Lacking the skills to be an artist or the money to be a collector, you are left wondering how to participate in the art world. Years of babysitting and frothing decaf soy lattes has proven you to be a pro at dealing with the fussiest of customers. Your finesse and likability make people pay attention to you and trust your suggestions. When a friend’s gallerist recognizes these qualities and offers you a job, it comes as something of a surprise. You took a couple of art history classes but never saw yourself working on the sales side of things, and yet you sense that with practice you could learn how to seal the deal.
Answer these questions to decide if you should sell art or keep roasting coffee beans.
1.You suddenly find that you are the gallery’s registrar but have no idea what you are supposed to be doing. You:
a. Look up “registrar” on YouTube.
b. Start regularly attending professional registrar conferences in Waikiki and Malta.
c. Accidentally mark everything as water damaged.
2. At openings, the gallerist makes you pour drinks and refill the beer bucket despite your erudition. You:
a. Save face by adding “sommelier” on your LinkedIn page.
b. Suck it up and make another ice run at the Duane Reade by the subway.
c. Throw a fit and remind everyone that you studied at Bard Center for Curatorial Studies.
3. You recognize an important art critic in the gallery staring quizzically at the paintings on exhibit. You:
a. Ignore the critic because his writing hasn’t impacted sales or opinions since 1993.
b. Approach him starstruck and proceed to give an impassioned two-hour tour with a press packet in hand.
c. Secretly take photos of him and use your burner IG account to deride his dad sneakers and smelly Kmart blazer.
4. Your odor-sensitive vegan gallerist tasked you with ordering lunch and didn’t say what she wants. You:
a. Buy a bag of baby carrots (no hummus).
b. Doordash a Crave Case of White Castle Impossible Burgers.
c. Order a 10-person Cajun crab boil with no utensils and extra bibs.
5. A gallery artist calls in a desperate moment to ask about money she is owed, hoping you will help her get the gallerist to pay her back rent and medical bills. You:
a. Slam down the receiver and take all phones off the hook for the day.
b. Call the accountant and have a check immediately sent by messenger to the artist.
c. Tell the artist she has been dropped by the gallery effective immediately.
6. A randy collector asks you if you are for sale along with the art. You respond:
a. “Eww. Really?”
b. “Will you put me on a pedestal?”
c. “The gallery takes a 20% cut.”
7. An angry curator calls wanting to know what happened to the art shipment for his show that opens in two days. You:
a. Apologize profusely and remind the curator how important he is to the career of the artist and success of the gallery.
b. Tell the curator “to chill” and watch his tone because the gallery is basically paying for the museum show anyway.
c. Make sure to seat the curator at the losers’ table at the next gallery dinner.
8. The same artwork was accidentally sold to two different collectors and the gallerist wants you to clean up the mess. You:
a. Tell the gallerist it’s her problem and she should fall on their sword to regain honor.
b. Spend all night with your roommate forging an identical piece to satisfy both collectors.
c. Burn down the art storage facility so that no one can have it.
9. The artist you have been tasked to handle reveals that he is planning on leaving the gallery because he hates the owner. You:
a. Get on your knees and beg for him to take you along to Hauser & Wirth.
b. Tell all the art handlers and reserve a front row seat for the big blowout.
c. Convince him that he is at the best gallery in the world.
10. You hear the gallery owner use a racial slur about a recently signed artist of color. You:
a. Pretend you didn’t hear it and keep filing unpaid invoices.
b. Agree that “Europeans” are having a tough time lately.
c. Quit on the spot.
0–4: It’s always nice to be acknowledged for your smarts and savvy, but this gallerist’s offer may not be the right opportunity given your strong moral compass and the art world’s demonstrated indifference. Your special qualities are better suited for a fledgling nonprofit or socially progressive arts start-up that is seeking someone who can charm rich people and foundations. Remember, you may be the only person who can explain the need to support sound art to a confused collector.
5–12: Maintaining an agnostic approach to life allows for all sorts of surprises along the way. It turns out that not caring enough to call out injustice or chicanery makes you a perfect candidate to sell art. Not every gallery is bad, but the business is just rotten, and for you this is a shoulder-shrugging given rather than an outright negative. Keep saying “c’est la vie” and you’ll always land on your feet.
