Marcel Duchamp and John Cage (1972)
February 1–29, 2024
e-flux is very pleased to present the February 2024 edition of our monthly series Staff Picks on e-flux Film, featuring Shigeko Kubota’s Marcel Duchamp and John Cage (1972, 28 minutes).
In this elegiac work, Kubota explores the relationship between two of the most influential figures in twentieth century art and music. The core images are Kubota’s own photographs of the famous 1968 chess match between Marcel Duchamp and John Cage, in which the board, wired for sound, functioned as a musical instrument. Recordings of Cage’s compositions accompany the stills and video footage, which Kubota electronically processes to abstraction.
Marcel Duchamp and John Cage will stream on e-flux Film from February 1 through 29, 2024.
Watch the film here.
Co-presented with the Shigeko Kubota Video Art Foundation.
Shigeko Kubota was born in 1937 in Niigata, Japan and died in 2015. She received a BA in sculpture from Tokyo University of Education, and studied at New York University and the New School for Social Research. In 1964, she moved to New York; in the same year she became the Vice Chairman of the Fluxus Organization. She taught at the School of Visual Arts, and was video artist-in-residence at both Brown University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. From 1974 to 1982 she was the video curator at Anthology Film Archives. Kubota was the recipient of numerous grants and awards and her work is in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Toyama Museum of Art, Japan. Kubota’s video sculptures, installations, and videos have been exhibited internationally and she participated in the 1990 Venice Biennale and the 1990 Sydney Biennale. Kubota lived in New York and Miami until her death in 2015.
Staff Picks is a monthly streaming series on e-flux Film of recommended videos designed to disrupt the monotony of an algorithm. Before the end times of big data, we used to discover suggested content along dusty shelves in video rental stores, where Post-it notes scribbled by shift workers implored us to experience the same movies that made them guffaw, scream, or weep. Sometimes the content bored us, sometimes it overwhelmed us, and sometimes, as if by magic, it was just right. e-flux invites you to relive this rental store mode of perusal, with personalized picks curated through judgment that does not take into consideration your viewing history.
For more information, contact program [at] e-flux.com.
