from 'Shigeko Kubota: Liquid Reality.'
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
Forbes: Media
Jonathon Keats
Her work can be viewed as an escape we might yet make by privileging experiences over the mechanisms that deliver them.
Hyperallergic
Justin Kamp
Her work posits that video can refract and distend across contexts, becoming a garbled object ripe for misreadings and semi-coherent glimpses. It can live nowhere and yet feel like it’s everywhere — meaning nothing at all but echoing, refracting, repeating, looking so tantalizing and beautiful.
Frieze
Jane Ursula Harris
Reveals the artist’s simultaneous exploration of the ephemeral and monumental qualities of her chosen medium.
Artforum
Cassie Pickard
Kubota sought an alternative to the way that video is created and consumed, encouraging viewers to critically engage with the medium rather than passively absorb it.
New York Observer
John Reed
Kubota viewed the intrinsic decay and distortion of video as gestural, and suited to her simultaneously American and Japanese fascination with landscape.
ARTnews
Emily Watlington
Chock full of archival materials, fascinating photos, and scholarly essays that illuminate an intriguing body of work that has spent far too many years in the shadows.
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This late-1970s Eric Kroll photograph of Shigeko Kubota with one iteration of "Duchampiana: Nude Descending a Staircase" (1976) in her loft on Mercer Street, New York—is reproduced from Shigeko Kubota: Liquid Reality, published to accompany the exhibition currently on view at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. “I am a sculptor, I want to make video, but I also wanted to make objects,” Kubota said in 1983. “So the video part is my mirror for my memory, of my life, but the object is creating my creation.” For those who associate video art and sculpture more readily with Kubota’s husband and sometime collaborator Nam June Paik, this book will be absolutely essential to understanding her importance to the history of Fluxus and video sculpture. “In the beginning Paik only used the television set, just like that, bare, without anything,” she is quoted. “Then I told him that a television by itself is not a 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 the late Sixties. Video Sculptures with all kinds of materials, with super 8 and moving images from films.” continue to blog
FORMAT: Hbk, 9 x 10.5 in. / 112 pgs / 100 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $35.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $54.5 ISBN: 9781633451285 PUBLISHER: The Museum of Modern Art, New York AVAILABLE: 9/21/2021 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Active AVAILABILITY: In stock TERRITORY: NA ONLY
Published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Edited with text by Erica Papernik-Shimizu. Text by Gloria Sutton.
An illuminating introduction to a visionary figure in the history of video art and video sculpture
Published in conjunction with an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Shigeko Kubota: Liquid Reality sheds new light on the multilayered practice of Shigeko Kubota (1937–2015), who broke new ground with her intrepid video sculptures combining “the energy of electrons” with raw materials like plywood, sheet metal, mirrors and the natural element of water. At the forefront of a generation of artists drawn to the nascent medium of video for its freedom from precedent, Kubota likened newly available portable video technology to a “new paintbrush.” She employed early image-processing tools to create otherworldly portraits and landscapes that explored journeys both personal and artistic.
Essays by curator Erica Papernik-Shimizu and scholar Gloria Sutton provide an in-depth look at a selection of Kubota’s key video sculptures from the early 1970s to the mid-1980s, which pivoted from her Duchampiana series to a foregrounding of nature as a means of examining her medium, the world, and her place in it. This richly illustrated publication further contextualizes the artist’s work through her writings and drawings, as well as archival ephemera. Viewed through the lens of today’s digitally interconnected world, Kubota’s revelatory sculptures continue to astonish through their economy of means and poetic juxtaposition of the organic and the electronic.
Shigeko Kubota (1937–2015) was a key protagonist in the Fluxus movement before her four-decade career as a video artist began in the early 1970s. She became a pioneer in the medium of video sculpture, working collaboratively to encase video monitors in volumetric forms. In doing so, she liberated video from the constraints of the “TV box” and explored nature as a metaphor for video technology. In parallel, she served as Video Curator at Anthology Film Archives between 1974 and 1983, and facilitated a critical exchange between video artists in New York and Tokyo.
