[Moises De La Cruz] To start with basics, I was hoping you could speak a little bit about your youth. It's always fascinating to hear artists speak about experiences that were formative for them early in their life, which then offer resonances in their later practice. I think with someone who explores archives as actively as you, this experience of a cross-temporal dialogue has to be even more fascinating. I'd love to hear more about that.
[TT Takemoto] There’s so many different ways to tell this story, but in thinking about what led me to art making, I would say that I was most influenced by hanging out with my dad. Both my parents were crafty in their own way; we always had lots of crayons, popsicle sticks, and Elmer's glue around the house. My mom usually had some kind of craft project going on, while my dad had a small wood shop in our garage, and he was always trying to fix things or make things. I would just follow him around or, if he was working on a car, I'd hold the flashlight. I also have two brothers (one older, one younger) but they were not as interested. My dad is second-generation Japanese American––nisei––and there's this idea that nisei men are always trying to fix things with duct tape or some other found materials. Whenever we'd go for a walk, he would always pick up a stray bolt, and say, “We can use this later.” It really instilled my love of hardware stores. We would just walk around, look at things, and ask, “Could this solve that problem?” We started off going to small hardware stores before Home Depot existed and way, way before cell phones; he would have us bring walkie talkies so we could be in different parts of the store. My dad would say, “Okay, go to this aisle and look for this nail,” then later he'd call me on the walkie talkie and ask, “Did you find the nail?” I'd be really embarrassed! But years later when I asked my brother, “Didn't you hate it when dad made us take the walkie talkies to the hardware store?” He said he had never had this experience with our father. I grew up in a predominantly white town where there were few Asian American families. So, I had little awareness of my Asian American-ness, but somehow I felt it was obvious that all of us kids were going to go to college to study science. In retrospect, these assumptions seem very Japanese American. When I got to college and started discovering art classes, I thought, “I'm gonna tell my folks that I'm going to switch my major to art.” Basically, my parents were super supportive, until you did something wrong. Then, they didn't yell––they just looked unhappy. When I told father I wanted to change my major to art, his face fell and he became very quiet. So I immediately backed down. I had a sculpture teacher who suggested I try architecture, because he said “parents like architecture.” I was very suspicious, but when I went back during winter break and asked, “What do you think about architecture?,” my dad said, “Architecture! That’s great! Study whatever you want; if you want to study architecture, that's terrific.” So I went into the architecture program at UC Berkeley. That's where I took my first performance art class, taught by James Melchert, who is an amazing ceramicist and a performance artist. His approach was to teach students how to develop various “recipes” or “temporal structures” for performance. He would start off by saying, “Think of an activity you know how to do really well, and do a performance where you teach us or show us the activity.” The next lesson would be, “Take an object and figure out its temporal structure.” For example, if you have a dozen eggs, you could think of a way to interact with each egg. If you planned to take each egg, roll it on top of your head, and drop it in a bucket one after the other, then your audience would naturally understand that you're going to do the same action for all 12 eggs. In other words, the object and the action are dictating the length of time the performance is going to take. This gives you a temporal structure. When the lessons got more complex, Melchert would say, “Take three temporal structures––one based on sound, one based on an object, and one based on movement, and dovetail them together to make a performance.” That's how I learned performance art: it was very much activity-based, object-based, and structural. When I went to grad school, I studied with Geoffrey Hendricks, Toby MacLennan, and other folks who were associated with Fluxus. That's when I more formally understood the idea of a performance score as a script for activity-based performance.
[MDLC] That's an incredible backstory, it’s clear to see the resonances in your work today. From the start, there’s the bridging of these different elements in unexpected ways; looking for the bolt that could be something other than a bolt, or the “structured temporality” of performance…there's definitely a lot there for people to dissect in your contemporary work. As we jump into a more direct discussion of your art, I know you've spoken in previous interviews on the materiality that underlines some of your practice. I recall reading about some low-tech operations with thermo-fax paper and lemon juice in the past, or the way you familiarized yourself with direct analog filmmaking during the COVID-19 pandemic. In spite of the growing prevalence of the digital in contemporary art, it really feels that tactility is a crucial part of your practice. Can you speak a little more to that tactile dimension of your art, and what it means to you?
