MATTER AND MEMORIES.

Memory, Matter, and Modern Romance

Bruce and Norman Yonemoto

Japanese American National Museum 

Los Angeles, California

Bruce and Norman Yonemoto: Memory, Matter, and Modern Romance

January 23-July 4, 1999

edited by Karin Higa

Los Angeles: Japanese American National

Museum, 1999

The memory, allure and substance of classic Hollywood cinema, 1950s television commercials and World War II documentary films serve as points of artistic departure for the Los Angeles-based video installation artists Bruce and Norman Yonemoto. Since the mid-1970s when they created their first collaborative film, the brothers have worked as a team exploring the manner in which imagery, history and identity are socially constructed. An ambitious mid-career retrospective of their work entitled "Memory, Matter, and Modern Romance" was staged to coincide with the opening of the newly expanded Japanese American National Museum in downtown L.A.

104 pp./$30.OO (hb)

Continually conversing with the vast and ever-growing repertoire of commercially produced films and photographic images, their work explores creativity as a collaborative process driven by visual dialogues that interweave private and public narratives. This use of multiple voices emerged in the 1970s and is intrinsic to a number of contemporary artists including Nam June Paik, Dan Graham, Joan Jonas and Bill Viola. As Susan Sontag suggested at the time in On Photography (1977), the filmic medium itself, with its implicit characteristic of replication and relationship to mass media, challenged and disrupted traditional markers of an artwork's authenticity that once sanctioned uniqueness, originality and craftsmanship as criteria of artistic quality. Complimented by the rising omnipresence of filmic imagery in a capitalist society, the disruption of such modernist values fostered and coincided with an apparent shift away from romantic concepts of artist-genius. In its place artists and critics began to conceiv e of creation as being related to paradigms of social and cultural codes and patterns that were collective rather than individual in nature. The Yonemotos' collaborative work accentuates such premises presenting not so much a duet as a chorus in which their voices play a critical lead. Eschewing simplicity, their videos, films and installations are layered with narratives that thematically explore the relationship between reality, photographic imagery and the construction of ideals, history and identity.

The Yonemotos' critique of mass media imagery carries credibility because of their familiarity and fluency with an array of national and international films, especially American movies and television. Growing up in the postwar '50s in what was then the Santa Clara agricultural basin, [1] their childhood was impacted by the ascending importance of television and home movies as normal, everyday phenomena in the American home. A gallery of sculptural works included in the exhibition often humorously underscored the significance of such media in the Yonemotos' childhood environment. For example, "Napkin Series: Standing Fan Napkin I, Crown Napkin I, Standing Triangle Napkin I" (1993) consists of impeccably folded napkins each placed atop a portable television dinner tray. In contrast to their associations with a more elegant dinner affair, the napkins are fabricated from white projection screens. Crossing the prospect of consuming food with the appetite for television specials and home movies, these napkins impa rt a critique of the often unquestioned consumption of television fare, along with its standardized narratives, dreams and character types.

A related work entitled "Golden" (1993) presents a projection screen covered with gold leaf. While touching upon the memory of Japanese Edo period (1615-1868) screen paintings, this work wryly nods to French philosopher Jean Baudrillard's suggestion that mass media filmic imagery has come to embody the golden ideals of consumerist society, conceptually supplanting lived reality with what the philosopher calls an idealized filmic hyperreality. On another level, of course, the work also suggests the significance of Hollywood's Golden Age, 1939 to 1963, which created the canonical images that continue to impact popular concepts of American identity.

The Yonemotos' concern for these issues is woven into the fabric of their family history. It is particularly relevant that their works emphasize a collective rather than a singular voice. The collaborative creation of their work imparts a critical mass that empowers its metaphoric inquiries that can be read as a voice for America's socially marginalized citizens. "The fact that our pieces question and critique mass media isn't a coincidence," Norman Yonemoto told a reporter in L.A., "because it was mass media that manipulated people into putting our parents into the [World War II internment] camps." [2]

The Yonemoto survey was showcased in two buildings: the Japanese American National Museum's new addition, a streamlined pavilion designed by architect Gyo Obata; and its original facility that served as L.A.'s first Buddhist temple. The exhibition focused primarily on 22 video installations, but was complimented by 17 film and single-channel video screenings. The films, scheduled to run at various times and locations, ranged from their earliest collaborative piece, Garage Sale (1976), to Japan in Paris in L.A. (1997), which presents the tale of the modernist Japanese artist Saeki. Linking this vast array of works is a conceptual interest in the alluring, pleasurable and problematic aspects of the celluloid surface. From the physically commanding installation Land of Projection (1992) to the fragile and ephemeral video and slide projection piece Framed (1989), the emphasis on surfaces creates tension between an awareness of the alleged artifice of film and the presumed deeper meanings of its imagery and impli ed narratives.

