Shigeko Kubota, Avant-garde Performer

Shigeko Kubota was a Japanese avant-garde performance artist during the 1960s. Born in Niigata in 1937, this multimedia artist, who explored areas such as music and visual art, began her career in the artistic group Ongaku, a contemporary of Gutai. Influenced by artists like Yoko Ono, who introduced other avant-garde movements to Japan such as Fluxus, and composer and visual artist John Cage, she experienced her first taste of success with her work Vagina Painting, a performance organised during the 1965 edition of the annual summer Fluxus Festival. The artist fixed a paintbrush to the back of her skirt and soaked it in red paint before crouching down over a large sheet of paper on which she then laid down long trails of blood-red colour. 

This work was an allusion to menstrual blood and was envisaged as a response to abstract expressionism, which was, at that point, dominated by men, and particularly as a reaction to Yves Klein’s series Anthropometries, which used naked female bodies as paintbrushes, directed by the artist in different performances.

The advent of video sculptures

Her body of work took a new turn in the late 60s with the arrival on the market of the portable Sony camera. Shigeko Kubota marked herself out from her peers by creating video sculptures and rooting herself in this artistic practice that was still in its infancy. 

At the start of the 1970s, she undertook an autobiographical video project, exemplified by Europe on ½ inch a day, the first component of these ‘video diaries’ – travel journals that come to life on film. In 1976, Shigeko Kubota created Nude Descending a Staircase, inspired by the cubist painting of the same name by Marcel Duchamp. These four television sets, fitted in a wooden staircase and that broadcast images of a naked woman walking down the stairs, comprised the first video sculpture acquired by MoMA.

Some of Shigeko Kubota’s video works are available on the Shigeko Kubota Video Art Foundation’s website.