Lessico Famigliare / Family Talk
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Transcript of Lessico Famigliare / Family Talk
LESSICOFAMIGLIARE
FAMILYTALK
Curated by Marco Antonini
First edition. May 2012. Published in the occasion of Lessico Famigliare / Family Talk, and Bryan
Zanisnik: Weekend Warrior, two exhibitions curated by Marco Antonini at FUTURA Center for
Contemporary Art, Prague, Czech Republic. Opening: June 5, closing: August 26, 2012.
Participating Artists:Guy Ben-NerLilibeth Cuenca RasmussenEttore FaviniPetra FeriancovaAaron GilbertKristyna and Marek MildeMoira RicciEva SeufertIrgin SenaJiri SkalaJiri ThynPatrick TuttofuocoNico VascellariBryan Zanisnik
The Year-Round program of FUTURA is supported by:
Ministry of Culture Praha
Thanks to:
Krusovice / Videotech.cz
Media Support:
ArtMap / Radio1 / Prazske Galerie / radio wave / Protisedi.cz / Articok.tv
Special Thanks to:
Sandrine Canac, Eugenio Percossi, Alberto DiStefano, Ondrej Stupal,
Michal Novotny, Amande In, all artists involved
This Publication is Free
Irgin Sena
6
Lessico Famigliare
On the evolving language of familiar relationships
in contemporary visual art
by Marco Antonini
///
In the 1963 novel Lessico Famigliare (known in
English-speaking countries as What we Used
to Say or Family Sayings, but more readily
translatable as “Family Talk”) Natalia Ginzburg
uses an apparently detached and ironically
humorous family memoir as a device to
highlight the ritualistic importance of words and
constructed behavior as driving forces behind
familiar unity. By the end of Ginzburg’s dry
and discreet autobiography, now unanimously
considered a masterpiece of post-war Italian
literature, the reader is completely immersed in
her family’s recurring jokes, ritual exclamations
and ordinary nonsense, a repertoire of
assorted little obsessions that stands out as an
independent “character” in the novel.
In a 1963 unsigned introduction to the
book, a writer usually identified as Italo Calvino
defines family as something mostly made
of “voices, intertwining over the table during
dinner or lunch, scoldings, jokes, disjointed gags,
sentences that we hear over and over again, at
every given occasion.” In time, this ritual lingo
becomes a real language, only clear to those
who practice it daily: the family members. This,
to Calvino, is the mysterious “something” that
characterizes and bonds together whatever we
call family. In Ginzburg’s novel this secret lexicon
is projected over a vast repertoire of quirky and
often neurotically ritualistic gestures, images
The attribution is confirmed by Domenico
Scarpa, in his “Cronistoria di Lessico
Famigliare”, published in appendix to the
1999 Einaudi edition of the book.
7
and allusions, describing her family nest as a
totalizing environment glued together by the
invisible bond of language, as stated early in the
novel’s opening pages:
We are five siblings. We live in different cities,
some of us abroad: we don’t write to each other
very often. When we meet, we can be distracted,
or indifferent to each other. But it only takes a
word. A word or a sentence, one of those ancient
sentences, endlessly heard and repeated in our
childhood (...) one of those sentences or words
would make us recognize each other, us siblings,
in the darkness of a cave, among millions of
people. Those sentences are our Latin, the
vocabulary of our long-gone days, they are like
Egyptian or Assyrian-Babylonian hieroglyphs (...)
they are the foundation of our familiar unity.
In recent times, visual artists have
contributed to explore the vocabularies of
family relationships, sublimating an increasingly
questioning attitude towards forming and/
or maintaining conventional, state or religion
-sanctioned family bonds by creating works
that explore, deconstruct and problematize their
own idea of family. Redefining permanence and
commitment in relationships that range from
relatively orthodox to totally deconstructed
and impromptu affairs, an increasingly relevant
number of artists have incorporated family and
its structured codes, behaviors and rituals in
their work. In doing so, they created art that is
directly or indirectly reminiscent of Ginzburg’s
Lessico Famigliare. Some of these works seem
Natalia Ginzburg, Lessico Famigliare,
Einaudi 1999. p.22 - passage translated
by the author.
Jiri Skala
10
haunted by a sincere desire for close, meaningful
relationships and a group identification
qualitatively located before (and beyond) social
relationships and their increasingly scattered,
technology-biased nature, others present a
more analytical approach to the re-signification
of familiar codes and their use as creative
material.
