The small but choice Gazing Back: Shigeko Kubota and Mary Lucier, is the first video installation in the 'Collection in Context' series at the Whitney Museum. It announces at once a general art historical and theoretical concern: the gaze as a subjective and historical subject. Kubota and Lucier artists long identified with expanding the medium of video into the field of sculpture are represented here by works that appropriate the Modernist icons of Marcel Duchamp and Claude Monet, reconsidering their work in the context of gender, cultural identity and the formal and conceptual properties of video itself.
The exhibition consists of one installation by Lucier and two by Kubota: Duchampiana: Nude Descending a Staircase and Meta-Marcel: Window, the former after Duchamp's eponymous painting, the latter after his wood-framed French window sculpture Fresh Widow. Lucier's installation, entitled Ohio at Giverny, was inspired by Monet's late series of luminously sunlit paintings produced at his country retreat in Giverny. Created before the ubiquitous post-Modernist appropriations of the mid-80s (all three videos were made from 1976-83), these installations appear refreshing today; their art historical commentary is unburdened by hermetic critical thinking, especially in relation to the subsequent surge of post-structuralist Duchamp studies.
