Bruce Yonemoto
BY
Andrew Norman Wilson
An interview with the LA-based video artist about spoofing the soap opera, and Japanese American artists one day getting their moment in the sun.
Green Card: An American Romance (1982) plays at Metrograph from Sunday, June 30, as part of TV in Review.
Parked in my rented Toyota Corolla on a street in Pasadena, California, I logged onto Zoom to interview Bruce Yonemoto. Bruce was not far from me, tucked away at his home in Crestline’s Valley of Enchantment, but I wasn’t able to make the four-hour round trip given the ridiculous schedule of meetings with producers, agents, execs, and other dream factory functionaries I had committed myself to this week, in the hopes of tunneling further out of the black box of video art and towards the silver screen. Between a meeting with an emissary from Riley Keough’s company and an exec from what had started out as a humble streaming platform, I was relieved to have 90 minutes to speak with Bruce about something more in my comfort zone: video art.
I had first seen Bruce and his brother Norman’s work Made in Hollywood (1990) as a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. SAIC houses the Video Data Bank, which holds just four tapes by the Yonemoto brothers, compared with Electronic Arts Intermix [EAI]’s dozen or so in New York. As a result, the brothers’ “Soap Opera series”—Based on Romance, An Impotent Metaphor (both 1979) and Green Card: An American Romance (1982), works that were shot on video, packaged as a soap opera, and then circulated in the art world and on television—had become the stuff of legend for me.
While it would take over a decade for me to finally catch the trilogy in full, Made in Hollywood’s exploration of the myths and realities surrounding the film industry had always stuck with me as a potent warning against ever trying to fully embrace Tinseltown pipe dreams. When I actually moved to LA in 2016, the critical distance that I then kept from the Death Star situated me in a world not far off from the one the Yonemotos depict in their trilogy—a milieu of adjunct professors, narcissistic conceptual artists, edgelord punks, visiting artists without papers, and surfers, ie. the LA art world.
Here, I asked Bruce to make sense of the career he built out of making work about commercial film and television—in part so I could perhaps try to make sense of why, decades later, I had done the same, albeit differently. —Andrew Norman Wilson
Made in Hollywood (1990)
ANDREW NORMAN WILSON: Where would I have seen Green Card: An American Romance back in the day? At the art museums listed in the credits? Was it played on television?
BRUCE YONEMOTO: It was co-produced with the Long Beach Museum of Art, and we used the black box video room to shoot part of the museum scene. Whereas the white cube gallery we shot in was at the La Jolla Art Museum of Contemporary Art, and there you see the work of that artist who killed his wife. I forget his name now. You know, pushed her out of the…
ANW: Carl Andre?
BY: Right, there was a Carl Andre that you could make out. It was important to have that context. But neither of those museums showed Green Card. It premiered at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, and aired on PBS and KCET.
ANW: You were in the air while I lived in LA, but I first learned about your work when I was a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, along with other contemporaries like Mike Kelley, Robert Ashley, Dara Birnbaum, and George Kuchar; all of these artists who were attempting to elevate or pervert or debase the televisual form in the late ’70s and early ’80s. You were of course aware of Kelley’s output at the time—he even helped out on Green Card—but what about George up in San Francisco, and Robert and Dara over in New York?
BY: I knew them all. I didn’t know George so well, but a couple of times I went to his “classes” at the San Francisco Art Institute, in which he would produce a film with his students, because the process fascinated me. Robert collaborated with the video artist John Sanborn, and they were out on this video art circuit along with Dara Birnbaum at events like the AFI Festival and the San Francisco Video Festival. The big one—the World Wide Video Festival, run by Tom van Vliet—was in The Hague in the Netherlands. Everybody went.
At that time, television stations in Europe were non-commercial, so they all had to produce their own content, and they had curators who went around looking for what to program—that’s how we connected with Carl Ludwig Rettinger. He didn’t produce Green Card, because that came earlier, but he produced Made in Hollywood and other later works.