The analysis, discussion and/or
redefinition of family matters is not necessarily
a point in itself: it often emerges as consequence
of trajectories that intersect the familiar and
domestic spheres on their way to somewhere or
something else. A sampler of such trajectories,
and the artworks they generate, reveals a wide
range of approaches and diverging “conclusions.”
Cool, detached observations and surrealistically
charged imaginaries converge at points with
intense, quasi-masochistic exercises in over-
identification that test the boundaries and
validity of existing (or supposed) bonds inside
the family or affinity group of choice.
The over-simplification of familiar
imagery and the lingering feeling of quiet
domesticity found in many paintings, drawings
and sculptures by Eva Seufert are representative
of the possibility of conceptually evoking familiar
contexts via un-specific and inclusive forms.
Often literally starting from language, Seufert
finds a minimum of relevance and presence
in each of her works. Her friendly and colorful
quasi-figuration hints at the codes, rituals and
psychological subtleties of familiar relationships in
its sparse, yet attractive essentialism. This ability
to abstractly reference both domesticity and the
Eva Seufert
11
family also echoes in Marek and Krystina Milde’s
sculptures and installations, deceivingly simple-
minded works that bend the most mundane and
humble materials in ambitious new directions,
often hinting at the familiar nest as a place of
petit bourgeois obsessions and homonormative
confinement. Diametrically opposed is the dark
intensity of works like Nico Vascellari’s Nico and
The Vascellari’s performance, a tour de force in
which the artist’s father, mother and sister are
cast as somewhat reluctant “home” to Vascellari’s
screaming spree. As the performance proceeds,
the weight of the roof/platform they must
stoically support becomes unbearable. Brother
and sister must eventually collaborate and
double their efforts to save their fatigued mom
from bringing the minimalist structure to the
ground. Vascellari’s metaphor of induced familiar
disfunctionality (and unexpected cooperative
redemption) flirts with Christian ideals of
familiar struggle and shared sacrifice, its dark
humor and claustrophobic overtones are not
uncommon in this line of research. Moira Ricci’s
heart-rendering series of Photoshopped images
of her mother, in which she systematically
added herself to each picture, fabricating a
virtually endless series of bonding experiences,
or her Custodia Domestica performance, a self-
imposed confinement to a life-size dollhouse
reproducing Ricci’s family home, also come to
mind. The latter work, reminiscent of Louise
Bourgeois’ well-known Femme Maison drawings,
paintings and sculptures, explores the physical
space of the family with humor and a vein of
unrepentant awkwardness, from the perspective
Moira Ricci
Nico Vascellari
14
of a young woman on the verge of facing the
kind of life choices that will determine the
personal definition of her own familiar space.
Based on the background, personal
investment and original intentions of the artist,
family can be identified as a hopeless mess, a
safe harbor, a quasi-sacred hyper reality, an
informal, affinity-based community, a dark place
of trauma and oblivion. As we have seen in
Vascellari and Ricci, such pictures can directly
involve family members (or objects and places
charged with family-related memories.) Relatives
and biographical materials both offer a readily
available narrative foundation for the artists
to work with, build upon or depart from. The
direct involvement of family members in the
creative process reappears in two wonderfully
similar photographic works: Patrick Tuttofuoco’s
Famiglia and Ettore Favini’s Ipotesi d’Infinito.
These iconic portraits of familiar unity are
somewhat romantically leaning towards a spatial
and symbolic organization of the family as living
“Form”: a fragmented triangle of toy swords in
Tuttofuoco’s large-format vision and a merry-
go-round drawing the mathematic symbol for
infinity in Favini’s relatively intimate print. This
kind of fruitful cooperation reveals its potentially
exploitative subtext in Guy Ben Ner’s multi-part
exploration of his own family as artistic material,
and the involvement of his wife and children in
the creation of elaborate narratives inside and
outside the domestic precincts. In his videos,
Ben-Ner mixes the personal and public spheres
by casting his wife and sons in now playful, now
uncomfortable and awkward roles. Narrative
Patrick Tuttofuoco
Ettore Favini
15
plots, often informed by well known literary
works and even political theory, are constantly
infiltrated by hints of the artist’s day to day
life, and his relationship with his ragtag crew of
actors.
One of the most exceptionally
consistent examples of creative involvement of
an artist’s family is without a doubt offered by
Bryan Zanisnik’s artwork. Mining the wealth of
objects, stories, legends and talent most closely
available to him, Zanisnik has created an ongoing
series of performances and photographic works
that put his own family members, and the
apparently infinite amounts of souvenirs and
paraphernalia they hoarded, under the spotlight.