13–20: Your ability to smile and nod your head in agreement while waiting for the credit card machine to spit out a receipt is what makes you special. Collectors like you because you laugh at their jokes and tolerate their gropes. Your lack of principles may very well guide you to art world domination, as long as you don’t learn how to cry along the way.
“VIDEO IS VENGEANCE OF VAGINA”: SHIGEKO KUBOTA’S TRAILBLAZING VIDEO SCULPTURES
Shigeko Kubota: River (detail), 1979-81, silent color video, three monitors, stainless–steel container, mirrors, pump, water.PHOTO PETER HARRIS. COURTESY SHIGEKO KUBOTA VIDEO ART FOUNDATION, NEW YORK AND MIT LIST VISUAL ARTS CENTER, CAMBRIDGE, MA.
Poster for “Viva Video!: The Art and Life of Shigeko Kubota” at Niigata Prefectural Museum of Art; The National Museum of Art, Osaka; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo.
In 1965 and while in her mid-twenties, Shigeko Kubota performed her most famous work, Vagina Painting. Before a group of ten or so artists involved with the Fluxus movement in downtown New York, she tied a paintbrush dipped in red to her underwear so that it appeared to come from inside her, then dragged it around a canvas on the floor by moving her hips. The work, which lives on in photographs taken by Fluxus artist George Maciunas, has been praised by numerous feminist art historians in the decades since for radically subverting traditional, patriarchal roles: man as artist, woman as nude muse. Art historian Kristine Stiles described the work in 1993 as “the most aggressively proto-feminist performance of Fluxus” because it challenges the longstanding notion of women as passive objects when it comes to art. Others read it as a fierce rebuttal of Yves Klein’s “Anthropometry” works (begun 1960), for which he dipped women’s bodies in his signature shade of blue and dragged them across canvases, objectifying them literally.
Kubota never performed this sort of body art ever again, though. In fact, in an oral history interview done for MoMA’s C-MAP global research project shortly before her death in 2015, she recalled that she was “begged to do” the piece by two male artists—Maciunas and Nam June Paik, whom she later married. With this in mind, feminist interpretations of the piece become less convincing.
For the rest of her career, Kubota mainly worked in a different medium: video sculpture, with her focus largely on landscapes. She carved her own visual language for pondering the well-trodden genre of the sublime. Occasionally, she also devoted works to her art historical heroes—including her husband. These works remain less known than Vagina Painting, though that all may change with the artist’s upcoming survey at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which opens August 21 and includes much of the long-neglected work she made in the decades that followed her famed 1965 performance. Meanwhile, a Kubota retrospective is traveling in Japan through February 2022, with a run in her hometown of Niigata before showings in Osaka and Tokyo.
Kubota’s exhibition history has been scant until now. In 1978, she had a two-person show at the Whitney Museum of American Art with Takahiko Iimura, another Japanese-American video artist. In 1991, a survey of her work was displayed at the American Museum of the Moving Image in Queens. The catalogue for that show included some of her writing—sometimes, she’d display poems alongside her video sculptures—replete with the iconic line that sums up the arc of her career: “Video is vengeance of vagina.”
She was integral to the New York art scene of the latter half of the 20th century. From 1974–82, she worked as the video art curator at the Anthology Film Archives, and her Mercer street neighbors included Joan Jonas, Alison Knowles, and Donald Judd. From 1967–69, she was married to the experimental composer David Behrman, and in 1977, she wedded Paik. Maciunas, who helped formalize the Fluxus movement, foresaw her central role when he implored her to move to the United States. He subsequently named her vice president of the Fluxus movement upon her arrival. It was an acknowledgment of the administrative work she did for the avant-garde and anti-elitist movement. Maciunas’s letter arrived on the heels of the disappointing reception she received following her only show in Tokyo. At that point, as she wrote in 2007, she felt “that female artists could not become recognized in Japan.” Though arguably, her recognition in the US has been eclipsed by that of the men she supported.
