Video Installations 1970-1994

Video began as a medium that inspired discovery. This art documentary traces the expressive roots of “media art” in Japan — works of video, performances, and installations created using video technology that allowed for free and creative visual expression.

The influence of Jewish fathers on their sons and the complexity of familial relationships are explored in a witty, poignant portrait of two artists. Beat poet Allen Ginsberg (whose father Louis was a poet in his own right) and performance artist/sculptor Allan Kaprow (whose father is a high-powered lawyer) are the sons who struggle with and against the influences of these patriarchal figures.

"Father, why did you die?" With this deeply intimate statement of grief, Kubota mourns the death of her father. Video and television are central to her ritual of mourning, and allow her father to assume a presence after death. Kubota and her father, who was dying of cancer in Japan, are seen watching television together on New Year's Eve. The suffering of father and daughter is rendered even more poignant when contrasted with the everyday banality of the pop music and New Year's celebrations on TV. After his death, Kubota weeps alone in front of a video monitor. Awash with tears and personal pain, My Father is a cathartic exorcism of grief, with video serving as witness and memory.

Suite 212 is Paik's "personal New York sketchbook," an electronic collage that presents multiple perspectives of New York's media landscape as a fragmented tour of the city. Paik critiques the selling of New York by multinational corporations and the city's role as the master of the media and information industries; Collaborators Yalkut, Davis and Kubota contribute their own vibrant and punchy segments.

In elegiac work, Kubota explores the relationship between two of the most influential figures in 20th century art and music. The core images are Kubota's own photographs of the famous 1968 chess match between Marcel Duchamp and John Cage, in which the board, wired for sound, functioned as a musical instrument. Recordings of Cage's compositions accompany the stills and video footage, which Kubota electronically processes to abstraction.

A single-channel version of Kubota's installation of the same name, Rock Video: Cherry Blossom is a lyrical fusion of nature and technology. Branches of pink cherry blossoms etched against a vivid blue sky are the starting point for this sensual visual haiku. Through a fluid application of electronic processing, Kubota layers, digitizes, slows, colorizes and ultimately abstracts the cherry blossoms, creating poetic transmutations of space and image. The mesmerizing and unexpectedly witty confluence of serene blossoms and energetic imaging effects—the transformation of the organic into the electronic—is quintessential Kubota.

This early video document is Kubota's answer to the question, "What happens if you travel with a portapak instead of American Express through Europe?" Spontaneous, low-tech and infused with a spirit of uncensored adventure, Kubota's video travel diary is a personal and cultural time capsule of Europe and its subcultures in the 1970s. Among the taped entries in Kubota's journal: an Amsterdam street musician/beggar, a Parisian sex cabaret, a gay theater troupe in Brussels, a ritualistic performance art piece, and a hallucinatory video trip along the Champs Elysees. The diary culminates in Kubota's homage to Marcel Duchamp at his grave in Paris.

Access to video technology had largely been limited to corporate-run TV studios until the Sony Portapak, a battery-powered video tape recorder that could be carried by one person, was popularized in the early 1970s. This device also allowed artists to see what they were recording in real time and to immediately play it back, prompting investigations of technology’s increasingly fluid relationship to the body, language, and time itself.  Shigeko Kubota’s ”Self-Portrait” embodied the boundless potential of the new medium and the freedom from precedent it represented. This work, in which Kubota interacts with her own image, contains some of her earliest known experimentation with video. Here, she used new tools to manipulate the electronic signal, creating previously unimaginable colors and patterns, and unraveling established conventions of image-making right before our eyes. [Overview courtesy of Erica Papernik-Shimizu via MoMA]

Meta-Marcel: Window (Flowers) adapts Marcel Duchamp’s ready-made Fresh Window (1920/1964) to the realm of film. [Overview courtesy of TWO x TWO for AIDS and Art]