“It’s hard to tell where you leave off and the camera begins.”

Minolta advertisement, 1976

It resembled a body bag. I had the urge to unzip and push the fabric aside, to better reveal the screen nested within, but it was obscured by design. Through the opening, I could make out only a quarter of the roughly twelve-inch monitor that contained the looping self-portrait of the artist Shigeko Kubota (1937–2015). Her eyes and mouth were nearly abstract, lit up in the pastel hues of a neon sign, while her transparent skin flickered with static noise. Her hands were gesticulating wildly and her lips widened into a large O. Part woman, part wavelength: Was she singing or screaming? It was impossible to tell. Yet she seemed aware of her own evasiveness. Her image faded from cotton candy pink to night vision green, before dissolving completely into rainbow pixels, a realm beyond my sight. 

Kubota’s Video Poem was first exhibited in 1975, but I was encountering it forty-five years later at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Standing before the shroud, I was utterly transfixed by its corporeal implications. A body bag inhabited by a recorded body that remained defiant, out of sight. It was formally daring, a rejection of the typical impulses of self-portraiture. Most video artists in the 1970s, a nascent decade for the medium, were more readily offering themselves to the viewer, experimenting with direct confession (Vito Acconci’s Air Time) and engagement (Bruce Nauman’s Live-Taped Video Corridor). Video Poem, on the contrary, decisively diverted the viewer’s gaze, as Kubota’s discolored face dipped in and out of sight. Viewing it—like so many of Kubota’s films, sculptures, and performance pieces—raised in me a phenomenological question: How and on what terms should the self be seen?  

I admittedly sought out Kubota under the pretense of identification, drawn to our demographic similarities as Asian women artists, two generations apart, living in New York. This is a common symptom of our contemporary moment, where consumption of art or content becomes a means of certifying the self. But in its strangeness and shifting imagery, Kubota’s work begged an alternative mode of engagement—a return to a mode of earnest witnessing that I had inadvertently abandoned when I began turning to art for meaning, empathy, or usefulness. 

While Kubota’s work is loosely autobiographical, she never makes the self precious. She does not hesitate to destroy her image to get closer to the truth. “I cut myself sometimes,” Kubota said of her attempts, I assume, to get to the core of things. In her videos, the body is a tool and the camera its intimate prosthesis, extending the artist’s essence and excreting its own evidential fluids. In a text that she projected onto the wall alongside Video Poem, Kubota wrote: “Man thinks, ‘I think, therefore I am’ / I, a woman, feel, ‘I Bleed, therefore I am.’ / Recently I bled in half-inch…3M or SONY…ten thousand feet every month.” 

Video was a mirror Kubota held up to life, and she bled her life and memories into tape. Life was to be scrupulously documented, an archive to be mined for art. She found bliss in video’s potential for dissolution, the “freedom to dissolve, reconstruct, and mutate all forms, shape, color.” Suppose there was freedom in deconstructing the self for someone else to decipher; Kubota left behind an archive of journals, photographs, films, and mirror fragments that invite viewers into dialogue. And the viewer finds some freedom in this chance discovery too, of the artist’s irresolvable, astonishing consciousness, refracted in a form that can never be fully grasped, only observed, from a distance.

Kubota did not want to start at the beginning. Because with beginnings, one must also talk of endings. “I don’t want to have any start, any end,” she once told an interviewer. “[My work is] more like a middle moment, not a continuous time.” The sublime stasis of this “middle moment” is what might’ve initially compelled Kubota to create sculpture—a medium less beholden to narrative—which she studied at Tokyo University in the 1950s. 

Her early work bridged sculpture and painting, traditional forms that belied Kubota’s growing interest in the avant-garde. (Video, at the time, was not yet a widely accessible technology.) Through the art-world grapevine, Kubota got in touch with George Maciunas, a founding member of Fluxus, a New York–based group of artists who believed that everyday life, objects, and events held radical artistic potential. After a tepid response to her 1963 debut exhibition in Tokyo, the New York scene also seemed increasingly attractive. “Come over to New York and we’ll do some work together—Fluxus performances and concerts,” she recalled Maciunas saying, so she did. By the next year, Kubota was beginning to establish a reputation, following her infamous Vagina Painting (1965) performance, where she attached a paintbrush to her vagina in a parody of Pollock–style action painting. But Kubota would swiftly abandon the paintbrush for the Sony Portapak, “a new paint brush” that reflected Fluxus’s do-it-yourself ethos.

