Forms of Identification

Japanese artist Yuzo Saeki, now considered to be the Van Gogh of Japan, hangs around a Parisian cafe hoping to meet the famous French painter Maurice Vlaminck. Having left his native Japan to become a “great artist,” he finds himself lost in a culture that does not understand him. Timidly, he approaches Vlaminck for some gesture of approval of his paintings. Instead, an outraged Vlaminck rails, “These paintings are copies of photographs of paintings which are not part of your history, let alone your culture.”

This scene from Bruce and Norman Yonemoto’s 30-minute film “Japan in Paris in L.A.,” made in 1997, constitutes the fictional reconstruction of a historical meeting between Vlaminck and Saeki in 1927, an encounter ripe with the kind of deep cultural divisions that have long fascinated the Yonemotos. Bruce points out, “What Vlaminck considered the liabilities of an artist coming from outside the Western world would be considered attributes of ‘success’ in today’s post-modern, post-colonial world.”

For more than 20 years, the Yonemoto brothers have produced videos, films and, most recently, installations that frame the singular question: How is identity formed? It’s an issue of particular importance to them, as sansei, or third-generation Americans of Japanese descent, and one they explore primarily through droll and incisive melodramas that skewer racial stereotypes and the mainstream media that perpetuate them.

For Karin Higa, art curator at the Japanese American National Museum, the Yonemotos’ art seemed ideal as the inaugural exhibition at the new 85,000-square-foot building in Little Tokyo. “Bruce and Norman Yonemoto: Matter, Memory and Modern Romance,” a mid-career survey of 22 installations and objects and 17 videos and films, largely sponsored by the Fellows of Contemporary Art, is on view through July 4.

“Early on in their careers,” Higa says, “the Yonemotos were looking at the ‘performance of identities,’ not only racial identities but sexual and ethnic identities. They are more concerned with how ethnicity is constituted rather than looking at ethnicity or race as absolutes. That was one of the most important things for me, and I thought it was important for this museum, too.”

Video art critic and new media consultant Michael Nash says, “They are the quintessential media artists. They play both ends against the middle. They love media, so they are presenting the thing and the critique of thing at the same time.

“There is almost nobody out there whose works have such dynamism when it comes to crossing the West with the East,” he adds. “Their perspective is about the construction of cultural identity through media.”

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The Yonemoto brothers are as different as they are similar, which lends a crucial tension to their collaborations. Bruce, 49, lives in an artist’s loft in downtown L.A. and operates from the theoretical vantage of a fine arts education. Norman, 52, lives in a bungalow in Venice and was educated as a filmmaker. Sitting around the dining room table at Norman’s bungalow, they frequently finish each other’s sentences. Bruce says, “We feel that the familial tie is more of an asset than a liability. After years of shared experiences and emotions, we are able to communicate in a verbal and nonverbal shorthand.”

The Yonemotos grew up in the Northern California town of Santa Clara, near Sunnyvale, where their Japanese grandfather had settled in the early 20th century to cultivate the Simm variety of carnation developed for cut flowers. Their father continues the family business, though none of his four sons has followed suit. A few years ago, Bruce and Norman honored him with an installation called “Asexual Clone Mutation” featuring a carnation with a golden petal. “Mutations in flowers are used to make new varieties of flowers,” explains Bruce. “The idea was that the golden petal would ultimately result in a golden flower.”

Although their grandparents occasionally took them to Buddhist temple and spoke Japanese, the Yonemotos were raised in a household with a largely Western orientation. Norman says that they “grew up believing completely in the American Dream as televised.” Their parents encouraged them to be “more American than Americans, to negate the Japanese thing as much as possible.”

Their introduction to racial self-consciousness and politics developed when they were students at UC Berkeley in the late ‘60s. “That was basically the beginning of the Third World studies movement,” says Bruce, who got his own awakening in the vagaries of cultural identity when he went to Europe to study what he had thought of as “his” art history. “Everyone there would characterize me as Japanese, not American. After I graduated I went to Japan to find out about that culture, since that is what I would be considered by people anyway,” he says.

After learning Japanese and studying at the Sokei Art Institute in Tokyo from 1973 to 1975, he went to the Otis Art Institute (now Otis College of Art and Design) from 1977 to 1979 where he studied with Italian critic Germano Celant and began making video art.

“Celant introduced me to the deconstruction of melodrama,” says Bruce. “His view was based on Arte Povera, a group of artists who wanted to take control of the creation, distribution and interpretation of the work. I was trying to apply that to our culture, which is television culture, and look at how that controls our behavior.”

