LA FREEWAVES Christmas Stars on DNA
By Rosanna Albertini
Norman Yonemoto, My Pump, 2003, 11" x 15" x 7", Mixed media, Courtesy LMAN Gallery, Los Angeles.
the past must be Invented
the future Must be
revIsed
doing boTh
mAkes
whaT
the present Is
discOvery
Never stops
John Cage 1993
The box is a miniature remake of the barracks of Tule Lake concentration camps in 1944, where the Yonemoto family had been incarcerated. It is built with slats, its inside covered with black tar paper. An image of DNA, sculpted by Norman Yonemoto, shines in the right-hand corner of a box—a DNA double helix, made of barbed wire and decorated with Christmas stars. This small detail speaks for the whole exhibit. Our natural history, and History, might be as impenetrable as the night. Because history (scientific, fictional, told and retold), is made up of circumstances that we do not chose when we first come to life, we spend the best of our time stitching this canvas with tentative awareness. Yonemoto, physically, turns on the lights in order to remove the shadows from past lives and to reveal the fragile, dreamlike conversation between objects and images, physical reality and the mind’s figments. He knows that human time has the power to run forwards or backwards, like a heart beat. Norman is sentimental.
Ten boxes, ten rooms of playful thinking reveals some remnants of arte povera—the idea that humans fluctuate impermanently in universal gravity, that images are only as strong as life itself—or some Fluxus affection towards objects that would be of no value if they weren’t living monuments of the artist’s life. Technological devices become materials in these contemporary Wall Clocks, no less whimsical and surprising than Nam June Paik’s old radios in which, for instance, a chicken watches a TV show while she sits on her eggs (Chicken Box, Chicken Farm, 1986). The light bulb, the clock and the micro TV camera that we discover in each of Yonemoto’s boxes are odd ways to recall archeological remains. So completely have these items become our home companions, that we could perhaps classify them as organs living outside of the human body, no longer machines in their own right. This is particularly true in Yonemoto’s My Pump, 2003, : In this work, the pump, which had worked for years inside Norman’s body, releasing medication to his spine, now gleams next to a piece of gray matter painted gold, as naked as a slug.
"It’s about time," says Yonemoto, enjoying the truism’s irony. This exhibition is not a statement on conventional time; it’s a nocturnal restatement of romance, an act of love in honor of all the stories naturally or artificially molded into dated objects. These objects remind us that time exists. A color, a faded image on paper, the tiniest lead soldier, a film can, a couple of dice, become tangible relics, opposed in their physicality to mental illusions. Objects are intriguing: the globe of a light bulb, the globe of the earth, a shell, are not created by our thinking about them, they simply exist. "The world of bodies and that of the mind are two divergent orders, two systems of time, two modes of transformation" (Paul Val�ry, Sea Shells, 1937). We will never stop trying to collapse the distance between these systems. But, in part, an artist can accomplish this. Yonemoto lets the clocks do their work, and he ties them in a chain of repetitive self-reflection. Mirrors and video cameras literally and physically represent time as an idea — movement of a dry sequence of seconds. Around them, a pulsing life of objects transforms each box into a space of wonder, a theater of visual associations inspired by Joseph Cornell’s shadow boxes. Over the last three years Yonemoto’s boxes have become more elaborate in form and material, thanks also to the collaboration of Eric Wise, Yonemoto’s assistant.
Each box is a materialized state of mind. The artist turns the room of his thoughts inside out in "Self" Portrait, 1999, and Cycle-Drama, 1999, two interactive pieces, which are among the most interesting ever realized on the Internet: human mind versus virtual space. In Wall Clocks, Yonemoto’s explores natural facts that were not born of any software or technology. With a sort of awe he builds his picture of the cosmological order, the rise and fall of tides, (Out of Chaos, 2002); the progress of form and the inhuman elegance of shells that we can numerically describe (the Fibonacci series), but not really understand (Out of Chaos #2, 2004). Then, for the sake of art, he gives these objects a place in his own imaginary museum, where the innermost fictions come to light. Out of Chaos #2 seems a ‘motherhood’ theater with its thick wooden walls with rounded edges, its mother-of-pearl’s moonlight reinforced by the light bulb’s white, (a full moon?) and its necklace of globes from a 1955 print which fascinated the artist at age nine. You, visitor, make up your story.
Movie Palace of the Mind (2003) opens a symbolic space. One could believe that the red color faded in the small reproduction of Edward Hopper’s New York Movie, 1939, has been bleeding all around the box’s inside walls covered in red velvet; a vertical, ornate cord brings a curtain to mind, while the translucent image of a fetus from 2001: A Space Odyssey, gives the last touch of artifice. It stands, perhaps, for the birth of narrative –a new story to be repeated and diffused, for the time being. The sense of reality is hidden in the little figurine who stands up in the painting, waiting for the end. Whatever is behind the curtain or the skin’s surface is once more turned inside out. My Pump, 2003, is a self-portrait. Next to the pump and the brain, sit an anatomical drawing, and a stained picture of Yonemoto with John, his companion for life. The space remains clear, impersonal. The electric resistance in the bulb burns like a flame. "There is a time in which progress seems to stop," the artist told me. Humans were on his mind, not machines, and he was dreaming the advent of the Goddess, a turn of civilization to reinstate a direct contact with nature, human and not.
