Bruce and Norman Yonemoto, An Impotent Metaphor, USA 1979, video, colour, sound, 43 min
Created as part of the Yonemotos’ Soap Opera Series (together with Green Card: American Romance), this postmodern tale navigates artistic and sexual crises in Southern California. Boredom and alienation, the banality of fantasies and reality and the need for idealised romance afflict the characters that wander through this narrative representation of the LA art scene. The pervasive cultural malaise is seen as conditioned behaviour — conscious psychological manipulation by the mass media. Against this dominant ideology, the film’s central figure Norman, played by Norman Yonemoto, approaches art as a means to ‘expose the derivative nature of the romantic ideal’ and ‘promote the examination of our personal contexts.’
Bruce and Norman Yonemoto in collaboration with Mike Kelley, Kappa, USA 1986, video, colour, sound, 26 min
Juxtaposing the myth of Oedipus with the ancient Japanese story of Kappa, a malevolent water imp, the Yonemotos create a highly charged discourse of loss and desire. Quoting from Buñuel, Freud, pop media and art, Kappa foregrounds the symbology of Western psychosexual theory in its look at longing, perversions, compulsions and catharsis. With Mike Kelley eerily performing the eponymous role, the film also features cult actress Mary Woronov of Warhol and Corman fame and artist Ed Ruscha’s teenaged son Eddie.
Bruce and Norman Yonemoto, Japan in Paris in L.A., USA 1996, 16mm transferred to digital, colour, sound, 30 min
Japan in Paris in L.A. centres on Saeki Yuzo, an early twentieth-century Japanese artist who makes a pilgrimage to Paris to seek his artistic fortunes, only to find that ethnic and cultural differences stand in his way. Around this narrative, the Yonemotos construct a multi-layered and self-reflexive work in which strategies of disjunction and contradiction are key. Employing heightened theatricality, experimental narrative strategies and archival footage, the film proposes a complex meditation on issues of modernity, representation, ethnocentrism and identity.
This programme is rated 18+ and contains scenes of a sexually explicit nature.
Bruce and Norman Yonemoto Japan in Paris in L.A. 1996, film still. Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York
Bruce and Norman Yonemoto An Impotent Metaphor 1979, film still. Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York