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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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