Watlington %22Total Freedom To Dissolve%22.pdf - MIT Architecture

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Art” at a conference titled Speak, body at the University of Leeds on 24 April ... die: human nature renders us compel
Total Freedom to Dissolve: Shigeko Kubota’s Video Sculptures By Emily Watlington

We’re fucked.¹ The only question is how soon, or how badly. Scientists agree that we have likely passed the point where we can do anything to prevent climate change— despite the fact that we, apparently, still have to chant “climate change exists” in the streets, as in the protests that followed the inauguration of President Donald Trump. We’re still convincing some that climate change exists, yes, but the concern, for many, is no longer what we can do to prevent it. It’s already here. Instead, we ask how we might delay or alleviate it, and how we might adapt. The greatest challenge this poses, argues Roy Scranton, is not one of national security or food and energy markets. It is the threat it poses to the very definition of being human. As the inevitable end of our species nears, he writes, “If we want to learn how to live in the Anthropocene, we must first learn how to die,” not just as individuals, but as a civilization.² How can we learn how to die? Shigeko Kubota’s art offers some insight. If the greatest challenge we face in the Anthropocene is the question of what it means to be human, then it is to the arts and humanities that we should turn for answers.

¹ I am grateful, in alphabetical order, to Gabriel Cira, Walker Downey, Caroline A. Jones, Eliyahu Keller, Rebecca Uchill, and Midori Yoshimoto for their myriad thoughtful insights at various stages of this research and writing process. The support of Norman Ballard and Reid Ballard of the Shigeko Kubota Video Art Foundation was invaluable. The present text is drawn from a paper originally written for Caroline A. Jones’ and Rebecca Uchill’s “Land-scape Experience” seminar at MIT. Subsequent research was generously supported with awards from the The Bill Mitchell ++ Fund and the The Harold Horowitz (1951) Student Research Fund. ² Roy Scranton, Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2015), 27.

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Philosopher Michel de Montaigne claims that learning how to die always underpins humanistic endeavors: “Study and contemplation draw our soul out of us to some extent and keep it busy outside the body; which is a sort of apprenticeship and semblance of death… all the wisdom and reasoning in the world boils down finally to this point: to teach us not to be afraid to die.” ³ Kubota created video sculptures about death set in landscapes rendered technical. Unlike some of her colleagues in early video art, Kubota was not afraid of new technologies; her Buddhist upbringing encouraged her not to fear death. Her work is committed to surrendering herself to nature, even when this includes accepting the decline of the human species, of herself. Roy Scranton argued further for art’s usefulness in learning how to die: In order for us to adapt to this strange new world, we’re going to need more than scientific reports and military policy. We’re going to need new ideas. We’re going to need new myths and new stories, a new conceptual understanding of reality, and a new relationship to the deep polyglot traditions of human culture that carbon based capitalism has vitiated through commodification and assimilation. Over and against capitalism, we will need a new way of thinking our collective existence. We need a new vision of who ‘we’ are. We need a new humanism—a newly philosophical humanism, undergirded by renewed attention to the humanities.� Looking to find these new ideas, I turn to a set of older (but overlooked) works by Shigeko Kubota, showing how they fulfilled Scranton’s plea, though preceded it. What follows is a close reading of two of her works: River (1979-81) and Niagara Falls I (1985). This work from the late seventies and early eighties gains new urgency today, in light of Anthropocene discourse, which describes the geological

³ Michel de Montaigne and Donald M. Frame, Essays and Selected Writings: A Bilingual Edition (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1963), 9. � Scranton, Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene, 19.

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era wherein no molecule is unaffected by humans, wherein distinctions between the self, nature, and technology have been destabilized on both molecular and conceptual levels. I argue that this work is pressing for learning how to die in the Anthropocene; it embraces technology to visualize what it means to dissolve into nature. In so doing, it acknowledges and accepts technology as a driving force, drawing us nearer to our death as a species. Yet the work takes technology as its medium; acknowledging that it is too late to do away with its destructive forces, but that it can still be purposed to noble ends. The work asks us to accept death. I draw, here, on Kubota’s video sculptures and her writing to learn how to die. Kubota was raised in Japan; her father was a Buddhist monk. She moved to New York at the age of twenty-six. Her work touched on Scranton’s argument well ahead of its time; and, perhaps as a result, it was painfully overlooked when it was made. Kubota is not a household name, unlike her husband’s—Nam June Paik. Paik is often over-credited as the “father,” or “inventor,” of video art, and his work overshadowed hers. But Kubota and Paik often collaborated, and her support was instrumental to his success. Yet she was so much more than an instrument. So not only is a close reading of her work imperative to learning how to die in the Anthropocene, but also to combatting, if you will, the Nam June Paiktriarchy of video art history. I pick up experimental filmmaker Jonas Mekas’s 2007 plea: “it’s time that we see Shigeko Kubota as an artist, a supreme artist.” 5 Jonas Mekas, Shigeko Kubota: My Life with Nam June Paik (New York: Maya Stendhal Gallery, 2007),7. 5