[TTT] When I went to graduate school at Rutgers, my primary practice was painting. I thought of myself as a political painter––I wanted to study with Leon Golub, who retired by the time I got there, but I had the good fortune of studying with folks like Joan Semmel and Emma Amos. I always thought of performance as something I did alongside my painting. Painting is a practice that often requires you showing up to the studio every day, making work and investing a certain number of hours each day. At that point, I was thinking of my painting practice as mini experiments where I would give myself parameters. I'd say, “I'm going to make one painting a day and I'm going to use resin, cigarette ash, and an iron.” I was trying to use unconventional materials like thermo-fax paper, which I would burn with an iron and then cover with resin. These highly unstable paintings would fade and rot and destroy themselves. I was trying to use materials in ways that went against the idea of painting as being permanent, precious, commodifiable, and masculinist in hope that the materials became part of the critique.In terms of the subject matter, I was incorporating my grandparents’ photo album, from when they were in the incarceration camps during World War II. I was thinking a lot about how I had such a distanced relationship to their past, and I wanted to make work that, in the form itself, was not precise. I was using clunky mark-making tools (such as an iron rather than a paint brush) or cyanotypes as ways to “unlearn” techniques of how to render things “professionally.” I was also using materials that resonated with my feeling of distance from the past, and this idea that the image was always changing and would eventually disappear, became another metaphor for memory.
[MDLC] It sounds like, in the manner of touching something and working on it with your hands, you discovered how to gain an incredible closeness to it, and an affinity for all of its details. In the process of, for example, making a cyanotype, you would lose so much of that resolution, but in attempting that translation you gain so much practice, I would imagine, in expressing those minute details. And a relatively low resolution translation is, ultimately, what your art has to become for other people to digest those narratives. Would you describe your work as a “labor of love” in that way?
[TTT] Yes. The thing I really enjoy about a daily studio practice is spending time with the imagery and content. When I was working on a lot of handmade cameraless filmmaking and putting imagery on film leader, the process is so labor intensive that you actually are literally spending time with every little frame of film. There’s something about touching historical materials that feels like touching history and honoring the past itself. Unlike some documentary or narrative fiction projects that try to retell a story as precisely as possible, my practice has often been about how to demonstrate my distance from the material that I’m working with, while at the same time showing how much I care about it.
[MDLC] I think that’s a wonderful way to describe that passion. It seems like formally, there are two broad categories that appear across your work: performance and collage. More than just a description of process, these refer to more of a typology of how your work functions, which I think Looking for Jiro emphasizes. That’s a piece which feels like the ultimate intersection of those two spectra, being one where passionately placing yourself into the role is just as essential as the unexpected juxtaposition of pop music, foodstuffs, and the original footage that you provide. They all kind of collide on the stage and become this––indeed, spatial and temporal––structure of experience. Extrapolating that to the rest of your practice, I'm wondering if there's a general pattern to the way you come from an idea or concept to the realization of its final form. Is there some inflection point along the way where you have to decide, “I'd like to do this with film,” or “I'd like to do this with collage or performance,” or does the art tell you what it would like to be?
[TTT] I'll start by talking about Looking for Jiro, which marks a pivotal point in my practice. It started with an invitation to present a live stage performance. Previously, I had made activity-based performances that would take place within an installation, often unfolding over many hours or many days. In this case, each artist was given six minutes on stage. So I was trying to think about what I could accomplish within that time frame. I had just begun working with the archival materials of Jiro Onuma, who was one of the few known adult gay Japanese American men incarcerated during World War II. At that point, I only really knew that Jiro was incarcerated, he liked muscle men, and he worked in the mess hall. Those were the three ingredients that helped me brainstorm towards a performance. I was searching for an activity related to the mess hall. I had seen some archival photos of men baking bread in the camps, so I was thinking that I could physically make dough within four minutes. Then, like they do in baking shows, I could interact with the “baked” muscle loaves during the last two minutes. I had previously done work with food, like eating top ramen off the top of my head, so I was used to incorporating food into activities as a point of humor. In terms of the emotional quality of the piece, I was imagining the experience of being a gay man in this very heteronormative and confined space after having a vibrant gay life in San Francisco. I was asking, “Where was the space for his loneliness, desire, and fantasy? Where would his mind go as he's working in the mess hall? Would he be fantasizing about muscle men from his magazines? Would he be checking out hot workers or be thinking about the young military recruits?” I structured the performance around a mashup of two songs: ABBA’s “Gimme Gimme Gimme,” and Madonna’s “Hung Up.” I slowed down the tracks to emphasize how “time goes by so slowly” in prison, and also so the female vocals sounded more masculine. I was thinking about what it meant for me, as a nonbinary masculine-presenting queer person, to perform as Jiro. This drag king performance was a very different emotional experience than when I performed as Björk-Geisha, in order to critique art world Orientalism. Performing as a white woman who was performing Asian drag was an interesting experience, but ultimately, it was less fulfilling and somewhat traumatic. It felt more moving and meaningful to perform as Onuma as he makes his muscular bread loaves, slathers Crisco on his arms, and then fists the loaves to become the muscle man of his dreams. I performed Looking for Jiro three times live. Usually we think that live performance is always more interesting than its documentation, but this was the first time I started thinking, “How do I make a video that is as resonant as the performance? What can video do that performance can't do?” This allowed me to think about the performative possibilities of editing itself. The piece is set against the backdrop of US war propaganda footage, which tried to sell the idea that Japanese Americans would be a viable labor force for companies on the east coast and in the midwest during the waning years of the war. The same footage also gets used over and over in most documentaries about the wartime camps because it exists in the public domain. In my project, I used simple editing techniques such as repetition, slow motion, and juxtaposition as a way of making it strange, and calling attention to the fact that we are all using the same footage. I think of my edited clips showing “dancing” military policemen and grandpa spitting out his food as small queer acts of resistance.
