About Shigeko Kubota Video Art Foundation
This Shigeko Kubota online window into the life and legacy of Shigeko Kubota endeavors to create a virtual view of the artist’s life, her artwork, and the era and vibrant future landscape of Video Art that she endeavored and committed herself to establish . Sharing the intimate personal perspective offered by this comprehensive survey of the video art p
ioneer Shigeko Kubota (1937-2015), and the chronology of her personal and professional history engaging with Video Art, and video art makers, reveals a rare perspective on the underlaying roots of our current media culture. Our prevailing personal engagement with electronic media at all levels of our lives suggests a re-writing of the Shakespearean adage to now express, “all the world's a screen,” upon which we eachand everyone play out the roles of our lives. To immerse audiences in the role of Shigeko, and her intimates, colleagues and collaborators, in this evolution is to review the history of cultural change— both in terms of our means and methods of mass communication and personal self-expression in the technological age. With the emergence of the first Porta Pak Camera in the late 1960’s and expansion of the communication universe began an explosive and rapidly accelerating expansion that metaphorically is akin to what the ‘the Big Bang’ theory describes about the birth of the known universe. Communication technology has been in large part driven and shaped into the current media culturewe live in today, by the historical developments in Video Art and Communications Technology, and video as an art form has been significantly shaped by the art and life of Shigeko Kubota. Widely referenced in the histories of video and postwar contemporary art, her work has been featured in numerous performances exhibitions during the 1970s, 1980's and mid-1990's and examples are held in many major museum collections across the globe. However, the scope of her practice and influence on Contemporary Video Art remains less well known. While the reasons for this gap of recognition are complex and varied, the solution was clear to Shigeko. In 2015 after the final relentless return of the cancer that she battled for many years, she was stoic in her acceptance of death. In her early writings, owing to her seminal engagement with video as an artist, she had expressed a level of resolution of life, insightfully positing a new, original,contemporary philosophical paradigm, “Is there death after video,” her deeply probing take ontraditional human nature, observing, 'Video is the ghost of yourself,” and life in video space as akin to “…magnetic memory.”
As one of the earliest pioneers to first engage 'hands-on' with this new technology, she personifiedvideo as a deeply human extension of herself, not as a separate technology. Meanwhile, as her embrace and engagement with the medium grew, she developed an art practice in which video servedto extend her self-awareness and self-expression with revelatory new perspectives on being human and 'seeing' human. Near death, Shigeko was not concerned at all with dying; her only concern was that her work might die with her. She and her husband Nam June Paik (1932-2006) had always intended to establish a video art foundation together to preserve their legacies, as is definitively expressed in their writings. While both Shigeko and Nam June lived liberated by a philosophy embracing chance and indeterminacy in their work and life, as she neared the end of her life Shigeko was not at peacewithout this vision of a permanency for in place for her work and the genre of Video Art itself. Her broad creative, altruistic spirit nurturing simultaneously, early enabling programs for breakthrough artists and legacy building for the future, clearly inspired her bequest, to create new initiatives that would realize both her and her husband’s shared vision of a video art foundation and art center, committed to preserving and presenting, not only her body of work and their personal archive, but the wider history and continuing evolution of Video Art. Guided by documentation of both Kubota and Paik’s wishes, SKVAF was established as a foundation to preserve Kubota’s collection of Fluxus materials and video artworks, in addition to the personal studio archive of both Kubota and Paik. Their Mercer Street loft, now SKVAF foundation headquarters, strives to work as they worked and lived, by providing a nexus for bringing together video art colleagues, scholars, collaborators, committed to propagating Video Art’s roots and ever expanding new branches . This online window is one of the first products of that process and realization of the vision, of making Kubota’s work—as well as a significant collection of artworks from many artists that they were closely associated— more broadly accessible for the first time.
“Is there video after death?”
“Viva Video…”
SKVAF Mission Statement
Shigeko Kubota (1937-2015) is renowned as a pioneering Video Artist who additionally and dedicated herself to become recognized as an especially significant early progenitor of this new medium by taking multifaceted roles as artist, curator, critic and essayist. Shigeko Kubota Video Art Foundation (SKVAF) preserves her artworks and oeuvre, and pursues and propagates her cultural legacy developing and supporting programs to develop wider awareness, appreciation and understanding of the history and future of video art. To help meet this goal our Foundation develops archival resources and enables in-depth research for students, scholars and cultural practitioners to explore visual material and historical contextual records, through on site and online access to our archival resources and references. Our programs also support and encourage artists cultivating new experimentation in new media technology and access to new audiences.