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The images reproduced here are scanned from her archive—so when I say this work has been ignored, I mean you cannot find it on Google Images.6 Further, she has never been written about as a landscape artist, despite the fact that such work comprised a significant portion of her oeuvre. And yet, she was the first the curator of the Anthology Film Archives. Her piece Duchampiana: Nude Descending a Staircase (1976) was the first video sculpture MoMA ever acquired. And she only just died in 2015. The nominal scholarship that does address her work is by feminist art historians who praise her piece Vagina Painting (1965). 7 But in an interview that Kubota gave just shortly before her death, she revealed that Paik “begged her” to do the piece, that she was not interested in performing or in identity politics, but rather in death, in nature, in poetry. 8 I have built on this new knowledge to argue elsewhere that feminist art historians who praise Vagina Painting’s aggression do a disservice to Kubota by overlooking the work in which she refused to succumb to aggression and refused art world pressures to perform identity politics.9 I will focus instead on her landscape work, showing how it speaks from a subject position while refuting the pigeon-hole of identity politics, situated in a broader desire to obliterate the self. For the very term “landscape” necessitates a subject position. The suffix, -scape, derived from the German schaffen (to create), ascribes agency to the viewer of the land. Land is autonomous, but a landscape has a viewer. Kubota did not perform again after Vagina Painting, but her landscape work still speaks from a subject position.

I hope this sentence will soon be outdated. After decades in storage, River will be on view at the MIT List Visual Arts Center from February 8 – April 15, 2018 in the exhibition Before Projection: Video Sculpture 1975-1995. Before Projection is curated by Henriette Huldisch; I served as the curatorial research assistant and contributed to the accompanying catalog. 7 See Kristine Stiles, “Between Water and Stone,” in In The Spirit of Fluxus, Organized by Elizabeth Armstrong and Joan Rothfuss (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1993), 82. See also Janet Koplos, “Shigeko Kubota at Maya Sten-dhal,” Art In America 96, no. 5 (October 2008): 187. 8 Shigeko Kubota, interview by Miwako Tezuka, Post: Notes on Modern and Contemporary Art Around the Globe, 2 January 2014. http://post.at.moma.org/content_ items/344-interview-with-shigeko-kubota. 9 I presented the paper “Shigeko Kubota and the Tokenization of Women’s Body Art” at a conference titled Speak, body at the University of Leeds on 24 April 2017. A version of this paper is forthcoming in the anthology Expansive Reflections: Returning to Feminisms of the 1970s, edited by Kimberly Lamm and Shilyh Warren. 6

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River (1979-81) For River, Kubota hung three monitors above a metal trough that sported a wave motor. The monitors displayed footage of Kubota swimming. Viewed as a reflection in the trough, her image dissolves and mutates. The screens are hung at an average eye level, making it difficult to view them at standing height. River was inspired simultaneously by the centrality of rivers in Buddhism, but also by a gigantic swimming pool with an artificial wave machine that she saw while in Düsseldorf on a DAAD fellowship. When the motor that produced the waves would stop working, Kubota would personify it by saying it got “sick.” Her work obliterated distinctions between nature, culture, the self, and technology well before that discourse was popularized, prompting one critic to write, “the motor groans like the river, as if it had a soul” upon viewing the piece. Of the footage in River, Kubota writes: The swimming body floats lightly upon the water, spins and dives with ease. Once cast into the video’s reality, infinite variation becomes possible, not only weightlessness, but total freedom to dissolve, reconstruct, mutate all forms, shape, color, location, speed, scale… liquid reality. 12 Water—itself, of course, a natural force—here stands in for all natural forces, representing them as amorphous, dissolving, and all-encompassing. In water, the body floats lightly and becomes weightless. The body’s agency and autonomy is affected, though not eliminated. Boundaries between the self and nature blur, but are not obliterated. The image of Kubota’s face is effaced, but still legible; highly mediated through digital distortion, seen as a reflection in the water, but still seen.