[MDLC] That film really ended up becoming a metamorphosis for you then, not just because you have to transform into this character and because they carry so much emotional and historical resonance to you, but also because it was an inflection point in your career. That transition to film and editing truly reflects the skill set that you display so successfully, engaging the audience emotionally and putting them into that zone of affectivity. There’s also the issue of personal identity, as you mentioned just now, which stretches across your art. Semiotics of Sab is one piece which underscores how diffuse and personal identity is, and how we come to conceptualize it within our cultures and our individual lives. It’s that incommunicable experience of embodying oneself at a particular point in history, which could be hard enough for people to express even when they're around to hold agency over their own narratives. I'm wondering what sort of headspace you have to be in when you approach the portrayal of a subject, how you absorb their identity from the research, and then how you distill that into something for screen.
[TTT] Semiotics of Sab is a film dedicated to the television and theater actor Sab Shimono, who has been in the business for 50 years. The opening sequence of the film shows the name of every film and theater role that Shimono had ever played throughout his career, and a lot of them are pretty stereotypical roles for an Asian American male actor. My pathway to Shimono was very idiosyncratic. I had made a film called Warning Shot that used footage from Come See The Paradise, the first big budget Hollywood film about the incarceration camps. Shimono played the grandpa character who ultimately gets really depressed, walks off into the sunset towards a guard tower, and then dies.Several years earlier, when I was living in Los Angeles, I had recently come out as queer to my parents and I took them to a gay-owned restaurant, where, if you arrive early, you wait in their piano bar called The Other Side. I thought maybe my folks wouldn't notice that it was gay-owned, and I didn't know if my dad had really even registered that I had come out. So we're sitting there, having a drink, and my dad looks up and says, “See that guy sitting at the bar? I know him. I went to school with him, and I think he's an actor.” Fifteen years later, I called up my father and asked him if the guy in the bar was Sab Shimono. And he said, "Yes, that was Sab. We both went to UC Berkeley. Sab was a couple years older than me, and I knew him from the JA circles but he didn’t know me.” Then I asked, “Did you know that we were in a gay bar, and did you realize Sab Shimono is gay?" And he said, “Yes, I guess so." For Warning Shot, I had various people play the main character, and I was using Sab as one of the surrogates, and my dad as the other––so my dad and Sab were playing the same character. I learned that the Smithsonian Museum of American Art had acquired Shimono's archive and I was able to visit the collection. During my research, I started creating many lists of information pertaining to his life including the gay bars he frequented. I hadn't reached out directly to Sab yet, but I had already heard that he was a super private person. I was trying to figure out how to organize all of his information in a way that didn’t explicitly tell the story of his gayness. I was thinking about ways people can simultaneously display and hide private information, such as Roland Barthes, who organized his autobiography through alphabetically arranged key words. I was also influenced by Hollis Frampton’s experimental film Zorn's Lemma showing pictures of words arranged alphabetically taken from signs throughout New York. Semiotics of Sab became a kind of poetic love letter to Sab, which was made for him and to him, but doesn’t try to reveal very much about him. Eventually I had the opportunity to interview Sab, and show him the film. I was a bit nervous, but he watched it and then said something like, "It feels familiar. I know it’s a film that’s about me, but I don't really understand it." After I showed him my notes and sketchbooks, and explained how I organized it, he said, “Oh! Okay, I understand it a little bit more." When I was thinking about Sab’s story, or when I’m speculating about queer historical figures, I'm always trying to acknowledge my distance from them. In other words, I am not claiming that I completely know their stories, because I don’t. Instead I want to find ways to honor their legacies as well as their right to remain unknowable. With someone like Sab, I was asking myself, how do I make a piece that expresses my interest but doesn't cross the line? I believe experimental film helps us express sensory and emotional qualities that are beyond the purely factual.
[MDLC] That crucial difference––between telling a story from an emotional standpoint and saying, I know definitively the facts behind this story––that is a world of difference. The choice to use Sab is perfect in that, as you mentioned, he's a private person and likes to have that separation between his performance and private life; I really do get the sense that most of the information you had to pull from that video is directly related to his performance. We feel this barrier as we're watching it between the person that we know is behind all these roles, and the roles themselves, vastly more familiar to most people familiar with Sab. Since we were just touching on the issues of persona and the public image that someone carries and the schism between that and their private life, I wanted to ask about performativity. The act of performing, now more than ever, has become a crucial aspect of what it means to form an identity and define oneself. The way that Semiotics of Sab deals with how everyday behaviors and embodied traits become us seems to hint at this, in a way. I'm wondering, has the way that you define identity been changed over time by the study of these subjects, or by coming to know different people through the archives? If there's a dialogue between you and the people that you have researched, what have they told you about identity and the way it's defined?
