久保田成子

Kubota Shigeko was born in 1937 in Maki-machi in the Nishikanbara District of Niigata Prefecture (now Nishikan-ku, Niigata City), the second of four sisters. Her father Ryūen, a teacher at an old-system middle school (later a prefectural high school), had adopted the family name of his wife Fumie, who was a music teacher and graduate of the Tokyo Music School (today’s Faculty of Music, Tokyo University of the Arts). The Kubotas were a prominent family in the Niigata town of Ojiya. Influenced in particular by her maternal grandfather Yatarō, a Nanga-School painter, Shigeko was exposed to music and art from a young age. Because of her father’s work and wartime evacuations, she lived in various parts of the prefecture as a child. She would say later that spending time at her father’s ancestral home of Saishōji Temple (he came from a family of Buddhist monks) and growing up in the bosom of the countryside drew her to the art themes of nature and death. Ryūen assiduously supported his daughter’s wish to become an artist, even inviting the sculptor Terashima Tatsuji to teach at Naoetsu High School, where he was the principal. In the autumn of her second year of high school, her first work submitted to the Niki Exhibition, the oil painting “Himawari” 向日葵 (Sunflowers) (1954, private collection), was accepted by the jury. In 1956, Kubota entered the Tokyo University of Education (now the University of Tsukuba). She majored in Carving and Modeling, intent on pursuing a career as a sculptor, an unusual choice for a female Japanese artist at the time. She attended the studio of Takahashi Kiyoshi, a Niigata sculptor with whom she had studied since high school; following his lead, she exhibited three times at the Shin-Seisaku Kyokai (New Production Association) Exhibition, starting with its 22nd session in 1958. The works presented, all head sculptures, displayed a gradual shift from the representational to the abstract. She also participated in the Anpo demonstrations against the US-Japan Security Treaty organized by the Zengakuren (short for the All-Japan Federation of Student Self-Government Associations). After graduating from university in 1960, she taught art at Shinagawa Ward Ebara Second Junior High School in Tokyo, while continuing to exhibit her work. From her university days through until around this time, she was particularly influenced by her maternal aunt Kuni Chiya (real name Kubota Yoshie), an avant-garde dancer. The Kuni Chiya Dance Institute, established in Tokyo’s Komaba neighborhood in 1957, was a place where young artists from the different genres of painting, music, dance, and so forth could interact, thus exposing Kubota to more outré forms of expression. Through the institute, she met members of the artists’ collectives Group Ongaku and Hi-Red Center, which inspired her to experiment with performance works of her own. In 1963, she exhibited an abstract sculpture made of welded iron at the 15th Yomiuri Independent Exhibition; and, for her first one-person showing the same year at Tokyo’s Naiqua Gallery, “1st. LOVE, 2nd. LOVE... Shigeko Kubota Sculpture Solo Exhibition,” she filled the entire space with various objects. Her dismay at being largely ignored by the critics contributed to her decision to head to the United States. A radical performance by Nam June Paik witnessed at the Sogetsu Art Center in Tokyo in May 1964 (“The Works of Nam June Paik”) deepened Kubota’s interest in Fluxus, the international artists’ network to which Paik belonged. After corresponding with George Maciunas, the leader of the collective, she moved to New York in July, along with the composer and artist Shiomi Mieko (then named Chieko), and began to help with the management of Fluxus. She was soon producing multiples, such as “Flux Napkins” (c. 1967, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, etc.), and participating in performances with other members. At the Fluxus event “Perpetual Flux Fest” in 1965, she performed “Vagina Painting,” using a brush apparently held in her vagina to apply paint to paper laid on the floor. In later years, she would claim this was not her idea, but one urged on her by Paik, her then lover, and Maciunas. A photograph exists showing Kubota painting in her underwear with a brush-like object attached to her crotch; taken at Peter Moore’s studio in late-1964, possibly for publicity purposes, it suggests the performance was at least carefully prepared. Around this time, Kubota met the composer David Behrman and joined his experimental music group Sonic Arts Union. Other members included Mary Lucier, who later became a video artist. In 1967, Kubota married Behrman and toured Europe with the music group that year and again in 1969. After they divorced in 1970, she moved to Los Angeles to rejoin Paik, who had started teaching video art at the California Institute of the Arts, and lived with him there and in New York to which they returned the following year. She and Paik were married in 1977 and remained together for the remainder of his life. While in Los Angeles she, too, had begun working with video. In 1972, she traveled to Europe with a Sony Portapak camera and videotape recorder and created the single-channel video work “Europe on 1⁄2 Inch a Day.” She would thereafter continuously produce and showcase single-channel video works (eventually designated the “Broken Diary” series). The same year, she and Mary Lucier, together with two other women of different races, formed White, Black, Red & Yellow. The group held two events at The Kitchen in New York. The performances were partly designed as a response to second-wave feminism. Back in 1968, Kubota had traveled to Toronto with Behrman to help make the official photographic record of “Reunion,” the chess concert performed by John Cage and Marcel Duchamp. The photographs documenting the concert, accompanied by acrostic poems by Cage, were privately published in Japan in 1970 as “Marcel Duchamp and John Cage.” A flexi disk of some of the sound recordings was included with each volume. Duchamp would become an important subject for Kubota. The major series “Duchampiana,” a part of the “Video Sculpture” project combining video and sculpture that she began in 1975, directly references Duchamp’s work. “Duchampiana: Nude Descending a Staircase” (1975–76, Toyama Prefectural Museum of Art and Design, etc.), for instance, became the first video installation artwork added to the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, several years after Kubota was featured in its “Projects” series in 1978. The excitement generated by her earlier solo exhibitions at the New York gallery of the German curator René Block had opened up many more opportunities for her to show works not only in the United States but also in Europe, especially Germany. The artist stayed in Berlin in 1979 on a scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). From this point on, Kubota participated in a great many exhibitions abroad, including such international events as Documenta 6 (1977), the Whitney Biennial (1983), and the Venice Biennale (1993). Her “River” (1979–81, Shigeko Kubota Video Art Foundation), exhibited at the Whitney Biennial, was featured on the cover of the February 1984 issue of “Art in America.” In 1991, a large-scale retrospective was organized at the American Museum of the Moving Image in New York. This traveled to the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and other museums in Europe and to the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo. From 1974 to 1982, she worked as a video curator at the Anthology Film Archives, co-founded by Jonas Mekas, planning the weekend screening programs and supporting the emerging New York video art scene more generally. She also taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and elsewhere. After Paik suffered a stroke in 1996, Kubota cared for him until his death 10 years later. The solo exhibition “Sexual Healing,” held in 2000 at New York’s Lance Fung Gallery, presented works she created during this period. “Shigeko Kubota: My Life with Nam June Paik” at the city’s Maya Stendhal Gallery in 2007 was her last solo exhibition. She died in New York in 2015 from breast cancer. That year, Norman Ballard used a bequest from the artist to establish the Shigeko Kubota Video Art Foundation in New York. It aims to preserve and exhibit works and documents left by the artist and contribute to the development and promotion of video art including through historical research. The first major posthumous exhibition, “Viva Video! The Art and Life of Shigeko Kubota,” was held in 2021 at the Niigata Prefectural Museum of Modern Art. It then traveled to the National Museum of Art, Osaka and the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo. Around this time, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, organized the exhibition “Shigeko Kubota: Liquid Reality.” (Hashimoto Azusa / Translated by Ota So & Walter Hamilton) (Published online: 2024-03-18)