Nobuo Kubota left his career as an architect in the 1960s, to eventually become one of Canada’s preeminent inter-media artists. For the past forty years, Kubota has performed, recorded, published, and exhibited internationally. He has produced an astonishingly dazzling array of artistic hybrids including sound sculptures, video installations, three-dimensional poems, improvisational art-music, and mouth mechanics. He is a founding member of The Artists’ Jazz Band (1962), CCMC (1974), and the Music Gallery (1974) in Toronto. Kubota is also the recipient of the 2009 Governor General Arts Award, Canada’s most prestigious arts prize.

Like collages, dictionaries are composed of incomplete, dense little fragments of information; while they purport to explain and provide a context, their abridged format is so concise that they only ever present partial statements, and always in point form.

The early 1980s were a time when a war of images played across battle lines defined by identity and representation. Artists and critics fiercely debatedoften in the turgid jargon of French Theorythe return of the image following more than a decade of militant dematerialization. In some ways, this crisis was sparked by artists’ new flirtation with the mainstreamparticularly the aesthetics of movies and TVfollowing conceptualism’s prohibitions on visual pleasure.

A condensed and revised version of a talk delivered at YYZ Artists’ Outlet on May 29, 2013.