The 1969 exhibition “TV as a Creative Medium,” put on in New York by Howard Wise at the gallery he ran before founding Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), had a profound impact on Kubota. The show brought together early experiments, and helped prove to artists and critics that televisual technology could be used creatively before the medium was widely accepted as an artistic one. Kubota’s six-page review for the Japanese art magazine Bijutsu Techo helped spread the word about video art across the globe. The following year, while teaching at CalArts, she completed her first experiment in video—a glitchy, colorized, close-up self-portrait made using a synthesizer engineered by Paik and with Shuya Abe, a Japanese electrician, both of whom also led classes at the famed art school. A version of the footage was used in Video Poem (1970–75), where it was played on a monitor inside a nylon bag that was left unzipped, revealing her face onscreen. Video Poem was shown alongside memorable pieces by Bruce Nauman, Howardena Pindell, and Walter De Maria in “Rooms,” the show that inaugurated MoMA PS1 (then the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center) in 1976.
Kubota began making video sculptures like Video Poem in part because she wanted to complicate the idea that video art is “fragile, superficial, temporal, instant.” She thought hard about how the medium worked—and didn’t work—in the context of the white cube. Within a gallery space, she realized, video required presentation strategies that differed from those common in the more traditional black box. She hoped that by covering up monitors with other materials, she could help divorce them from their everyday connotations, which was important because, like many early video artists, she believed TV was often watched mindlessly.
Today, works like Kubota’s are more likely to be termed “video installations” rather than video sculptures. During her lifetime, Kubota raised concerns about the latter term. She was worried that “installation”—not yet an established piece of jargon in an art context—might be confused with the German word installateur, which means “plumber” (Germany was a major video art hub). Paik’s video sculptures are now better-known, but Kubota claimed she more or less came up with the genre. “In the beginning Paik only used the television set, just like that, bare without anything. Then I told him that a television by itself is not work,” she told an interviewer in 2008. “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.”
Kubota’s first major body of video sculptures was dedicated to the artist Marcel Duchamp. In 1968, the two artists met on a plane—both were traveling to Rochester for the opening night of Merce Cunningham’s Walkaround Time. Duchamp died that same year. Starstruck and mourning, Kubota began her “Duchampiana” series in 1972 with Duchampiana: Marcel Duchamp’s Grave (1972–75). In the work, footage of his tombstone—inscribed with the epitaph D’ailleurs, c’est toujours les autres qui meurent (Besides, it’s always the others who die)—is repeated across twelve nine-inch monitors. The tiny screens are stacked vertically in a plywood sheath, flanked by two mirrors that extend toward the viewer. Kubota’s obsession with death—perhaps influenced by her grandfather, a Buddhist monk who participated in many funerals—persisted throughout her career. In the catalogue for the MoMA exhibition, art historian Gloria Sutton posits that perhaps this obsession with futility drove her interest in glitchy video, as she wanted to highlight the medium’s impermanence.
In other “Duchampiana” works, Kubota borrows some of Duchamp’s famous compositions. In 1983, she stuck tiny monitors in the spokes of bicycle wheels turned upside down and perched on top of stools in reference to Duchamp’s assisted readymade Bicycle Wheel (1951). And, she reinterpreted his iconic painting Nude Descending a Staircase (1912) by lining a plywood staircase with four monitors, each showing footage she filmed of a nude woman traipsing down the stairs at Anthology Film Archives. It’s tempting to read this work as a feminist rejoinder to art history’s obsession with the female nude on the heels of Vagina Painting, but when Kubota spoke about Nude Descending during her lifetime, she focused on her earnest reverence for Duchamp—especially his interest in capturing movement over time, an ambition she saw ripe for updating via video. In 1981, Nude Descending a Staircase became the first video sculpture MoMA ever acquired.
From 1972–73, Kubota was part of a short-lived multiracial feminist video art collective called Red, White, Yellow, and Black. The name riffed on the colors of the American flag, and also referred to each member’s skin color. Kubota was joined by Mary Lucier, Celia Sandoval, and Charlotte Warren, and the group held two “multimedia concerts” at the Kitchen in New York. In December 1973, Kubota showed Riverrun—Video Water Poem, which introduced another recurring motif in her work—flowing water. Four channels showed rivers and canals she recorded while traveling in Europe, and a fifth played footage of the Hudson River. In front of the monitors, a fountain spewed orange soda, and on a sixth channel, there was live footage of viewers drinking form it. This was the only channel in color. Art historian Midori Yoshimoto claims that Riverrun was the “first of its kind” to combine multichannel video with other materials.