Brooks Adams in: Shigeko Kubota: Video Sculpture, ed. Mary Jane Jacob (New York: American Museum of The Moving Image, 1991), 11. 11 Brooks Adams, “Zen and the Art of Video,” Art in America 72. (February 1984): 123. 12 Kubota, Shigeko in Shigeko Kubota: Video Sculpture. ed. Jacob, Mary Jane.New York, NY: American Museum of The Moving Image, 1991. 41. 10

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Rosalind Krauss famously claimed that, “the medium of video is narcissism.” 13 Indeed, central to River are reflections, mirrors, and footage of Kubota. Krauss wrote that, “The body is… centered… between two machines that are the opening and closing of a parenthesis. The first of these is the camera; the second is the monitor, which projects the performer’s image with the immediacy of a mirror.” 14 But Kubota introduces an actual mirror into the equation—not into the filming process either, but into the viewing process. Again, the footage is seen indirectly, in the reflection of the water and the mirror in the bottom of the trough. Kubota employs these mediums of narcissism to talk about the dissolution of the self, about surrendering to nature. The self is still represented by rather conventional means, via the face, but then upended—quite literally, the monitor is turned upside down and viewed indirectly. For one cannot talk about the dissolution of the self if there is no self to dissolve. This tension recurs in the piece I’ll discuss later, Niagara Falls I. When confronted with the Falls, Kubota experienced both a sweet nostalgia for suicide and also a refusal of suicide: she longed to jump, she didn’t

Rosalind E. Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism” in Perpetual Inventory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 4. 14 Ibid. 6. 13

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jump. Likewise, she didn’t like the attention that accompanied performing—she had stage fright—but that didn’t mean she didn’t like any attention. She has said that she wanted to be unique, and that was part of what drove her to make video sculptures, to make big work; there were already enough single-channel video artists, she noted.15 These tensions reflect the very problem of learning how to die: human nature renders us compelled to live, but of course, we are born to die. Survival is instinctual, death is inevitable. On this point, Scranton writes, While dying may be the easiest thing in the world to do, it’s the hardest thing in the world to do well—we are predisposed to avoid, ignore, flee and fight it till the very last hour. We are impelled in our deepest being to struggle against it. Every time you feel hunger or taste ambition, every time your body tingles with lust or your heart yearns for recognition, every time you shake with anger or tremble in fear, that’s the animal in you striving for life. 16 In Buddhism, life is cyclical, rendering death not an end, but another beginning. This cyclicality is represented in Kubota’s work in both natural and technical terms. Water and video recur in her oeuvre as apt mediums to represent this cyclicality. Just as video recycles closed circuits, rivers recycle water. She writes, “In one of their aspects, video and rivers progress through linear time and space, in another, video’s closed circuit feedback reflects itself and its environment in cyclical, ‘whirlpool’ time, and rivers throw back images from their surface reflections.” 17 The mirror too, then, is caught in this cyclicality; the image of the self is suspended in an infinite loop between the camera, the monitor, the mirror. “Shigeko amplified the mystique of mirror, as mankind’s first two-way communication feedback

Mellinger, Jeanine, and D. L. Bean. “Shigeko Kubota.” Profile, November/December 1983, 4. 16 Ibid. 89. 17 Kubota, Shigeko Kubota: Video Sculpture, 41. 15

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system,” wrote Nam June Paik. 18 For Krauss, this displacement of the self renders it an object, an other, and the artist’s fascination with the artist’s self as object renders them a narcissist. But for Kubota, the self ’s autonomy is suspended in this feedback loop, and she reveals her limited control over both the natural and technical forces that comprise her self-representation. Her use of a displaced self is far from narcissistic. Kubota views death as a return to the Earth; she wrote: In Buddhism after we die we will become dust. We become part of the earth. Very elemental. But even Yves Klein, French artist, said art is ash of art. Art is ash of yourself. But Buddhists are always coming to the ashes. So I like landscape, where coming to the art is more elemental.19 This notion, this work, gives form to Donna Haraway’s imperative to rename the posthumanist “compost-ist,” to view the end of human civilization not as a bad thing for humans, but as a good thing for the Earth, for our bodies will be repurposed and surrendered to a greater, natural force.20 Waxing poetic, Kubota ties the Buddhist notion of dying as turning to dust and returning to the earth to contemporary art theory, and to the self, again obscuring distinctions between nature and culture.

