CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 9/26/2021

In 'Liquid Reality,' the pioneering video sculpture of Shigeko Kubota

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.”