ANW: I’ve shown video work at the New York Film Festival and Rotterdam several times over the past decade, as they now have these hybridized sidebar programs in which “moving image art” or whatever they call it is screened, but my sense is that, back then, avant-garde film and experimental cinema programming was distinct from what you and other video artists were doing.
BY: Video started to infiltrate some of the festivals like Oberhausen and Rotterdam in the ’90s. But certainly not in the ’80s.
ANW: You’ve called Green Card deconstructive, and I’m wondering about what you perceived as the value of deconstructing television at that time? How cynical were you feeling at the time about social change, particularly through media? Today, there’s a sense the art world has a limited and already informed audience, and that, online, the algorithm tends to bury work, but back then, I’m imagining chance encounters with television viewers who weren’t primed for deconstructive video art, and what their reactions might have been to characters who, for example, talk about breaking the cage of melodrama, who call out romantic love as media propaganda, and who muse on how conceptual art will allow them to realize their utopian fantasies of alternate realities. Was the irony in Green Card a defeatist irony, or were you hoping to use irony as a social tool?
BY: I studied with the artist Germano Celant, the critic and art historian who coined the term Arte Povera [meaning “poor art,” in which artists made sculptural use of non-precious, everyday objects], and so I was examining my surroundings and the materials that influence us as artists. I focused on television, and particularly the soap opera, because I felt that, to a ridiculous degree, it informed how people viewed their lives—particularly things like marriage, love, and desire. Pop music had this hold on people, too.
I know irony is “out” right now in contemporary art, but it’s a useful device to look at the outsized influence that movies, television, and music have on everyone—people of color, white people, everyone. That’s why there are many parts of the Soap Opera series that are obviously ridiculous, and made to be laughed at, not even with.
There was some hope on the horizon, to use a cliché, because things were rapidly changing. The internet didn’t exist yet, but there were signs that venues would perhaps open up more to media artists. There were things like the Z Channel in LA, who were showing Fassbinder on TV alongside the artists on PBS and public access, and there was buzz around cable TV. Then, as you know, we went through all the successive stages, and here we are now.
Green Card: An American Romance (1982)
ANW: On a Zoom call through our Apple iPhones.
BY: Yeah. At the University of California, Irvine, we’re doing a search for a Video position because I’m retiring next year, and Ulysses Jenkins recently retired. Some of these younger artists we’re looking at… I don’t know what they’re thinking. They’re claiming they want to teach with consumer-level or deskilled technology because that’s all the students can afford—which is such bullshit, because things are crashing in terms of price. You can get a RED camera for $1,000, and an iPhone costs more than that. It’s ridiculous. And they don’t want to teach any skills! I mean, Tangerine (2015) was “shot on an iPhone,” sure, but it has all this lighting, it has all the techniques of a Hollywood film. It’s bizarre, the younger artists are so skewed.
ANW: There’s a nice form/content interplay in Green Card in that the relationships—mainly romance/marriage that plays out between the Japanese aspiring artist Sumie [Nobuhara] and surfer/filmmaker Jay [Struthers], but also between Sumie and Gary [Lloyd] the egotistical professor, and Sumie and her disabled friend Kyoko [Watanabe] who offers advice—are ersatz, like cheap substitutes for relational ideals, and then the style is sort of ersatz, in that it’s a cheap imitation of the soap opera form. I’m wondering if you had your druthers, would you have incorporated higher production values on Green Card and produced it through a network, or was the mode of production integral to the work, and it had to remain cheap, punk?
BY: If we had the resources to produce it at a higher level, we would. But at the time the only technology we had access to was really low quality. Tube cameras shooting on tape. Even editing cost so much money at that time because you had to use professional edit houses, things like that. Very few artists were able to produce things at the level of, let’s say, Bill Viola, or Gary Hill. And their grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) were enormous compared to artist grants these days. I think Bill got something like $500,000 to produce a tape.
ANW: Yet you stretched that budget out across nearly 80 minutes. Why is Green Card feature-length as opposed to a more televisual duration, like the prior two works in the trilogy?
