Insightful, Social Special Effects

Among the many notorious fictions promulgated by showman Ronald Reagan during his tenure as a politician was the howler in which he imagined himself playing a more heroic role during military service in World War II than simply making Air Force training films in Culver City. History, memory and images fabricated in movies and on TV merged in the telling into seamless melodrama.

During the war, Reagan narrated films like “Target Tokyo” and wore uniforms custom-tailored by the wardrobe department at Fort Roach--a.k.a. the Hal Roach Studios--complete with the special collars he’s always used to make his short neck appear longer. The ex-president doesn’t turn up as a performer in “Environmental” (1993), one of 18 video installations and sculptures made during the past decade by Bruce and Norman Yonemoto, which inaugurate the galleries at the new pavilion of the Japanese American National Museum. But, you can’t help feeling he’s there in spirit.

The installation, like the one-time TV pitchman’s militaristic fantasy life, splits the difference between the era of the silver screen and the postwar television age. Scenes from what appear to be black-and-white Air Force training films or Hollywood movies from World War II are projected without sound onto a makeshift wall, collaged from 14 home movie screens. Opposite the silent screens, a TV set placed casually on the floor plays a raucous reel of vintage commercials.

The spectator stands betwixt and between old-fashioned cinematic and video imagery. On one side airplanes silently strafe ships, pilots warily scan the horizon, victims cling to life rafts bobbing in the water. On the other, a Pepsodent toothpaste jingle suddenly claims that using the brand means “you’ll wonder where the yellow went.” A weird, postwar paean to a domesticated yellow peril rises into consciousness.

Organized by curator Karin Higa and sponsored by the Fellows of Contemporary Art, “Bruce and Norman Yonemoto: Memory, Matter and Modern Romance” is an ideal inaugural exhibition for the Japanese American National Museum’s new pavilion. For one thing, the Yonemotos are the most important American artists of Japanese ancestry working in Los Angeles. For another, even if the museum’s new, corporate-style pavilion is a major disappointment architecturally, it is also dedicated to the sometimes remarkable, sometimes painful history of Japanese American experience--and that has been a central strand in the Yonemotos’ art for nearly 20 years.

Another main ingredient of their work has been the transformation wrought by the tumultuous emergence of electronic technology in the postwar era. The Yonemotos’ art often mixes up technologies both old and new.

A napkin made from a piece of projection screen and folded into a fan atop a TV tray-table is part traditional origami, part stereotypical artifact of an Asian restaurant, part oblique allusion to postwar Japan’s emergence as a powerhouse of electronics manufacturing, part reflection of new postwar patterns of American suburbanization--dinner in front of the tube. Nearby, a projection screen covered in fragile squares of gold leaf conjures both the gilded world of Hollywood and the shimmering surface of an elegant Japanese folding screen.

A spool of old-fashioned nitrate-based movie film sealed inside a petrie-like glass dish rests atop another TV tray-table. Pointedly titled “Disintegration,” it simultaneously suggests the decay in importance of lens-based imagery in our newly digital world and the social divisiveness--or disintegration--fostered in some mass-culture imagery.

A Photograph and a TV Monitor

On a shelf inside an elaborate china cabinet carved from exotic wood, a framed, sentimental photograph of two young boys (the Yonemotos as children) sits next to a tiny TV monitor whose vivid, frozen picture shows an impossibly lush, green jungle. (Notably, a tree seems to be falling in the silent forest.) Inside the curio cabinet, which is a homespun version of a public museum, a memento of lost personal history resides alongside an up-to-the-minute image of the natural world that, all of a sudden, feels poised at the brink of slipping into an irrecoverable past.

Much of the Yonemotos’ work is built from found-objects and pre-existing images. In the manner of Italian arte povera, these are brought together intact, in an effort to establish a new poetic power.

When electronic technology is employed, the artists rarely hide the machinery, exposing it instead in clear-plexiglass cases or as part of a sculptural tableau. Rather than exploit the mystifying wonders of technology, importance is given to the plain materiality of man-made things, whether scientific or artistic.

Because of this material emphasis, graceful precision feels essential to the success of the Yonemotos’ art. Folding a thick piece of unwieldy projection screen into something resembling an elegantly fanned napkin is unlikely to achieve the refinement essential to the practice of origami. Here and in some other examples, the Yonemotos’ sculptures are intellectually cogent but visually clumsy, as if making helpless gestures in the direction of what they can’t quite seem to embody.

By sharp contrast, a work like “Exotica: Le Cabinet Chinois”--the china cabinet holding two pictures--strikes a clear, powerfully compelling chord. So does “Asexual Clone Mutation,” which manages to make traditional Japanese flower-arranging both poignant and scary; “Land of Projection,” in which a looming Easter Island monolith, made of fiberglass in the manner of a studio prop, is the jumbo screen through which you watch live broadcasts from CNN (“Monica Arrives at the Capitol!”); and “A Matter of Memory,” where pictures from the 1950s are projected onto a small cube of sugar that appears to be perpetually melting in a big glass of water.

The importance of this precision is evident in “Silicon Valley,” a new video installation having its debut across the plaza in the exhibition hall of the museum’s historic Buddhist temple. Between the show’s preview and the museum’s official opening, the piece was significantly edited and fine-tuned, mostly in beneficial ways.

Trimmed by half to just eight minutes, “Silicon Valley” tells the story of the postwar transformation of the landscape around Santa Clara, Calif., where the Yonemotos grew up, from vast rural farmland to bland suburban sprawl. In format it’s an electronic version of a traditional Japanese screen, where a painted narrative might tell the “Tale of Genji” or the story of a dynastic shogun.

Marvelous Union of Visual Traditions

Here, a vertical projection screen meets the floor and extends horizontally at your feet. A projected video image of a period chandelier in the temple gives way to a sequence of sights familiar from both Japanese painting and the modern media environment: rushing clouds in a blue sky; streaks of rain; cherry blossoms dropping petals onto the ground; TV’s famous “daisy spot” from the Johnson-Goldwater presidential election, where a little girl plucks petals from a flower; a loud montage of U.S. government test films showing nuclear explosions; an angry red sky above an image of a solitary, antique computer; and, finally, an aerial view of an ordinary suburban neighborhood, shot to create zigzag street patterns and flatten the space.

This final image is a marvelous union of two great visual traditions: a classic vista from a 20th century Spielberg movie seamlessly merged with a classic 17th century panel painting of a Tokugawa palace. Two eras--one American, one Japanese--characterized by complex social, political and cultural upheaval come together, forming an indelible picture of timelessness and perpetual change.

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* “Bruce and Norman Yonemoto: Memory, Matter and Modern Romance,” Japanese American National Museum, 369 E. 1st St., (213) 625-0414, through July 4. Open Tuesdays-Sundays, 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Thursdays until 8 p.m.