Shigeko Kubota: Restored in Beacon

Mother Gallery, Beacon, NY | November 2 – December 15, 2019

Since opening in 2003 Dia:Beacon has been one of the Hudson Valley’s primary destinations to see the work of internationally-known contemporary artists. In recent years, however, a number of museum-quality exhibitions have been presented in galleries and other art spaces in the area. Last fall, Beacon’s Mother Gallery hosted Shigeko Kubota: Restored in Beacon, a selection of newly restored video sculptures by the influential artist Shigeko Kubota. The same work is to be included in upcoming exhibitions in Japan and at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Curated by David Ross, the show included work on loan from the Shigeko Kubota Video Art Foundation, which for the past few years has maintained a storage and restoration space in Beacon. A series of personal connections led to the exhibition, which was truly a community effort. Paola Oxoa, owner and director of Mother Gallery hosted the show at the suggestion of Ross, who lives in Beacon and was instrumental in bringing the Kubota foundation there. In addition, local artists and woodworkers restored the sculptural elements of Kubota’s work.

Shigeko Kubota (1937-2015) was a video art pioneer and one of the first artists to combine the new medium with sculpture. Born in Niigata, Japan, Kubota moved to New York in 1964 at the invitation of artist George Maciunas. Kubota participated in the Fluxus art movement of the 1960s, but by the 1970s had transitioned to video art. She and her husband, the artist Nam Jun Paik, experimented with early video technology (like the Sony Portapak, the first portable video camera) that emerged in the late 1960s. Influenced by the art and ideas of Marcel Duchamp and John Cage, Kubota was interested in making art that involved indeterminacy, chance, randomness, and repetition. Though she was overshadowed by her husband’s fame, Kubota was a respected artist whose work was included in numerous exhibitions and prominent museum collections. Her work Duchampiana: Nude Descending a Staircase, a version of which was on view at Mother Gallery, was the first video sculpture acquired by MoMA. Kubota was involved in the larger video art community in New York and beyond, helping to coordinate the first annual Women’s Video Festival in 1972 at The Kitchen, and serving as a curator at the Anthology Film Archives from 1974 to 1982.

The majority of the work in Shigeko Kubota: Restored in Beacon was from a series of video sculptures dating from the 1960s to the 1980s with the collective title Duchampiana, which includes videos of experiences related to Marcel Duchamp, whom Kubota met in 1968. The largest work in the exhibition was Duchampiana: Marcel Duchamp’s Grave, 1972-75 / 2019, which features scenes Kubota filmed at Duchamp’s gravesite in Rouen, France. In this work video monitors are encased in a vertical structure with mirrors positioned horizontally above and below creating the effect of the grave image rising up and down into infinity. The show included one of Kubota’s most well-known works, Duchampiana: Nude Descending a Staircase, 1976 / 2019, composed of four video monitors encased in a plywood “staircase.” Kubota’s image of a nude woman walking down the stairs directly relates to Duchamp’s 1912 painting of the same title. The press release for the exhibition explains that Kubota’s interest in Marcel Duchamp was multifaceted: “Surpassing mere homage, Kubota’s assiduous appropriations examine Duchamp’s legacy, and his role in the destruction of dichotomies: art/ life, masculinity/ femininity, East/ West, etc.”

Duchamp’s work was referenced in other works in the show, including Duchampiana: Bicycle Wheel One, Two and Three, 1976 / 1990, which, like Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel readymade, is composed of a bicycle wheel mounted on a stool. In Kubota’s version video monitors are mounted on the spokes of motorized turning wheels. The landscape imagery in the videos refers to Zen Buddhist philosophy and to Kubota’s childhood bicycle rides through the Japanese countryside. Meta Marcel: Window, 1966-77 / 2019 refers to Duchamp’s sculpture Fresh Widow. Kubota’s work, like Duchamp’s, features a pair of miniature French windows, but with the addition of a video monitor inside. The monitor shows static or “snow” produced by the random dot pixel pattern found on analog TV sets when no signal is being broadcast.

Two of the works in Shigeko Kubota: Restored in Beacon referenced Duchamp’s obsession with chess. In Duchampiana: Video Chess, 1968-75 / 2019 Kubota placed a video monitor horizontally underneath a clear plastic chess set. The video contains photographs and audio from John Cage’s 1968 collaborative performance Reunion in which Duchamp and his wife, Teeny, played chess with Cage on an electronic board. Kubota traveled to Toronto to document the event. In the back corner of the gallery’s viewing room, the video Marcel Duchamp and John Cage, 1972 included documentation of John Cage’s homage to Duchamp performed in Bremen, West Germany in 1972 combined with Kubota’s photographs from the 1968 Reunion chess match. Also in the viewing room was a projection of Kubota’s single-channel video Rock Video: Cherry Blossom, 1986, in which cherry blossoms are electronically abstracted into kaleidoscopic imagery.

Shigeko Kubota: Restored in Beacon was beautifully installed in Mother Gallery’s space, a former warehouse. Kubota’s analog video work felt fresh and exciting in an era when most people have a video camera on their phone. The exhibition in Beacon was a great opportunity to expose a younger generation of artists to Kubota’s work, something that was important to David Ross, the curator. Ross has been a supporter of Kubota’s work since the early seventies when he was the curator of video art at the Everson Museum in Syracuse, NY. He is currently Chair, MFA Art Practice Department, School of Visual Arts, and the former Director of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Ross organized one-woman exhibitions of Kubota’s work at the Long Beach Museum (1976) and the Whitney Museum (1998). When Kubota died in 2015 the Shigeko Kubota Video Art Foundation was formed to manage her estate. The Foundation is based in the former home and studio of Kubota and Nam Jun Paik in SoHo, with a storage and restoration space in Beacon. Kazumi Tanaka, a master wood restorer and artist living in Beacon, and Jon Reichert, an artist and carpenter living in Newburgh, NY restored Kubota’s work in the exhibition. Tanaka and Reichert faced some challenges working with the decades-old plywood sculptural elements, and some pieces had to be rebuilt completely by Reichert in order to travel to Japan. The restoration project was a unique opportunity for Tanaka, who has admired Kubota’s work since moving to New York decades ago.

Mother Gallery was the ideal venue for Shigeko Kubota: Restored in Beacon. Paola Oxoa was not only excited to host the show in her space, but Kubota’s work has a personal connection for her. As a young artist just out of college, Oxoa primarily created films and videos. When given the opportunity to have her first show at the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art, she needed to find a way to display one of her videos. Research led her to Kubota, whose work Meta Marcel: Window gave Oxoa the idea to display one of her video works in a domestic sculptural setting. Oxoa remarked on the amazing coincidence that, years later, the Kubota work that inspired her would be on view in her gallery.

Shigeko Kubota: Restored in Beacon was on view from November 2 – December 15, 2019. Additional information can be found at mothergallery.art and shigekokubotavideoartfoundation.org.