ACT Research Affiliate Gloria Sutton is one of 20 writers awarded a 2021 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. These grants support projects addressing both general and specialized art audiences, from short reviews for magazines and newspapers to in-depth scholarly studies. The program supports writing about contemporary art and aims to ensure that critical writing remains a valued mode of engaging the visual arts.
Gloria Sutton’s book Against the Immersive: Shigeko Kubota’s Video Sculptures will be the first sustained account of the New York-based artist’s video sculptures. Distinct from her peers who marshalled the aesthetic vocabularies of cinematic projection and televisual broadcast, Kubota (1937–2015) fused the emerging medium’s durational and material qualities into a format she made uniquely her own. Sutton demonstrates how Kubota’s hybrid role as an artist, critic, curator, collaborator, and caregiver operates as an intersectional history of media art from the 1970s to the early 1990s. Addressing the moment when the protocols and conventions of proprietary commercial image technology were adapted by artists to create idiosyncratic and intimate exchanges well before the advent of the Internet, Sutton offers a feminist critique of the friction-less concept of the immersive, which has become the default descriptor for all forms of moving images and time-based media. Kubota’s work, Sutton suggests, asks us to think about the limits and thresholds of one’s own capacity for memory, so that the experience of being subsumed by images could be accompanied by acts of revision and re-ordering, as well as a powerful measure of vulnerability.
More information about the award can be found here.