BY: Well, for Green Card we got our first NEA Grant. Not a Bill Viola-scale NEA grant, but more than we were used to. It was also referring to the “problem dramas” and “women’s pictures” of the ’50s—like, Douglas Sirk.
ANW: Right, and Green Card begins with the Imitation of Life (1959) title theme.
BY: There were also sequences lifted from those sorts of features, like Now, Voyager (1942) and The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947). We were thinking about that form, and taking it on alongside the form of the soap opera.
ANW: In Green Card there’s a use of amateur actors that you have identified as Bressonian. Due to the canned affect of their performances, the expressiveness of their lines, and the melodramatic story, the actors don’t seem to function as the “models” that Bresson would refer to, though. He was trying to construct a movement from exterior to interior in the performances, thereby working against the grain of commercial cinema in which the interior of the performer is externalized, whereas you seemed to cultivate a movement from interior to exterior from your amateurs—however, their performances are often stilted, and what emerges is an interior that I can’t quite trust, that I don’t think I’m supposed to trust.
BY: I knew all our actors very well, because I had either gone to school with them or socialized with them. I was using people who were very real to me, and I built characters around who they were, or as I thought they were. The irony—there’s that word again—is that through the formal artifice, we were nodding to the fact that something more complex was stewing beneath the surface.
Green Card: An American Romance (1982)
ANW: Right—for example, Gary was a professor at Otis College of Art and Design, and he actually behaved that way in real life?
BY: He has always acted that way. Complete narcissist.
ANW: What about Kyoko?
BY: Kyoko is the most interesting character to me. I thought, since she was disabled, she would see her life outside of the norm. But when I got to know her, I realized that, for her, achieving this sort of normal life based on her romantic visions was what she wanted more than anything.
ANW: Kyoko is also one of many Japanese characters throughout the trilogy whose marginalized identities create a complicated relationship to assimilation. Less than two years ago, you told Julie Ault that you hope Asian American artists will soon have their moment in the sun. I was looking last night online to see what’s up around LA and there’s Paul Pfeiffer at MOCA, followed by Josh Kline. A CFGNY show just opened at the Hammer Museum, and you’re in a show at the ICA that’s mostly composed of Asian artists. Do you feel you’re now living in that moment?
BY: It’s a beginning, perhaps. I like to refer to Black Male, the show curated by Thelma Golden in 1994 at the Whitney. It takes years for a collector base to develop, and for Black artists it’s just beginning now. So for Asian American artists, I’ll probably be dead—somebody told me that, I think…
ANW: [Laughs] Somebody told you that you’d be dead when your moment in the sun arrives?
BY: When the money starts rolling in, yeah. Black Male was a critical moment. I don’t know if there has been a show for Asian American artists that has the same gravitas, in that it was organized by a major curator with a strong thesis at a major institution. I tried to talk to people for maybe 20 years about doing a show of conceptually based Asian artists that studied in the US, or went through the US, or had been formed by Western art—which is what we’re talking about, basically; not Eastern art, those subcategories exist already. I think that could be a pivotal show. It’ll come, but it hasn’t been done yet.
ANW: Through teaching, you must have your ear to the ground with what’s going on in contemporary art. Do you consider yourself an active participant in the video art of younger generations, and do you seek out certain artists who are of the millennial generation?
BY: I’m going to try to go to the Josh Kline show. He was at EAI for many years, and was a strong supporter, so I really appreciate that and am very happy about his success. I also sit on the board of Art Matters, so I see a lot of work, you know, BIPOC, LGBTQ+, T+... whatever. There’s such a push towards this work that is culturally based in terms of ethnicity and gender as if that’s more important than the aesthetics of the work itself. I’m ambivalent about that sometimes. I would like to see work that has it all— not only strong content and representation, but finesse in terms of technique, too.
Andrew Norman Wilson is an artist and director based between America and Europe. His first feature film—Interlaken—is currently in pre-production.
Green Card: An American Romance (1982)