Nam June Paik in Rooms, (New York: MoMA P.S. 1, 1976), 121. Jeanine Mellinger and D. L. Bean, “Shigeko Kubota,” Profile (November/December 1983), 19. 20 Donna Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin,” Environmental Humanities, vol. 6 (2015):161. 18 19

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Niagara Falls I (1985) Niagara Falls I similarly addresses returning the self to the Earth by way of Kubota’s grappling with a sweet nostalgia for suicide prompted by a sublime encounter with Niagara Falls that made her feel liberated from herself, the way only death can. As originally theorized by Immanuel Kant, the sublime is that which is experienced when confronted with nature’s incomprehensible immensity, which reveals the limits of the mind to comprehend, and also reveals the individual as but a speck in a broader ecosystem. It is a feeling of limitation and disempowerment; and simultaneously, it is a feeling of astonishment and awe. It is the recognition of the limits of the self, in ways both freeing and frightening.21 That we both crave and fear sublime encounters again reflects how we are both compelled to live and born to die. Through immersive close-ups, Kubota recreated in the gallery how the Falls seemed to invite her to death and swallow her into nature. The weightless dissolution she proposes mirrors, again, Donna Haraway’s “compostist” notion—surrendering ourselves and our species to nature so as to be repurposed, integrated back into a larger ecosystem. Kubota wrote, “I found myself thinking, if I commit suicide, I would choose Niagara Falls so that I would be able to easily disappear into nature.” 22

See Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960). 22 Shigeko Kubota: Video Sculpture, 55. 21

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Rather than capturing the immensity of the Falls with a wide view, she recreated closeups, as if already engulfed. The shooting involved two friends holding her body with a belt so that she would not fall into the Falls with the camera. Her sublime encounter with death at Niagara Falls was not merely one of a distanced aesthetic view; she put herself and her camera at an actual risk by shooting closeups of nature’s immensity. Her representation, then, rejects aesthetic tropes of the natural sublime, but also the technological one, employing a three-colored lens that produces images more grainy than glossy. In complicating these tropes of the beautiful and the sublime, she highlights their always latent, threatening underpinnings, writing: Beauty of nature is nightmare, fear, and terror. Niagara Falls particularly, because of its magnetic force of nature, plunges into my impulse to thrust myself to death, releasing my body and jumping into the falls. Niagara Falls has a particular kind of beauty that makes you feel liberated from yourself. 23 Niagara Falls I similarly rejects the picturesque—which praises nature for looking like a picture of nature. This gritty aesthetic was a deliberate resistance to conceptions that because “video art was Sony,” video art was establishment.24 She made

Ibid. Jonathan Price, “Shigeko Kubota and the Video of Wipe, Flash, Crash” Women Artists Newsletter 2, no. 6 (1976): 4. 23 24

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the work during a time when the growing accessibility of photographic technology was rapidly increasing, cheapening, literally, picturesque images of sites like Niagara Falls. Again, she wanted to make work that was unique. She complains about tourists in her writing on the piece, all after the same image. She was not after a beautiful view of the Falls—her three-color lens recreated, instead, her view from the hotel window, through which she “stared at the falls illuminated by the artificial colors of red, blue, and green at midnight. I thought of this as a landscape in hell.” 25 The Falls, then, prompt her to long for death and to dissolve into nature. By contrast, the light pollution viewed from the hotel room and populated by tourists is equated with hell: and of course, the worst fear of death is that we end up in hell, in a crowded Holiday Inn illuminated by colored neon, rather than a picturesque view of a natural wonder into which we can dissolve.

Jonathan Price, “Shigeko Kubota and the Video of Wipe, Flash, Crash” Women Artists Newsletter 2, no. 6 (1976): 4. 25 Shigeko Kubota: Video Sculpture, 55. 24

