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.
Gloria Sutton is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History and affiliated faculty in the Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies program at Northeastern University. Sutton publishes widely on the intersection of contemporary art and image technologies using an intersectional lens to examine how computational networks have informed the reception of visual art since the 1960s. A French translation of her book The Experience Machine: Stan VanDerBeek’s Movie-Drome and Expanded Cinema (MIT Press) will be published in 2022. Her criticism has recently appeared in Architectural Review, BOMB, Woman’s Art Journal, and X-TRA. Sutton has contributed to numerous international exhibition catalogues and artist monographs, including publications on Rosa Barba, Jennifer Bornstein, Olafur Eliasson, Renée Green, Harun Farocki, Hans Haacke, Yayoi Kusama, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Bruce Nauman, Pipilotti Rist, and Elaine Summers. She edited the first volume on the photographic and sculptural work of Sara VanDerBeek and was the inaugural editor of the College Art Association’s Art Journal Open. Currently, Sutton serves on the editorial board of Signs Journal of Women in Culture and Society and Bloomsbury Press’s Series on Critical Media Aesthetics. Sutton is a research affiliate in the Art Culture Technology Program at MIT and a member of the MIT List Visual Arts Center Advisory Committee, and she serves on the Board of Directors of Voices in Contemporary Art (VoCA).