One of the seminal video sculptures from Kubota’s Duchampiana series that premiered at Rene Block Gallery in 1976, Meta-Marcel: Window adapts Marcel Duchamp’s ready-made Fresh Window (1920/1964) to the realm of video, exploring combinations of different media (sculpture, video, text) and issues surrounding representation. The sculpture is accompanied by text that alludes to the perception altering potential of video, “Video is a window of yesterday. Video is a window of tomorrow.” According to the artist, Meta-Marcel: Window is “so simple, clear, pure…the quintessential video sculpture, a means to glimpse and grasp the birth of a new genre.”
The first iteration of this work, Meta-Marcel: Window (Snow), did not include edited video by the artist at all but a snowy pattern produced by the innate random pattern of electrons created in a video Cathode Ray Tube at rest – that is with no image control signal being input to its circuitry. Throughout the 1980s, Kubota created additional iterations of this work with varying video content including flowers, stars, colored snow, and later landscapes. Debuted at NYU’s Grey Art Gallery in 1983, Meta-Marcel: Window (Flowers) features a surreally color-synthesized bouquet that highlights the painterly possibilities in video. Building on Kubota’s conceptual sketches and site-specific adaptations of her work, this 2022 foundation edition of the sculpture includes the Flowers content on a LED flat screen, which the artist heartily embraced in its earliest days, her concept and extraordinary composition uniquely liberated.