The Art of Sushi and Sake
NORMAN YONEMOTO on Norman Yonemoto

By Nancy Uyemura

For those of you who are not familiar with the work of Norman Yonemoto, the following is a brief narrative written by the artist highlighting his amazing career.

I grew up in California with the thunderous echoes of World War II still ringing in the air. For my parents the humiliation and pain of the internment camp experience and its roots in political mass hysteria and mass media propaganda burned raw in their memories. It is not difficult to see why I was raised to question political institutions and the mechanics of the mass-media. These questions were to form the foundation of the films, videos and installations I’ve produced during my thirty year career as a multi-media artist.

After receiving my MFA at the American Film Institute Center for Advanced Film Studies in 1972, I teamed with my brother Bruce to produce a series of single channel videos that cast a critical eye on the world of corporate moving image production, also known as Hollywood.

We received our first National Endowment for the Arts Grant in 1980, and in 1983 we received our second NEA grant for Green Card: An American Romance, a feature length exploration of the materials and contextual implications of the mass media of the moving image.

Commissioned by the Long Beach Museum of Art, in 1989 the first of our multimedia installations opened. Framed was a meditation on the WWII Japanese relocation camps.

In 1990 I completed a feature length narrative, Made in Hollywood for ZDF Television in Germany. The following year I co-wrote, edited and produced the documentary A History of Clouds also for ZDF.

In 1993 we won the Maya Deren Award for experimental film and video artists, and the year witnessed the completion of the second installation Land of Projection (1992). Working with archaeologist Dr. JoAnne Van Tilburg, the world’s expert on the Moai of Easter Island; a Hollywood prop house fabricated an opaque fiberglass shell of a life sized replica of an Easter Island statue and we projected TV into it. The piece was included in the 1993 Whitney Biennial.

I suffered a devastating stroke early in 1993. Through intense physical therapy I’ve been able to recover most of my mobility. But alas I’m still dependent on my wheelchair at least some of the time. The experience changed the course of my career. I spent a lot of time on my computer at a time when something called the Internet was reaching critical mass. As an artist, it gave me a head start in a new field. I’ve always been enthralled by the “mass” media. It was becoming clear to me that the Internet and interactivity were ground zero in the development of a new mass medium.

Our mid-career retrospective was the opening show of the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles in 1999. After almost a year of preparing for this major moment in our careers, Bruce and I decided to become solo artists.

My first solo piece was performed as part of Interactive Fictions, a conference sponsored by the Annenberg Center for Communication at USC in 1999. Cycle Drama (1999) was the first live interactive drama/game to be netcast on the Internet. This was my first work to explore the new medium of the Internet and interactivity in a narrative.

My first solo video installation following the stroke was “Self”Portrait 2002 (2002). The installation positions the Viewer within a Herman Miller office cubicle, seated in a wheelchair, watching a computer monitor. The images on the monitor trace an excursion onto the Internet intercut with my interthecal pump being refilled in the doctor’s office. I have a pump implanted in my body to deliver drugs directly into my spine to help with pain and to relieve muscle spasms. The pump is refilled by injecting the drugs into a port on the pump with a hypodermic needle and wirelessly programmed from a laptop computer. Viewers get glimpses of themselves reflected in a two way mirror mounted on the monitor screen. The images toggle back and forth between the viewer and the viewed.

Also in 2002, I began my Wall Clock Series, a series of miniature video installations that hang on the wall. My latest single channel piece; A Norman Yonemoto Clip Joint, was completed in 2006.

In 2008 Framed will be in a group show at the J. Paul Getty Museum. At present I am preparing to start work on my new installation Green Screen . It is yet another piece that deals with the physical relationship between the Viewer and the Viewed. It also plays with the possibility of being in two places at the same time, a holy grail of phenomenology.

Norman Yonemoto’s work is in the permanent collections of many major museums both here and abroad. He is the recipient of numerous awards and grants and his work is shown globally.
Thank you, Norman, for your courage and strength and for continuing to produce good art.


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