Bruce and Norman Yonemoto
b. 1949/1946
California-based artists Bruce and Norman Yonemoto, brothers who produced a body of collaborative videos beginning in 1976, deconstruct and rewrite the hyperbolic vernacular with which the mass media constructs cultural mythologies. Ironically employing the image-language and narrative syntax of popular forms such as soap opera, Hollywood melodrama and television advertising, the Yonemotos work from "the inside out" to expose the media's pervasive manipulation of contemporary reality and fantasy, individual and collective identity. In their highly stylized, deadpan fictions, they decode the tropes of cinematic and television formulas, self-consciously appropriating the artifice and cliches of this "media delirium" as metaphor. In their ironic psychosexual melodramas, including Vault (1984) and Kappa (1986), they decipher the Freudian symbology, psychoanalytic strategies and Surrealist tactics that underlie media representations and narrative texts. The Hollywood myth of romantic love, and its role in the construction of personal desire and cultural memory, recurs throughout their work. The Yonemotos' critique of America's mediated culture is informed by their Japanese-American h…
Films