"The video community has its painters, sculptors, and graphic artists, as well as its poets, performers, storytellers, and mad-persons; and often the characteristics of several of these are happily combined in one person.
Shigeko Kubota's training and background are in sculpture, and Meta-Marcel her current show at the Rene Block Gallery, reflects sculptural concerns, at least on its beautifully unfinished plywood surfaces. Closer inspection reveals a graphic artist and a poet, and her economical and well-planned use of the small gallery space and her attention to the smooth operation of her pieces suggest to us that she is a curator as well, as indeed she is at Anthology Film Archives.
Her interest in Marcel Duchamp, the Marcel in the title of the show, stems from meeting him at a performance in Toronto with John Cage in 1968, eight months before his death. Shigeko photographed the performance and subsequently published a small blue book entitled Marcel Duchamp and John Cage, documenting the event. Following Duchamp's death she made a pilgrimage to his grave, which she videotaped. Many of her sculptural video pieces, including those in her last show, Duchampiana, have been outwardly analogous to particular works of his.
Duchamp's impact on contemporary art is legendary. It could be argued that in some areas he appears to have stopped it in its tracks. But my arms are too short wrestle with Duchamp and, in any case, Shigeko's work reflects Duchamp's only superficially; it is really Shigeko underneath. It has a monumental rather than a derivative quality.
The show consists of three pieces. One of them, the central and dominating work Mountain, bears no obvious relationship to a particular Duchamp piece. It is a 41⁄2 foot-square truncated pyramid, intelligently constructed by Al Robbins of untreated fir plywood, perfectly joined and sanded. It is located in the center of the floor, and one can see that it is hollow, inviting one to peer through the opening in the top. The inside is covered with mirror surfaces, nine of them, carefully cut and fitted to conceal 11-inch and 5-inch color monitors. There are recessed openings opposite each other for the screens of the monitors, and these also are lined with mirrors. It's a bit like looking at a faceted jewel from the inside. At the bottom is a small collection of desert stones. The image on the monitors is a record of a speedy videotape passage through dry mountainous area in the southwest, shot through the video of a car or train (the audio portion suggests train noises), and the predominating colors are the deep rusts of the rocks against the rich blue-green of the sky. The images are scattered throughout the surfaces of the mirrors, and in the center of it all is a mirror image of one's own face, lit only by the blue and rusty monitor light.
On the south side of the room, to the right of the opening leading to the office, is a reconstruction of the Door at 11 Rue Larrey, in Paris, where Duchamp lived from 1927 to 1942. In its original edition it was situated so that it functioned as a door to both bedroom and bathroom, never either truly open or truly closed, a kind of paradox that Duchamp was apparently fond of. Shigeko's reconstruction leads, by either doorway, into a small and interesting space dominated by two color monitor screens mounted at eye-level in a plywood bridge between two opposite walls. Only one monitor can be seen at a time as they are facing in opposite directions. The bridge is between the two doorways and in order to enter by one door and leave by the other, one has to duck under it, placing oneself in the territory of the other monitor. One of the monitors is in the negative mode, through the images and soundtrack are identical. It is a still image of Duchamp's head and shoulders, superimposed over a videotape of the geysers at Yellowstone Park. The steam swirls around his head, like a manifestation at a seance, a visit from Duchamp in the underworld. We hear his voice, telling us that art is a mirage.
The third piece, Window, located near the north wall of the gallery at eye-level, is a replica of Duchamp's Fresh Widow, mounted into a two-foot by 30-inch plywood box. Fresh Widow, you will remember, was a pun on "french window," and was a miniature french window mounted on a piece of wood.
Shigeko's replica is accurate except for one detail. The original Fresh Widow had black leather pasted over the panes of glass. In Shigeko's model the glass is clear, and through it we can see the screen of a 19-inch monitor turned vertical. It is playing random video noise, sometimes called salt and pepper or snow. It is what we see when both deck and monitor are on but no tape is running through the machine. In this case, the effect is like looking through a french window at a heavy snowfall; the mood, in this as well as the other pieces, is Shigeko rather than Duchamp, whose works after all radiate a fierce black humor, a highly developed sense of strategy, and even a little nastiness.
Shigeko bypasses these aspects of Duchamp, and tends to deal with him denotatively rather than connotatively. Duchamp becomes a surface structure, a reference, a set of imposed circumstances that Shigeko uses as an outer framework for her own unique vision."
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