Land of Projection commanded the dimly lit opening exhibition room in the new pavilion. It presented a modern fiberglass replica of an ancient Easter Island moai stone figure that subliminally echoed photography's replication of the real, while wryly intoning the significance of fiber optics in the transmission of media imagery. The powerful but mute sculpture was continuously bathed by an array of colorful, collaged television footage featuring advertisements, documentaries and soap operas. Anticipating and parodying the customary assumption that voiceless phenomena need verbal explication or translation, the installation featured four soundtracks, creating a verbal equivalent to the visual filmic collage. Functioning as a verbal counterpoint to the projected video imagery, these narratives could be heard in headsets placed within reach of benches situated along the room's walls. Spouting tourist, anthropological, sociological and historical interpretations of the "exotic" sculpture and its culture, the nar ratives, along with the filmic imagery, articulate western cultural concepts of the non-western "other." In affiliating modernity with the ongoing western video imagery and soundtracks, while ascribing a sense of silence, timelessness and antiquity to the Easter Island moai sculpture, the work redresses entrenched western cultural perceptions and conclusions regarding the so-called non-western world. While intoning a cultural acceptance of vicarious experience as a plausible substitute for immediate and actual encounters, the work nonetheless articulates the circuitous and closed nature of such knowledge with all its alluring but ultimately repetitive images and perceptions. Emphasizing the disjunctures between surface imagery, verbal remarks and sculptural form, this work accentuates the complexity between appearances, explanations and reality.

Closely related in theme is a trio of small installations that share the title Exotica (1994). These works, subtitled Hashi de Mato Grosso, Le Cabinet Chinois and Outdoor-Indoor, parody various western mass media culture tropes that are repeatedly used to signify the non-western other. Using irony to reveal the incongruities of long-standing and jaded stereotypes, these works challenge accepted filmic images and their presumptions. Exotica: Hashi de Mato Grosso presents ethnographic sepia-colored footage of a ritual dance being performed by a native Brazilian tribe. The footage is projected onto a homemade screen fabricated of Japanese chopsticks, thereby layering and conflating two different non-western worlds. Challenging a system that claims to be enlightened but that fails to recognize cultural differences other than those of its own devising, this work satirizes the western penchant for classifying all non-western cultures as one homogeneous abstract other.

Similar themes appear in the more complex and poetic video and slide projection entitled Framed. Shown on a home-viewing screen, Framed juxtaposes two interrelated sequences of imagery that present different yet simultaneous visual narratives. Blurry photographs are projected over moving images in sharp focus. The film footage was originally commissioned in the 19405 by the American War Relocation Authority (WRA) agency, which administered the forced relocation of over 100,000 Japanese Americans into 10 concentration camps during World War II. Superimposed over these images is a sequence of still photographs that have been enlarged from the peripheries and margins of the primary film. These blurry close-ups offer an alternate reading to the intended cheery message of the original footage. Subtle and effective in its exegesis of the relationships between appearances, meaning and reality, Framed details the ways in which allegedly documentary film constructs specific, monologic narratives of history and identi ty that innately suppress alternative readings.

In unveiling the hidden or repressed visual dialogues embedded in the WRA archival footage, Framed refocuses and reinterprets filmic imagery created by a group of unnamed cinematographers in the 1940s. This work and an array of other works presented here underscore the manner in which artistic creation is essentially social and collective in nature, rather than singular and individual. The Yonemotos not only work as an artist team, but create film and video pieces that noticeably converse with a legacy of preexisting work, affirming the significance of community in the creation of artistic narratives. Thus Framed exposes the manner in which film, in this case the WRA archival footage, functions to define what is both socially acceptable and inadmissible. By creating two simultaneous narratives, Framed emphasizes the limitations and boundaries of a single narrative voice as a credible paraphrase of actuality.

