Shigeko Kubota and the Iterative Process of Feminist Video

Connecting performance to the liveness of video, New York-based artist, Shigeko Kubota (1937-2015) explored video’s relationship to material forms and the built environment. Despite the fact that her watershed work Duchampiana: Nude Descending a Staircase (1976) was the first video sculpture acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in 1981, Kubota’s reception within art history has been eclipsed by her husband, Nam June Paik, who she often collaborated with and supported. This talk demonstrates the ways Kubota’s own important contributions helped establish the aesthetics of video as an art form by focusing on her “Broken Diaries” from the 1970s as well as her agit prop proto-feminist collaborations under the moniker, White Black Red & Yellow [Shigeko Kubota, Mary Lucier, Cecilia Sandoval, Charlotte Warren] and Sonic Arts Union [Robert Ashley, David Behrman, Alvin Lucier and Gordon Mumma]. I argue that Kubota’s video sculptures critically modeled the ways modernist sculptural paradigms give way to digital processes—including the shift from originality towards the notion of iteration—in order to harness new ratios between bodies, images, and spaces. Drawing on newly available material from the Shigeko Kubota Video Art Foundation, I argue that feminism and media art became co-constituted during the 1970s through a shared contestation of visual art’s established quality standards. Helping to diversify the voices that art historians use to construct the narrative around art and technology in the post war period, this talk foregrounds Kubota’s prescient thinking about subjectivity and the temporal conditions of sculptural practice.