Shigeko Kubota, performing the 'perfomance' 'Vagina paintings' in 1964, in a portrait of P. Moore.
Just before the pandemic, MoMA undertook a transformation in its exhibition policies: it was time to rescue so many overlooked artists, left behind in the museum's infinite warehouses and who, however, had also played an essential role in development. of the avant-garde.
For well-known reasons, the most talked-about case has been that of the Afro-American community - the painter Faith Ringgold sharing a room with
Picasso's
The Ladies
- although the inclusion is noticeable in every proposed room in the New York museum, even in the presence of certain European artists also forgotten and rediscovered in an unexpected montage, protagonists of their own and shared history.
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Why were they called wives or muses instead of just artists?
Responsive and obedient
This fall it was the turn of Shigeko Kubota, the Japanese artist born in Nigata in 1937 (and died in New York in 2015) who, after graduating from the Tokyo School of Education in 1960, encountered the avant-garde groups that then they grew up in the city. Ongaku, Zero Jigen and other activists of Tokyo modernity sought to break down the barriers between the strict genres prevailing in the art world. The inclusions of music or
performance
in his proposals, his new approaches to art, were preceded by an avant-garde tradition in Japan as powerful as it is little known. Suffice it to mention the early experience of the Gutai group, which, with its first exhibition in 1955, inaugurated a way of doing in which the basic thing was the approach to the
happening.
His dances with theatricality and his use of the body were ahead of the proposals of the Europeans.
It's more.
By throwing himself in the mud or painting with his feet, Kazuo Shiraga seemed to take a step further than the bet of Pollock, well known to the Gutai.
Kubota's 'Nude Descending a Staircase' (1976) was the first video sculpture acquired by MoMA.
Photo: 'Nude Descending a Staircase', at MoMA in New York.
© 2017 Shigeko Kubota
In any case, the Japanese critics at that time were not very receptive to new experimentations and less so if it was a woman, which is why Shigeko Kubota decided to go to New York. It was not long before he found Fluxus, for whom the old divisions between arts were a thing of the past, and began a lasting collaboration with Maciunas or Cage, both celebrities among the Japanese avant-garde. Finally, at the Perpetual Fluxus Festival in 1965, Shigeko Kubota carried out one of her best-known actions: painting a white surface red with a brush placed in the vagina. His gesture was linked to the logic established by Fluxus and reviewed Pollock's own gesture rooted, like the entire New York School, in the masculinity of "genius." In the same way, it radicalized Klein's gesture when,Instead of using paint cans or sticks, he used the models' naked bodies as brushes on the canvas in a
performance
in March 1960 in Paris.
In spite of everything, it is still another cliché in the enhanced readings about the artists - even from feminism - that this piece is her most popular work and that it tends to forget the solid work that the artist undertook very early with the video , a place where only the bravest entered the 1970s. "In the reality of video, infinite variations are possible ... There is freedom to dissolve, rebuild, mutate in all imaginable forms, shape, color, place, speed, scale… A liquid reality ”, Kubota commented.
Liquid reality
is called this sample that can be seen until January 1, 2022 at MoMA. A good way to think about how many things need to be revisited, because when we believed that we were all inside, there is always someone who has been left out or who has to be included for reasons other than those repeated.