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Water, Video, Death Building on works like these and others, Nam June Paik declared that Kubota discovered death for video. “It was very nice of him to say that,” Kubota replied. “But video is like that to begin with. So I said, ‘Video is a ghost of yourself.’ It’s like your shadow. It reveals your interior. It still exists after you die.” The camera has long been employed to capture and keep images of loved ones after they die; it is the death of Roland Barthes’ mother that prompted him to write Camera Lucida. In one sense, cameras reveal our fear of death, our desire to preserve; but they also reveal our acceptance of death’s inevitability, in that they reveal our necessary preparedness for it. Art historian Caroline A. Jones, in the obituary she wrote for Kubota in Artforum, wrote that the kind of death Kubota discovered for video “was neither tragic nor heroic.” 26 It was a dissolution. It was inevitable. It was humble. It was natural. Kubota’s father was a Buddhist monk, so she grew up a witness to funeral after funeral, which gave her a unique chance to comprehend and accept death’s inevitability at an early age. Kubota has also asked if there is video after death. 27 Her video sculptures are looped endlessly when displayed in the gallery; they thus have a sort of permanence, an objecthood, and yet each frame is fleeting, ephemeral.

Caroline A. Jones, “Shigeko Kubota (1937–2015),” Artforum, October 15, 2015, https://www.artforum.com/passages/id=55566. 27 Brooks Adams, “Zen and the Art of Video,” Art in America 72. (February 1984): 125. 26

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Conclusion I don’t mean to suggest that we should learn how to die instead of trying to combat climate change, but rather, in addition to it. To learn how to die does not mean to give up; if Kubota wanted to do that, she wouldn’t have made work. She would have jumped into the Falls. Instead, I argue that our desperation for survival is both an agent and product of the very anthropocentric and capitalistic result-driven mentality which drove us to both reject the poetic and to exploit resources with entitlement. In this vein, Donna Haraway has proposed another useful renaming: not the Anthropocene, but the Capitalocene, for our treatment of the Earth is often more capital-centric than human-centric.28 Scranton writes, “We can continue acting as if tomorrow will be just like yesterday, growing less and less prepared for each new disaster as it comes, and more and more desperately invested in a life we can’t sustain. Or we can learn to see each day as the death of what came before, freeing ourselves to deal with whatever problems the present offers without attachment or fear.” 29 To look to Kubota to learn how to die is to accept her plea to embrace human limits and transience as fundamental truths, to consider surrendering ourselves and

Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin.”  29 Scranton, Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene, 27. 28

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our species to a broader ecology on molecular and conceptual levels. It is to allow the artistic and the poetic to be tools through which we rethink our humanism in relation to both ourselves and ecology. It is to view technology as a destructive agent but also a tool amenable to new ends—to poetic ends. It is to be open to dissolving the self.



Emily Watlington is a graduate student at MIT in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art section. She also serves as the curatorial research assistant at the MIT List Visual Arts Center. Her research focuses on contemporary art, primarily video, through the lenses of affect theory and feminist theory. Her writing has appeared in numerous journals and magazines such as Frieze, Mousse, Art Papers, and Zivot Umjetnosti, as well as in the exhibition catalogs An Inventory of Shimmers: Objects of Intimacy in Contemporary Art and Before Projection: Video Sculpture, 1975-1995. In 2017, she received the Vera List Writing Prize for Visual Arts.

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Photograph pg. 10 River.jpg. Shigeko Kubota, River (1979-81), Courtesy the Shigeko Kubota Video Art Foundation Photograph pg. 13 RiverStills.jpg. Shigeko Kubota, River (1979-81), Courtesy the Shigeko Kubota Video Art Foundation Photographs pg. 16 NiagraFalls1.jpg. Shigeko Kubota, River (1979-81), Courtesy the Shigeko Kubota Video Art Foundation Photographs pg. 17 NiagraFallsStills.jpg. Shigeko Kubota, Niagara Falls I (1985), Courtesy the Shigeko Kubota Video Art Foundation Photograph pg. 20 NiagraFallsPostcard.jpeg. Postcard for March 1985 exhibition at The Kitchen, Shigeko Kubota: Niagara Falls, Courtesy the Shigeko Kubota Video Art Foundation

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Haunt Journal of Art Volume 4 2017 ISSN 2334-1165 (PRINT) Address: Haunt Journal of Art Department of Art Claire Trevor School of the Arts University of California, Irvine 3229 Art Culture and Technology Irvine, CA 92697-2775 Email: [email protected] Website: www.hauntjournal.org http://escholarship.org/uc/uciart_hauntjournal For more information on forthcoming calls and submissions guidelines please visit our website. Haunt Journal of Art is a graduate student run, peer-reviewed, open access journal from the University of California, Irvine, published online through eScholarship. We believe speculative and innovative art writing practices are paramount to the development of radical thinking and imagination.

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