Mike Kelley: Psychosexual Pantomime, or: Character Development in the Emotional Homunculus

Bruce Yonemoto in person!

Los Angeles Filmforum presents two episodes from Kelley's multi-part Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction series, along with Kappa, a 1986 collaborative piece with Bruce and Norman Yonemoto, in which Kelley also performs.  

In episode 36 (Vice Anglais) of the Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction series, Kelley cooks up a phantasmagorical mix of Hammer horror films and community theater, as weird ceremony, dramatic cliché, and incongruous characters collide and unfold in an atmospheric cave setting.  Eleven years prior, in Kelley's first entry in the series, EAPR #1 (Domestic Scene), a school yearbook photo of two grubby young amateur actors is extrapolated into a miniature photoplay steeped in torment and hysteria.

Bruce and Norman Yonemoto collaborated with Kelley in 1986 to produce Kappa, a twisted retelling of the Oedipus story, in which Kelley and actress Mary Woronov inhabit a narrative environment blending tropes drawn from Eastern, Western, ancient, and contemporary sources.

Very gracious thanks to Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts/Mary Clare Stevens (Executive Director), Bruce Yonemoto, and Electronic Arts Intermix for making this screening possible.

For more event information: www.lafilmforum.org, or 323-377-7238

Tickets: $10 general, $6 students/seniors; free for Filmforum members.

***

Widely regarded as one of the most influential artists of our time, Mike Kelley (1954-2012) produced a body of deeply innovative work mining American popular culture and both modernist and alternative traditions - which he set in relation to relentless self and social examinations, both dark and delirious.

Born in Detroit, Michigan, Kelley lived and worked in Los Angeles from the mid-1970s until his death at the age of fifty-seven. Over his thirty-five year career, he worked in every conceivable medium - drawings on paper, sculpture, performance, music, video, photography, and painting - exploring themes as diverse as American class relations, sexuality, repressed memory, systems of religion and transcendence, and post-punk politics, to which he brought both incisive critique and abundant, self-deprecating humor. (partial biography courtesy of MOCA, Los Angeles)

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.

Bruce Yonemoto was born in 1949. He studied at the University of California at Berkeley and Sokei Art Institute in Tokyo, and received an M.F.A. from Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. He has taught video and photography at universities in California and Japan, and has been a contributing writer for publications such as SEND and Artweek magazines. He is currently a Professor and Chair, Studio Art, at University of California, Irvine.

Norman Yonemoto was born in 1946 and died in 2014. He studied film at Santa Clara University, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of California at Los Angeles, and the American Film Institute. He was a contributing writer for Artweek magazine, and was the author of the commercial films Chatterbox (1976) and Savage Streets (1983).

***

This program is supported by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission; the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles; and the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts. Additional support generously provided by American Cinematheque. We also depend on our members, ticket buyers, and individual donors.

Los Angeles Filmforum is the city's longest-running organization screening experimental and avant-garde film and video art, documentaries, and experimental animation.  2014 is our 39th year.