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Vault

Norman Yonemoto

1984 00:12:00 United StatesEnglishColorStereo4:3Video
Tags:
Television, Psychoanalysis

Description

“We are hoping that in presenting this story in such a minimal way it would become evident that this Freudian logic is a conceptual and visual cliché. We want our audience to have an emotional response to the work, but at the same time realize that they’re being manipulated.” —Bruce and Norman Yonemoto

“In Vault, the Yonemotos reconstruct a traditional narrative of desire—boy meets girl, boy loses girl—that knowingly employs the melodramatic syntax of Hollywood movies and commercial television. They illustrate the psychoanalytic subtext of advertising, film, and TV language through the recurrent use of Freudian symbols and flashbacks to the characters’ childhood traumas, humourously underscoring the power of these devices in creating personal fiction.” —Bruce and Norman Yonemoto, “Made in Hollywood: A Treatment for a Video Feature and Discussion of Aesthetic Strategies,” in Resolution: A Critique of Video Art, ed. Patti Podesta (Los Angeles: Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, 1986)

About Norman Yonemoto

Bruce and Norman Yonemoto are brothers who have been an effective collaborative team since 1975. Both Bruce and Norman develop the concept and script for their videotapes and films, that deconstruct the clichéd forms of soap operas to comment on the conventions of emotion and expectation that form the plastic heart of TV romance.

The Yonemoto brothers base their videotapes on familiar narrative forms and then circumvent convention through direct, over-eager adoption of heavily clichéd dialogue, music, gestures, and scenes that click in the viewer’s memory without being identifiable. Dealing with the “collective unconsciousness” of the TV generation, their work adopts the language of mass media to critique the manner in which television inculturates individuals and over-codes experience. What the Yonemotos' videos effectively illustrate is how the televised representation of the world becomes the model for living, with individuals not only copying the fashions, gestures, and dialogue of TV characters, but using the situational patterns of TV as the way to understand their life. The Yonemotos' narratives of love and romance are not however, simply parodic. The emotional struggle of the characters persists in seeming real, even if the words they speak, the very looks in their eyes, are fake. A common supplementary theme in their work is the interaction between traditional Japanese and contemporary American cultures.

“For us, using the style of commercial work to critique the commercial media is experimental.”

—Bruce Yonemoto