These concepts are brought to a crescendo in the powerful yet meditative two-channel video projection entitled Silicon Valley (1999). Created as a site-specific video installation for the historic building of the Japanese American National Museum, Silicon Valley was presented on the upper level of what was originally the Nishi Hongwanji Buddhist Temple. Built in 1925, and a renowned historical L.A. landmark, the upper floor features an ornate gilded wooden ceiling carved with painted lotus flowers. The video begins with a tranquil and lyrical sequence of budding pink cherry blossoms set against a clear azure sky. It then sets up narratives of identity by juxtaposing Japanese cherry blossoms with an American daisy. Throughout the video, a drone can be heard, creating an ominous sense of premonition. When footage of a fictional World War II pilot is introduced, appropriated from the 1952 MGM production Above and Beyond (by Melvin Frank and Norman Panama) one recognizes the familiar narrative of peace and appro aching war. Curator Karin Higa's catalog essay also notes other appropriated footage used in Silicon Valley including clips from the infamous "Daisy Girl" commercial created for Lyndon B. Johnson's 1964 presidential campaign and actual footage of the atomic bomb blast over Hiroshima.

These markers of cultural specificity are rephrased in geographic terms in the film's closing shots that juxtapose the shattering of Japanese buildings at the moment of the explosion with the tranquillity of suburban homes in California's Silicon Valley. As in many Yonemoto works, the layers of artistic voices are seamlessly fused, creating a powerful work that is not merely documentary, dramatic or political in viewpoint, but rather combines all three, creating an aggregate of viewpoints that is unusually frank in its affirmation of art as a reflection of collective values and thought.

In sequencing images of the temple ceiling's large carved flowers with the blossoming of nature's flowers, followed by the devastating "flowering" image of the bomb explosion, the Yonemotos overlay circular symbols of renewal and destruction in complex and disturbing ways. Superimposing fragile and lyrical dream-like imagery with the devastating documentary image of the atomic explosion, the video integrates utopian and dystopian imagery suggesting a powerful and inextricable symbiosis between such opposite experiences and realities. The effect is emotionally and psychologically powerful. Disclosing the complexity of the Japanese American struggle for identity as neither singularly Japanese nor singularly American in character, this work manifests in yet another way the reason why multiple views, visions and voices are significant to the Yonemotos. Acutely attuned to the complexities of cultural difference, their works parlay an awareness and fusing of more than one cultural perspective and more than one cul tural voice. Working in what. was once a sanctuary space, the Yonemotos approached the difficult challenges of addressing cultural differences with equanimity, poignantly addressing. the chasm between dreams and their often-fractured realities.

Spinning from scenes of nature through images of destruction and then to a man-made. suburban environment, Silicon Valley quizzically contains parallels to the fabricated nature of film imagery itself. Parodying the process of filmic construction that moves from reality through a crucible-like process of transformation to a structured and yet vicarious realm, this work again echoes the taut tensions of surface imagery played against the deeper questions of meaning and life. Exposing the fabricated nature of Hollywood film imagery, the Yonemotos' works suggest that artistic creativity is intrinsically collective rather than individual in conception. In working as an artist team, they eschew notions of the artist or filmmaker as an individual genius figure, proposing instead that creativity is born of collaborative inspiration. Their communal authorship grants their insights, spawn of cultural marginality, a powerful credence. That credibility in turn is enhanced by the visual dialogues their works knowingly i nitiate with filmic works of the public domain. Deconstructing popular documentary, dramatic and political film sequences, they transform familiar linear narratives into works that layer and collage perspectives and views. In synthesizing such extant filmic categories, the Yonemotos construct intense and commanding visions forged in the crucibles of collective realities and dreams.

COLLETTE CHATTOPADHYAY is an art and cultural critic who lives in the Los Angeles basin. She is a regular contributor to Asian Art News, Sculpture, Art AsiaPacific and Artweek

NOTES

(1.) Hunter Drohojowska-Philp, in "Forms of Identification," Los Angeles Times, Calendar (January 24, 1999), p. 6 quotes Norman Yonemoto as saying, "Santa Clara was called the Valley of Heart's Delight because it was covered in orchards of pear, cherry and plum trees. Since the arrival of Silicon Valley, it looks like a bomb fell and wiped out our childhood environment."

(2.) Jack Stentz, "'Framed' at the Museum: L.A.'s Yonemoto Brothers open JANM Space," Los Angeles Downtown News (January 18, 1999), p. 17.