Norman was initiated into filmmaking in 1967 at Berkeley by making a short documentary about student protests against the Vietnam War called “Second Generation.” After attending UCLA, he 1684366185536870913Streets” and “Chatterbox,” he was yearning for a challenge when Bruce approached him for help in producing an art video, with the story line and production values of film, a surprisingly unconventional notion at that time.

The brothers weren’t looking to become commercial filmmakers, but neither were they interested in the prevailing forms of video art, which were rooted in structuralism or the documentation of performance art. Instead, they looked to meld the two genres into something altogether different.

“We were the first to use narrative in video,” Norman recalls. “In fact, people could not comprehend that this was video art. If we used a two-shot, they’d say it was like commercial TV, not art.”

Using soap opera as their format, their first outing was the 1979 “Based on Romance,” a half-hour homage to Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu with white actors playing out a doomed romance set in the context of the Southern California art scene. The 1982, “Green Card: An American Romance” concerned the attempts of a young Japanese woman, Sumie Nobuhara, to attain a U.S. visa by marrying an American.

A few of their work’s signal elements were present even then: Swelling music and golden sunsets make promises that are never delivered; scripts are composed of dead-pan monologues, in this case on the media’s manipulation of romantic ideals. They blur the lines between reality and fiction, mixing actors with characters playing themselves. For example, as a coda to “Green Card,” Bruce and Sumie married so that she could get her green card. (They divorced eight years later.)

Structuring their productions as small independent films, the Yonemotos worked more collaboratively than most video artists and often invited other emerging artists to join them. In 1986, artist Mike Kelley co-wrote the script for the completely bizarre “Kappa,” in which he is featured as the randy Shinto god of fresh water overseeing the Oedipus story performed by underground actor Mary Woronov and Ed Ruscha, hunky young son of the well-known artist. Around the same time, the Yonemotos worked with artist Jeffrey Vallance to document his project of burying a supermarket chicken in “Blinky.”

In 1990 came their ambitious critique of filmland ambition, “Made in Hollywood,” produced for German television, starring then-unknown Patricia Arquette as a wannabe starlet and the late Wooster Group star Ron Vawter as a cynical screenwriter who are forced to choose between art and commerce. “We were in Hollywood,” says Norman. “Right in the middle of the production center and we could see how it manipulates and controls people.”

One would never confuse any of their projects with a candidate for the Sundance Film Festival. For one thing, they regularly interlace their productions with clips of TV commercials. And they insist on “bad acting” ranging from histrionics to wooden monologues. “It’s a rupture,” says Bruce. “From the beginning, we used actors and non-actors. We like to manipulate the audience while they understand they are being manipulated.” Norman adds, “We have to throw the audience off the narrative. And in a number of our works, we throw the narrative out.”

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Art critics loved “Made in Hollywood.” Asian culture specialist Ian Buruma, a scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., says, “Their work is not only a witty deconstruction of Hollywood, in an odd sort of way, it’s a loving one.” Such success meant that the Yonemoto brothers nearly accrued the funding to complete a feature-length film when, in 1993, Norman suffered a stroke. After years of rehabilitation, his speech remains slightly slurred and he can barely use his left arm.

Since then, the brothers have concentrated on installations. Over time, video art has changed from the presentation of a work on a single monitor to video used as an element in a larger piece. Bruce explains, “I wanted to continue to be a part of the art world. I pushed to do installation because I knew that single-channel video was becoming more marginalized, and with the demise of the National Endowment for the Arts, there was virtually no support for experimentation in video.”

The Yonemotos had completed a few earlier installations including 1989’s “Framed,” which is based on a cache of archival films of Japanese Americans in internment camps during World War II. For the survey, it is being re-created in the museum’s former home in the Buddhist temple opposite the new building. In the same site, the museum commissioned the Yonemotos’ most recent installation, “Silicon Valley.”

“Silicon Valley” incorporates archival footage of the atomic bomb blasts as a way of looking at the destruction of the agricultural basin where they were raised. “Santa Clara was called the Valley of Heart’s Delight,” says Norman, “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. Anyone of Japanese heritage remembers the omnipresence of the bomb.

“This installation will use the idea of TV as being an open text as opposed to films which have closure,” Norman adds. “TV goes on forever like reality.”

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“Bruce and Norman Yonemoto: Memory, Matter and Modern Romance,” today-July 4, the Japanese American National Museum, 369 E. 1st St., (213) 625-0414. Admission is free today and Monday, as part of the opening festivities of the new museum. Regular admission: $6 adults, $5 for seniors, $3 students and children over 5, free for members and children under five; and free on Thursday. Museum hours today are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Regular museum hours: Tuesday-Sunday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; Thursday, 10 a.m.-8 p.m.