Since my introduction to the artist, I have become especially preoccupied with her Broken Diary series, a video project begun in 1970. First conceived to include twelve distinct chapters, Broken Diary features footage of Kubota’s life from the seventies and eighties between living in New York and traveling to Europe, Japan, and across the western U.S. Yet despite the chronology suggested by its title, the series showcases Kubota’s commitment to her principle of “middle moments” and disjointment. Time, when seen on her tape, is freed from the pace and order by which Kubota had experienced it with her camera. The diaries are a patchwork quilt of memory, where footage is edited, reworked, and layered into a collage. In Europe on ½ Inch a Day (1972), Kubota’s conversations with locals are interspersed with footage of posters, stray dogs, and passersby who curiously peer at the camera. Video Girls and Video Songs for Navajo Sky (1973) features footage from Kubota’s monthlong stay with a Navajo family, and SoHo SoAp/Rain Damage (1985) reflects on the storm that flooded Kubota’s loft, which she shared with her husband, the video artist Nam June Paik. “It rains in my heart. It rains on my video art,” she wrote of the event. The diaries are an emotional time capsule, capturing the inquisitive voyeurism of being a tourist in Europe and the wry devastation Kubota felt in losing part of her creative archive to a rainstorm. 

Then, somewhere in the middle—1974, to be exact—Kubota is crying. 

Her sharp sobs puncture the lilting timbre of a serenade. The discordant chorus solemnizes the mood as an image comes into focus. An outline of a television in black and white, the white stark and pulsating, like a bonfire seen from a great distance, until a gray hand smothers it, groping the glass. The scene, we realize, is two screens deep. We are watching a woman watching a video of her late father. There is no funeral, no flowers, no ritualistic indication of mourning aside from a staccato of sobs. Just a woman hunched over a television, palms extended towards the glass, a motion similarly enacted by passengers bidding farewell during a train’s departure. We get the sense she wants to reach into the glass to grasp the last moment shared with her father.

This window into the past is perhaps more real to Kubota than his death, which she had learned of that day. She had, in fact, just purchased a plane ticket to visit him before the telegram arrived. With nowhere to go, she devotes the gestures of grief to his video-double, who lives on in the eternal present. When he appears on the television, she repeats, anguished: “Otosan. Otosan. Otosan.” The loss of her father is a lost chance of capturing his essence for posterity. She is grieving the lost possibility of a final image, a final goodbye—of the father on his deathbed with the dutiful daughter present, there at the very end. 

By comparison to her other Broken Diary entries, My Father (1973–5) has a straightforward simplicity. The fifteen-minute tape is devoid of the vibrant color and abstract forms that pepper Kubota’s ecstatic oeuvre. Death needs no decoration. But her decision to front-load the visual elegy with a nearly three-minute cut of her crying is characteristically and consciously dramatic; she draws attention to the performance of grief enacted by the mourner, and she cues us into the ironies of the ritual. While crying, she adjusts a knob on the television’s right-side panel. Her hand moves with a technical determination before resuming its soft pawing at the glass. She also pauses to take a sip of water, briefly revealing her side profile to the camera before turning away. In these instances, the illusion of naturalness is shattered as the context of her mourning becomes apparent to the audience. She veils her grief—complicates our access to it—her gestures their own kind of obscuring visual static.  

In 1976, one year after Kubota released My Father, the critic Rosalind Krauss cast the emergent genre of video art as a “medium of narcissism.” It was not a derogatory dismissal of video, but instead a rigorous, psychoanalytical response to the medium’s tendency toward “narcissistic enclosure.” Video is unique as a visual medium, Krauss argued, for the recording and transmitting of an image, from camera to monitor, can occur simultaneously. In this self-contained feedback loop (since most video artists at the time were using their body as material), “the human psyche [becomes] a conduit,” such that video, which mirrors reality, “is a process which allows [the artist and his double] to fuse.” 

Kubota, too, later admitted her discomfort with video’s inherent narcissism. It led her to integrate video and sculpture, imbuing the medium with a formidable physicality. Alongside her Pollock send-up, Kubota was also greatly inspired by Duchamp, as she considers the medium of video a ready-made form of social sculpture: her Duchampiana: Nude Descending a Staircase features four monitors embedded in the steps of a large staircase. Kubota believed sculpture made video more engaging to viewers, constructing “video environments” that audiences could meander and inhabit, beyond passive observation. “Since most viewers never quite stay and see the whole video, they may stay longer if they can move around it with more freedom and appreciation,” Kubota remarked in 2007. 

