Skip to main content

The Review’s Review: Organic Video

Shigeko Kubota’s Berlin Diary: Thanks to My Ancestors. 1981. Cathode-ray tube monitor, crystal, ink, and twine. 9 × 8 × 11″ (22.9 × 20.3 × 27.9 cm).

“Everything is video,” the Japanese-born, New York–based artist Shigeko Kubota remarked in a 1975 interview. “[We] eat video, shit video, so I make video poems… Part of my day, everyday, the memory—I like to put in video.”

Overlooked compared to some of her other Fluxus-associated peers (including her husband, the pioneering video artist Nam June Paik), Kubota’s work is now the subject of a small but brilliant exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Liquid Reality, which spans her artistically fertile period from 1976 to 1985. In Kubota’s hands, video abandons its cold, sleek pretense, instead taking on a wild quality, with inverted color schemes and pulsating time warps akin to an overgrown garden. “Film was chemical, but video was more organic,” she told The Brooklyn Rail in 2007, eight years before her death at the age of seventy-seven. In her work, mountains stand tall, water seeps, and, in 1979’s River, a literal stream babbles over three neon-colored monitors, like some magic rivulet snatched from an old mythology and transported to our technological age.

Video Haiku–Hanging Piece (1981). Cathode-ray tube monitor, closed-circuit video camera, mirror, and plywood. Overall dimensions variable, mirror: 40 × 42″ (101.6 × 106.7 cm).

Duchampiana: Nude Descending a Staircase (1976). Standard-definition video and Super 8 mm film transferred to video (color, silent; 5:21 min.), four cathode-ray tube monitors, and plywood. 66 1/4 × 30 15/16 × 67″ (168.3 × 78.6 × 170.2 cm).

On a late afternoon in early October, a crowd filmed Kubota’s videos, and water from Niagara Falls I (1985) splashed. The people’s murmurs were like the whirring sound of a tape spinning backward. The room grew cool and dark. Suddenly, a small shriek, and a beleaguered MoMA employee ran over to one of the three open-top pyramids comprising 1976’s installation piece Three Mountains. A couple stood near the lip of one of them, peering in. There, inside the column, amid mirrors and monitors reflecting endlessly, lay another type of screen: while taking a video, one of the couple had by accident dropped their phone. —Rhian Sasseen

Inside of Three Mountains. 1976–79. Four-channel standard-definition video (color, sound; approx. 30 min. each), seven cathode-ray tube monitors, plywood, and mirrors, overall dimensions variable.

 

* * *

A while ago, I was surprised to hear myself describe the reading of John le Carré as a guilty pleasure. I suppose I was trying to elevate my bookshelf in some way—trying to suggest that I occasionally wolf down some genre stuff in between Gravity’s Rainbow and Finnegans Wake. In any case, it was ungracious nonsense. The further I get into middle age, the more I lean toward hospitable books and the more I distrust the assertion that this hospitality is evidence of some sort of authorial limitation or lack of literary ambition. As Ian McEwan stated, le Carré is not simply a spy writer, “he’s in the first rank.”

All of which to say, I have le Carré’s final book, Silverview, sitting on my nightstand, waiting for me when I get home. How wonderful and how reassuring to be welcomed into the dusty, bureaucratic world of le Carré’s espionage one last time. —Robin Jones

I recently asked an old friend to send some music they’d been listening to as a lazy way of staying connected. They sent back Leona Anderson’s 1957 album Music to Suffer By, which has exactly the anti-sonorous quality you’d expect from a silent film actress; the song “Summertime Blues” by the Flying Lizards; and Miharu Koshi’s 1983 album Tutu, which is lightly industrial at heart and rich synth on top, and has me head over heels. —Lauren Kane



from The Paris Review https://ift.tt/3pOEqSx
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Sphere

Photograph by Elena Saavedra Buckley. Once when I was about twelve I was walking down the dead-end road in Albuquerque where I grew up, around twilight with a friend. Far beyond the end of the road was a mountain range, and at that time of evening it flattened into a matte indigo wash, like a mural. While kicking down the asphalt we saw a small bright light appear at the top of the peaks, near where we knew radio towers to occasionally emit flashes of red. But this glare, blinding and colorless, grew at an alarming rate. It looked like a single floodlight and then a tight swarm beginning to leak over the edge of the summit. My friend and I became frightened, and as the light poured from the crest, our murmurs turned into screams. We stood there, clutching our heads, screaming. I knew this was the thing that was going to come and get me. It was finally going to show me the horrifying wiring that lay just behind the visible universe and that was inside of me too. And then, a couple se...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Historical Future of Trans Literature

  Whatever happens against custom we say is against Nature, yet there is nothing whatsoever which is not in harmony with her. May Nature’s universal reason chase away that deluded ecstatic amazement which novelty brings to us.  —Michel de Montaigne If you were trying to get anywhere in the late thirteenth century, the Hereford Mappa Mundi would not have been particularly helpful; the map is rife with topographical omissions, compressions, and errors—the most egregious of which is perhaps the mislabeling of Africa as Europe and vice-versa. Of course, as any medievalist will tell you, mappa mundi were not intended for cartographic accuracy anyway. Rather, they were pictorial histories, encyclopedias of the world’s mythological and theological narratives, records of medical fact and fable. Notable places—Carthage, Rome, Jerusalem, Alexandria, Jericho—appeared, but their placement on the map emphasized their symbolic import, rather than their geographical specificity. Thus, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Year in Reading: Daniel Torday

I’ve been on leave from teaching this year, so it’s been a uniquely good 12 months of reading for me, a year when I’ve read for only one reason: fun. Now when I say fun … I’m a book nerd. So I tend to take on “reading projects.” The first was to work toward becoming a Joseph Conrad completist. I’m almost there. I warmed up with critic Maya Jasanoff ’s The Dawn Watch: Conrad in a Global World , which granted me permission to remember the capacious scope of his perspective, his humanistic genius. His masterwork was hard work, but Nostromo belongs on the shelf of both the most important and most difficult of the 20th century. The Secret Agent blew the top of my head off—it’s funny and deeply relevant to our moment, about a terrorist bombing gone horribly wrong. Under Western Eyes is all I got left. 2018 isn’t over yet. But then much fun came in reading whatever, whenever. That started with a heavy dose of Denis Johnson . The new posthumous collection of his short stories, The Lar...
Post a Comment
Read more