The video artist Shigeko Kubota, a central figure in the Fluxus movement, with her husband, Nam June Paik, in New York.CreditTom Haar
Shigeko Kubota, who with Nam June Paik, her future husband, was one of the first artists to see the artistic potential of video technology, which she integrated in intensely personal sculptural works, died on Thursday in Manhattan. She was 77.
The cause was cancer, Norman Ballard, her executor, said.
In the early 1960s, Ms. Kubota was exhibiting her avant-garde sculpture in Tokyo, with little recognition, whenGeorge Maciunas, the founder of the anti-art Fluxus movement, persuaded her to relocate to New York.
Like other members of the movement, notably Yoko Ono and Mr. Paik, she was deeply influenced by the ideas of Marcel Duchamp and the composer John Cage. Once in New York, she became a central figure in the group, making an immediate impact with the performance work“Vagina Painting.”
At the annual Fluxus summer festival in 1965, she attached a paintbrush to the back of her skirt, dipped it in red paint, and, squatting over a large piece of paper, laid down broad, gestural marks. With its allusions to menstrual blood, “Vagina Painting” was an audacious retort to male-dominated Abstract Expressionism and, more particularly, to Yves Klein’s use of women as “living paintbrushes” to create his “Anthropometry” series of works on paper in 1960.
When Sony introduced a portable video camera in 1967, Ms. Kubota immediately embraced it, making video diaries like “Europe on ½ Inch a Day” and “My Father,” about her father’s losing battle with cancer. She went on to integrate her videos physically and conceptually into works of sculpture.
“In video, time flows frame by frame,” she said in a 2009 interview for the Oral History Archives of Japanese Art. “If I combine it with a still object, the resulting space will be like a museum, like a pantheon. If it is brought to a public space, it can heal people’s minds — even, say, at a busy airport. It contains many possibilities.”
Shigeko Kubota (pronounced shuh-GAY-ko koo-BO-tuh) was born on Aug. 2, 1937, in Niigata, Japan, where her father taught at a Buddhist temple. Both her mother and sister were passionate amateur pianists. Shigeko also studied piano but suffered from stage fright.
After earning a degree in sculpture from the Tokyo University of Education in 1960, she taught secondary school and made sculptures in her studio. For her first show, at the Naiqua Gallery in Tokyo in 1963, she scattered love letters on the floor, heaped up newspaper scraps into a mountain, and added a welded iron sculpture.
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“Duchampiana: Nude Descending a Staircase,” a 1976 work by Ms. Kubota.CreditThe Museum of Modern Art
When the show attracted little attention, she headed off to New York, where she studied at the New School for Social Research and at the art school of the Brooklyn Museum. She was briefly married to the experimental composer David Behrman.
In 1968 she traveled to Toronto to record “Reunion,” a collaborative performance piece in which Duchamp and his wife, Teeny, played chess with Cage on an electronic board, with the movement of the pieces triggering sounds and oscilloscopic images projected on television monitors.
Ms. Kubota used her documentation of the event, along with material she gathered later, in several works with the collective title “Duchampiana.” In the sculpture “Marcel Duchamp’s Grave,” stacked monitors in a wooden column showed images of Duchamp’s tombstone in Rouen, France.
In the 1976 work “Nude Descending a Staircase,” inspired by Duchamp’s 1912 cubist painting of the same name, she installed four television monitors in the risers of a wooden staircase, each transmitting images of actual nudes descending a staircase, with varying colors, speeds and angles.
Ms. Kubota took a more lyrical turn in the 1980s in works like “River” and “Rock Video: Cherry Blossoms,” which reflected her Buddhist upbringing and reverence for the natural landscape. Both were included in a retrospective of her work at the American Museum of the Moving Image in Queens (now the Museum of the Moving Image) in 1991.
When Mr. Paik, whom she married in the 1970s, suffered a debilitating stroke in 1996, his rehabilitation provided her with the subject of the video “Sexual Healing” (2000). After his death in 2006, she made a number of works in his honor, including “Nam June Paik I” (2007), a metal silhouette equipped with video monitors showing scenes from a vacation they had taken in Miami.
Over the years, she found herself explaining that her relationship with her husband was not that of master and disciple.
“We are very different, like water and oil,” she said in her 2009 interview. “Even when I did my own stuff, people said, ‘She imitates Nam June.’ I found it infuriating. So I headed further in the direction of Duchamp. When Nam June went populist, I went for high art.”
Ms. Kubota taught at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan and was an artist in residence at Brown University and, on multiple occasions, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. From 1974 to 1982 she was the video curator at Anthology Film Archives.
She is survived by her sisters, Yuko Kubota, Yushio Kubota and Keiko Hossho.
From the outset, Ms. Kubota brought a marked sensuality to the cool abstractions of the video data stream, vividly on display in “The River,” with its graceful, hypnotic images of her swimming projected onto a mirrored trough.
“The swimming body floats lightly upon the water, spins and dives with ease,” she wrote of the work. “Once cast into video’s reality, infinite variation becomes possible, not only weightlessness, but total freedom to dissolve, reconstruct, mutate all forms, shape, color, location, speed, scale.”
Correction: July 29, 2015
Because of incorrect information provided by an interpreter, an obituary on Tuesday about Shigeko Kubota, a creator of video sculptures, misidentified one of her sisters, who survives her. She is Keiko Hossho, not Genji Kubota.
