A Different Spin on Internment

They smiled a lot and giggled, did the jitterbug and sang in choirs, tended garden, had haircuts and read the newspaper. No one would have known they were prisoners.

That’s the way American government films portrayed the Japanese-Americans interned during World War II.

“Basically, the films were staged to show that life in the camps was normal, like life outside of the camps,” said Bruce Yonemoto, who has collaborated on a video installation with his brother Norman that uses uncut, original footage from these propaganda films but puts an entirely different spin on what they depict.

“Framed: A Video Installation by Bruce and Norman Yonemoto” runs today through April 23 at the Long Beach Museum of Art.

The governmental footage, along with internee Toya Miyatake and Ansel Adams’ photographs of the Relocation Center at Manzanar, Calif., are believed to be the only existing photographic record of life in the camps. The interned Japanese-Americans were barred from owning or using cameras.

“We’re presenting the footage as is, as a record, but also manipulating it and trying to reverse the meaning of the material” by superimposing reframed still photographs taken from the films over the screen on which the film is projected, Yonemoto said.

By reframing a photo of a woman’s face, for instance, a seemingly contented soul looks like a concentration camp victim, Yonemoto said. Another reframed photo crops off the the top of the head and eyes of a little girl standing on a stage. Instead of enjoying a moment in the limelight, she seems to be loathing an experience she was forced into.

The installation attempts an examination of perception based in part on the philosophy of Henri Bergson, Yonemoto said. He read a statement inspired by the early 20th-Century thinker’s writing: “What we are left with in the film documentation of the camps is clearly incomplete. It is broken. As in our own incomplete perception of the world around us, the government consciously chose only to perceive those parts of the experience that were useful, that satisfied a personal, social need.”

“Basically, we see things the way we want to,” he elaborated, “according to what is useful.”

The work makes a statement about contemporary propaganda, added the artist, who has been collaborating on video projects with his brother since 1976.

Along one wall of the dark, corridor-like installation is a scenic backdrop of sky and clouds actually used in television commercials for McDonald’s, Hills Brothers coffee and other commodities.

“The material about the concentration camps was contrived, it was a commercial. Our TV commercials are like propaganda.”

PREPARE FOR O’KEEFFE: Tickets for “Georgia O’Keeffe: 1887-1986,” a major exhibition of more than 100 works at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art March 30-June 18, are on sale at all Ticketron locations and through Ticketron’s phone reservation service. Tickets will be available at the museum box office only during the exhibit.

To make ticket reservations (and to charge tickets by phone) call Ticketron at (213) 410-1062, (714) 634-1300 or (619) 268-9686.

Tickets, $5 for adults, $3.75 for senior citizens and students with I.D., and $2 for children ages 6-12, will be issued for each half-hour period. Exhibition hours are Tuesday and Wednesday, 9:30 a.m.-5 p.m. with final admission at 3:30 p.m.; Thursday and Friday, 9:30 a.m.-9 p.m. with final admission at 7:30 p.m.; and Saturday and Sunday, 9:30 a.m.-7 p.m. with last admission at 5:30 p.m.

The museum box office will open at 9 a.m., Tuesday-Sunday throughout the exhibition and close 30 minutes before the exhibit closes each day.

NEW MUSEUM GALLERY: On Saturday the Santa Barbara Museum of Art will reopen its Sterling Morton Gallery as the new home of its Asian collection. The reinstallation follows months of renovation involving extensive architectural changes and features more than 100 objects from China, Japan, India, Tibet, Cambodia and Thailand, among them paintings and prints on silk and paper, sculpture in wood, stone and bronze and ceramics.

Many of the objects now on view have not been seen for several years due to space limitations; others are returning after extensive conservation.

CHATTING IT UP: ARTS Inc., the local arts service organization, has formed a new program called Patrons of the ARTS. The program is designed to provide a forum for arts supporters and art organization officials to discuss issues critical to the management of arts organizations. Such topics as the need for cultural diversity; the role of major cultural institutions and public agencies in the arts community; and the future of (public and private) support for the arts will be discussed. The first program session was held last month and Dennis A. Collins, president of the James Irvine Foundation, a leading California arts funding institution, was guest. The next meeting will be held in mid-April. Information: (213) 627-9276.

GRAPHIC EXPOSURE: Winning entries of the 18th Annual Design Competition sponsored by the American Federation of Arts will be on view at the Pacific Design Center, Friday through April 30. Among the items to be displayed are Arata Isozaki’s T-shirt design for the Museum of Contemporary Art and posters for “The Machine Age in America, 1918-1941,” produced by graphic designer Robert Evans for the High Museum, Atlanta.

GRANT: The Social and Public Arts Resource Center (SPARC) in Venice has won a $20,000 grant to be awarded over two years from the Hitachi Foundation. The center will use the grant to develop an endowment campaign.