But even the most personal entries in Kubota’s Broken Diary, if inescapably self-centered, do not feel enclosed, where the artist’s subject-self is endlessly affirmed and reaffirmed, like a repeating reflection in a hall of mirrors. Watching Kubota cry in My Father, I feel her sadness emanate from the screen. Her sobs transcend the threshold of time, and I replay the scene compulsively, as (I imagine) she replays the footage of her father. Here, I search for a hint of self-consciousness. Did she avert the camera’s gaze out of shyness or in staunch refusal to show more of herself? Why did she do it? But my preoccupations are misplaced—too focused on Kubota herself—as most of the remaining twelve minutes of My Father are an ode to her father’s aliveness. The diary is interspersed with footage of the television program he was watching that day with Kubota. The program’s vocals are rich and plangent; the vibrato is sung like a goodbye.

I replay Kubota’s three minutes until I absorb the force of her grief—a grief I have yet to experience but will know one day—until I, like Kubota, am a lone woman crying before a screen. Is the screen a “concentric ring of sadness,” as Chris Kraus writes in Aliens and Anorexia, that crying leads one through? 

Crying leads you through concentric rings of sadness. You close your eyes and travel outwards through a vortex that draws you towards the saddest thing of all. And the saddest thing of all isn’t anything but sadness. It’s too big to see or name. Approaching it’s like seeing God. … There are too many parts of other people in it for one person to absorb. Grief is information.

If grief is information, My Father encodes sorrow as a transmittable spectacle, from person to person, screen to screen. And with the sorrow freed from the individual, there is no cause or compulsion to identify, only evidence of an immense feeling, exhibited through snot, tears, shakes, or a downturned mouth. In this video, the screen transforms from a partition between the dead and the living, into a portal connecting multiple lives—the artist’s, the father’s, the viewer’s—whose eternal aliveness endures, no matter their current station in life, within their respective feedback loops, ghastly and static in the routine of living. 

The very first time I saw Kubota’s work, I didn’t realize she was already dead. Her spectral presence, animated and vibrant, permeated every surface of MoMA’s white-walled gallery. Different versions of her in different sizes and colors, never at rest. Electronically, she was alive. I couldn’t think of her as anything but. 

Kubota once described video as “a form of communication between the world of the dead and … the living.” Video “produces images that connect to the eternal, that will never disappear.” This eternal third space is its own kind of heaven, a portal to another reality that our video-saturated culture increasingly dwells in. Yet Kubota’s view is strikingly optimistic, a sharp contrast to the cynical, dystopian tone that presently dominates discussions of digital media. Today, we often speak of the screen as a kind of personal hell: a feedback loop of entertainment and horror, where images coalesce toward a loose, disorienting irreality.

Perhaps part of what sets Kubota apart is this belief in “communication,” in a reciprocal exchange between the artist and viewer. The zippered bag in Video Poem and her obscuring gestures in My Father are not rejections, but invitations to look closer. Such reciprocal engagement is notably absent from much of contemporary media culture, say, in the “sleek and pore-less world” of AI-generated imagery, which as the critic Leo Kim puts it, seeks “to divorce us from the messy particulars of human life.” Whereas an AI image attempts to think for us, Kubota encourages us to feel for ourselves.

In Video Haiku–Hanging Piece (1981), Kubota used CCTV to capture live footage of viewers, projecting their movements onto a reflective steel disk below and doubling the image through a Mylar panel suspended from the ceiling. The result transformed passive museumgoers into unwitting participants in their own mediated image—as if the work were quietly urging them to attend to their own act of looking. Navigating its reinstallation, I resisted the urge to take out my phone and record the projection for Instagram. Stripped of its spatial and temporal weirdness, a work like Video Haiku might become just another aesthetic spectacle—neatly consumable, easily forgotten.

But that the essence of Kubota’s work could not be digitally transposed onto the internet (or descriptively distilled into an essay) makes it all the more precious. What I love about Kubota’s art is its strangeness; the room she leaves for error and mystery and self-projection. Unlike a modern-day vlogger—the downstream inheritor of her form—rather than crafting a persona, she splinters it. In Europe on ½ Inch a Day, we only have her voice to guide us. There are no clear images of her face, no overt efforts to let us “in.” You never quite get a sense of who she is. Yet, her camera reveals to us the dynamic, transportive, and humorous possibilities of pure observation, if you are patient enough to bear witness.

“Why do I climb the mountain?” Kubota wrote of Three Mountains (1976–79), a video sculpture of three plywood pyramids, embedded with footage of the artist’s travels across the American West. “Not ‘Because it is there,’ a colonialist/imperialist notion, but to perceive: to see.” Kubota’s work suspends the viewer in the act of seeing, as reality bends and stutters to the artist’s temporal and visual manipulations. Her work is a reminder that the screen doesn’t have to pacify or affirm. It can provoke. It can resurrect.