Shigeko Kubota: River, 1979-81, silent color video, three monitors, stainless-steel container, mirrors, pump, water.PHOTO PETER HARRIS. COURTESY SHIGEKO KUBOTA VIDEO ART FOUNDATION, NEW YORK AND MIT LIST VISUAL ARTS CENTER, CAMBRIDGE, MA.
Kubota returned to water frequently in search of what she called “a total freedom to dissolve,” and several of her works express a desire to be subsumed by nature. Perhaps she was not fearful of technology—or at least not in the way that many of her early video art contemporaries were—because her Buddhist upbringing taught her to embrace impermanence. She also saw the closed circuit—an essential component of analog video—as synonymous with the way that rivers cycle water.
Shigeko Kubota: Niagara Falls, 1985, video sculpture.PHOTO YUKIHIRO YOSHIHARA. COURTESY NIIGATA PREFECTURAL MUSEUM.
Standouts from this body of work include River (1979–81) and Niagara Falls (1985). In River, three monitors hang from the ceiling and face the floor, where the footage is then reflected by a metal trough filled with water, lined with broken mirrors, and replete with a small motor that creates waves. The brightly colored shapes and footage of the artist swimming becomes abstracted in the reflection, and the bouncing colors make the work something of a proto-projection. Niagara Falls (1985), meanwhile, is a matrix of small monitors and metal reflected in a rectangular pool of water. Kubota once said that the grand waterfalls made her feel liberated from herself. Rather than capturing their largeness with a wide shot, she recorded the falls up close, as if engulfed.
Even the storm that flooded Paik and Kubota’s loft and destroyed several important tapes only amplified her reverence for water. She commemorated the event in a video titled SoHo SoAp/Rain Damage (1985), which includes one of her signature poetic lines: “It rains on my heart, it rains on my video art.” (The loft—in a Jonas Mekas–owned building on Mercer Street—still houses the Shigeko Kubota Video Art Foundation.)
Shigeko Kubota: SoHo SoAp/Rain Damage, 1985. video, 8 minutes 25 seconds.COURTESY THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK; SHIGEKO KUBOTA VIDEO ART FOUNDATION, NEW YORK; AND ELECTRONIC ARTS INTERMIX (EAI), NEW YORK.
Kubota devoted much of her time and energy to supporting Paik. She has said that he would spend the salary from her job at Anthology Film Archives on nothing but monitors, and joked that they had so little left over, they needed to sleep on a TV bed. In 1972, Paik literalized the idea in a work called TV Bed, which curators often frame as an homage to Charlotte Moorman. While this could be true, it’s also an example of how Paik and Moorman’s collaborations were much more visible than Paik’s and Kubota’s. Paik famously made a TV bra (in 1969) and, later, a TV cello (in 1971) for the famous “topless cellist.” Moorman’s choice to perform in the nude was more compatible with the maker/muse role that Paik sought, and was a way of working that Kubota refused. Moorman’s visibility, like the reception of Vagina Painting, confirms Lucy Lippard’s argument in a 1976 issue of A.i.A. that feminist body art—which often lives on in photographs by men—tended during the ’70s to be picked up more eagerly by the art world than did “neutral art by women that ignores the sexual identity of its maker.”
Kubota knew how people saw her vis-Ã -vis Paik. In 2007, a year after Paik died, she opened “My Life with Nam June Paik,” one of her few and final solo exhibitions, at Stendhal Gallery in New York. The show featured lighthearted sculptures depicting the couple in robot form displaying footage of their final years together, which they spent in Miami. In one, she’s jogging with dumbbells, and in another, Paik is peeing. She complained that a reporter covering the show asked her why she would use a rare platform—a moment of fleeting attention on her work—to advance Paik’s legacy rather than her own, as if the oversight of her work was somehow her fault, and as if caring for or missing her sick husband or considering him a muse was somehow anti-feminist.
Here again, video sculptures were a vehicle for mourning. At once ephemeral and monumental—or as Kubota put it, both hot and cold—it was the perfect medium for both remembering and letting go.