Creating immersive environments somewhere
between bombed rec-room and thrift store
owner/customer nightmare, and engaging in all
sorts of symbolic activities with his relatives,
Zanisnik uses constructed familiar and domestic
setting to project anxieties about his own persona
and unfold retro-active cathartic narratives.
Reveling in plain, unapologetic
weirdness while making the most of a completely
genuine sense of humor that characterizes even
the most serious and problematic of his works,
the artist summarizes the variety of different
approaches briefly described earlier on. His
work is inclusive, it digs the family mine directly
and still never fails to transform recognizable
objects, places and situations into something
deeply “else,” charging them with meanings
far beyond those suggested by an anecdotal
reading of the work. It makes good use of humor
and strikes as often plain funny while also
Bryan Zanisnik
18
successfully conveying feelings of humiliation,
inadequacy, even horror and disgust. Finally,
and probably most importantly, Zanisnik’s work
is about family bonds and rituals but, in so many
ways it isn’t, as most of the artists’ concerns are
firmly grounded in reflections on his individuality
and/or far reaching considerations on American
culture and the influence of normative, restrictive
environments on human development.
Although belonging to different generations
and individually preoccupied with a remarkably
heterogeneous set of themes and problems, all
abovementioned artists (together with the many
more whose work was included in the exhibition
that this eBook edition complements) share an
interest in the system of signs and codes at
the foundation of an extended and permeable
notion of family: a self-determined idea as open
to criticism as to constructive reinvention. This
system, so brilliantly identified by Ginzburg
in her Lessico Famigliare, is in no way a fixed
entity and it never really self-reproduces itself.
Instead, it is generated inside each individual
family “unit,” determined by all of its members,
tweaked and adapted in real time, on a day to
day basis. This flexible and receptive nature is
probably among the most fascinating aspects of
the familiar bond: something durable, an ideal to
commit to, and yet a notion that never ceases to
be discussed and redefined.
19
Images: Irgin Sena, There Was A Mirror In The Reanimation Clinic, 2009. Video, color with sound, 5:10
min, dim.var., HD DVD / JIri Skala, The Volume of Every Member of My Family, 2002. Cardboard. /
Eva Seufert, Double Bind, 2009. Watercolor on paper, 174x100 cm / Moira Ricci, Custodia Domestica,
2003-4. Video installation and documentary photograph, dim. var. / Nico Vascellari, Nico and the
Vascellaris, 2005. Video 5’ 30”. (Img. courtesy: Monitor Gallery) / Patrick Tuttofuoco, Famiglia, 1999.
Framed photograph, 150x150cm / Ettore Favini, Ipotesi d’Infinito, 2003. Photo mounted on aluminum,
30x40cm / Bryan Zanisnik, Rawling Hall, 2011. Site-specific installation and performance. / Guy
Ben-Ner, I’d give it to you if I could but I borrowed it, 2007. Single channel video, 12’. (Img. courtesy:
Postmasters Gallery)
Marco Antonini is Gallery Director at NURTUREart, a Brooklyn based non profit organization that
provides exhibition opportunities and resources for emerging artists, curators, and public school
students. While supervising NURTUREart’s exhibitions, special events and publications, Antonini
curated WE ARE:, an experimental series that showcased week-long projects by invited artists,
curators and organizations for the entire Summer 2011. He is currently at work on another special
program: ...Is This Free?, an investigation of the history, development and current status of “Free”
art; this sprawling group exhibition will include artworks, ephemera and publications dating back to
the late sixties, presented side by side with contemporary artworks, many of which commissioned by
NURTUREart. Alongside his work at NURTUREart, Antonini has remained active as an independent
curator and writer. His exhibitions have been produced by Japan Society, the Lower Manhattan
Cultural Council (LMCC), ISE Foundation, Elizabeth Foundation, The Italian Cultural Center in New
York, Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation, the International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP) and
Centro Cultural de Espana in Guatemala (CCE/G). His reviews and interviews have appeared on Cura,
ArtPulse, Flash Art, Whitehot Magazine, BMM, Drome, Contemporary, AroundPhotography and NYArts
Magazine. His essays have been published on Cura, Occulto, PulseBerlin, Arte&Critica, BMM, as well
as on many exhibition catalogs and exhibition-related publications.
Guy Ben-Ner