[TTT] At the very beginning of this interview, you talked about how some of my films pull you into an emotional moment in time. I don't know if I actually create an internal dialogue with historical subjects who are no longer with us, but in a lot of my work, I try to offer an emotional arc of experience. With Looking for Jiro, I try to convey a sense of longing and desire that would allow Jiro to enter to enter into a queer fantasy where he can become the muscular guy he desired. If Looking for Jiro is about embodiment, then On the Line is about queer inhabitance, where Japanese American female cannery workers from the 1930s lived, loved, and labored together. These women lived on the docks, worked on the assembly line, and occasionally gathered at a diner run by a single butch woman. I tried to imagine how the physical environment might feel in your bones when you are constantly surrounded by water and machines. I thought of this diner as a place of refuge and intimacy when the men were out to sea. I selected most of the archival footage for this film from the Center for Asian American Media Home Movie Collection. Rather than using US war propaganda footage, I really wanted to use footage that was seen through the eyes of Japanese Americans, for Japanese Americans, capturing these intimate moments among women.
[MDLC] I think that gets to the heart of what your filmmaking tries to do: not just expressing the known history of people, but trying to convince people to be emotionally invested in stories that otherwise, maybe they wouldn't even be aware of. It’s approaching from an emotional angle first to really engage the audience. And it seems to be successful so far! Given the extent to which you depend on content from archives, how do you confront the inevitability of low-fidelity historical records? Would you say there’s something of an affinity between the graininess that embodies old film technologies, and the intentional layers of abstraction you apply in your cinematic pieces, like On the Line?
[TTT] A key interest of mine is what the film theorist Jamie Baron calls the “archive effect,” which she describes as the intentional disparity between original archival material and how it is reused by artists who work with found footage. I'm interested in the way the form of the film itself intuitively tells the viewer that there is a disconnect or intentional distance between how these materials functioned in the past, and how we're perceiving them now; rather than assuming that photographic evidence is always truthful. In terms of the use of abstract and degraded imagery, I like the way that the graininess signals history and also the labor involved in processing and manipulating footage. For On the Line, I shot black and white film using a Bolex and developed it in my bathtub using the “jam it in a can” method, which creates lots of “artifacts” and glitches on the surface where the film gets rumpled and literally touches itself. Recently, I’ve also been investing effort into making handmade cameraless films, by scraping emulsion off of still photographs and discarded reels of 35mm films, then sticking tiny pieces of emulsion onto clear 16mm leader. I love the crazy unpredictable way that manipulated footage looks when it is finally projected.
[MDLC] Considering your practice also places such a strong emphasis on pulling its characters and storylines from archives, how do you see yourself within a larger meta-narrative? You're someone who's very comfortable utilizing archives and the language or the visuals of the past to inform your current practice. Where do you see yourself eventually fitting into that larger dialogue between past and present and future? How do you anticipate eventually becoming part of this greater archive of Japanese American and queer art and history? What kind of legacy are you trying to build with that?
[TTT] When I was first working on Looking for Jiro, I was trying to find research about the queer experience of wartime incarceration for Japanese Americans. I couldn't find much, and most people I spoke to said, "Wow, I've never actually thought about queer people in camp." There are some historians who have touched upon the subject, but it's not within the general way that we talk about Japanese American wartime history, which typically focuses on intergenerational trauma, or the heroism of the 442nd young military recruits. We don't think a lot about the first-generation issei, especially in relation to discussions of sexuality. As my work has circulated, the idea of queer people in camp has become more popular, and that’s really exciting to me. For example, Kiku Hughes is a graphic novelist who wrote Displacement, which includes a queer camp storyline. And, there's a Japanese American folk singer who did a song about Jiro Onuma. It makes me laugh and cry every time I hear it! It’s very meaningful to me that I have had something to do with the popularity of Jiro Onuma in the wartime history narrative. I'm also delighted to help younger folks get excited about analog practices, and the idea that you can make a film without a camera by putting stuff on the film leader, and putting it through this old machine called a projector. I've done some artist residencies where I have taught people how to put stuff on film. I'm thrilled when folks get excited about the process, because I feel like I'm really still learning about handmade filmmaking too. I just want other people to enjoy it as much as I do.
[MDLC] I think, the perfect answer, and it underscores what it seems like you're really trying to do, which is become an emotional historian of sorts; to preach the value of not just the factual and the textual, but the underlying the prevalence of what it is like to be.
