| The Family
Dynamics Episode - Curator's Text
Family Dynamics is a concept that has trickled down -and mutated
whilst trickling- from the realms of counselling, family therapy
and the broader heritage of psychoanalysis. Once used almost entirely
behind quiet clinical doors, the bitch-slapping of Jerry Springer
and quietly-spoken vicars of morning radio have put the concept
firmly within a pop psychology. We understand that individuals,
particularly in the context of the Western nuclear family, communicate
through constantly shifting roles and behaviours, often articulating
drives for power or need of care more clearly through what is acted
out than what is articulated. We have all become familiar with the
idea that we may be, individually, the cast of a number of roles
to other family members, roles that change or are re-cast in response
to the changes and demands of others.
"Family Viewing - The Family Dynamics Episode" explores
the differing practices of a number of contemporary artists who
examine or play with the idea of the family, overtly or by inference,
as a context for constantly changing relationships. Changing relationships
through which meaning or reading can change.
It is difficult, arguably impossible, for a dynamic to have a meaning
or an impact where there is no relationship. Thus, there are no
lone figures here, conceptual or figurative. Although the artists
differ in their practice and media, the commonality linking all
of these works is the central role of the relationship. The work
explores relationships between people whether real or implied; between
figures in domestic settings, between absent individuals and those
present and between objects that carry the family history of an
unseen family.
In some cases, the family is real, such as in the work of Helmut
Stallaerts where the grief of a real family is conveyed in paint
in almost classical modernist terms, bringing Richter or even Bacon
to mind; or in the film work of Yvonne Wahl where her real family
members are used to construct a distinctly staged scenario; a louche
draping of her female-heavy family within a bourgeois furniture
store. In this "Endless Misery", Bergman arm-wrestles
with German soap opera.
In the case of others, such as the work of Delia Brown, the pop
narratives of family -as told in a million soap operas and independent
films- are the reference points for a slightly glamourised depiction.
Here is a new quasi-fictional family in which the artist casts those
from her personal adult life - not those bonded by blood- into archetypal
scenes of domestic family moments. These are stills from the heartfelt
Hollywood canon rendered beautifully in paint.
For example, in the painting “Morning Conversation”
(2001), from a series called “No Place Like Home”, the
artist responded to her early impressions of her Los Angeles gallery
owner, Margo Leavin, by casting herself in the role of “the
daughter” in a series of familial scenes primarily set around
Leavin’s house; cooking, talking, fighting, watching TV, sunning
by the pool...
Delia Brown describes the practice as partly inspired by a childhood
memory of the mother of one of her friends. Her impression of Leavin
as a sophisticated, cultured and glamorous archetype of an independent
woman overlapped with a memory formed in childhood. But, the work
is also, in part, in keeping with her art historical consciousness
that informs numerous works. There is an intentional response to
the traditional genre of mother-and-daughter popular with female
Impressionist painters. Here the women are knowing and complicated
adults and, indeed, at the heart of the work and the series is the
questions raised about the nature of dealer/parent and artist/child.
Jemima & Dolly Brown's work is almost the example of intersection
between these practices. Here, the real family is literally the
starting point as Jemima re-purposes, mutates and alters casts and
images taken from real family members to work into sculpture, video
and 2-D works. But as with Delia Brown's reworking of real people
into artist-defined narratives, Jemima & Dolly Brown's work
takes the literal flesh of her family to create new narratives conjured
up through decorative and figurative elements.
However, the family narratives that form are also a direct artistic
response the various media in which she works. The family grouping
that forms the central motif of her “Family Wallpaper”
(2005), for example, is effectively a transposition of a large grouping
of sculptures that have “lived” in her studio for over
a year. Feeling unresolved about showing this work-in-progress in
the three dimensional form she had painstakingly made, she began,
instead, to make drawings of this group of non-life models. The
drawings, in turn, transmuted into wallpaper.
In the work of Cathie Pilkington, the morphing nature of the subjects
goes in a different direction, literally taking the common projections
of humans onto other primate species and allowing us to see ourselves
in apes. However, the monkeys of Cathie Pilkington's piece, part
chimp's tea party, part Last Supper, veer far from the saccharine
simplistic depiction that other great exploiters of the phenomenon,
least of all Disney, usually present.
Humanity and humour are certainly present, but these are horribly
human little monkeys: they're bored and boring, probably drunk and
certainly not offering a party that seems as jolly as it should
be.
The subversion of comedy and the real family is also a feature of
Enrique Marty's work. In his two-screen piece, his real mother and
father take pot shots at each other with guns from two different
landscapes. The sitcom animosity of husbands and wives is immediately
recognisable……...in individuals aiming real guns at
each other.
Stories and popular narratives -family dramas - are also a feature
of Dallas Seitz's work. In the case of the "candy dishes",
a popular literary source reconfigures ideas about a dysfunctional
family's story. And, in a strong congruence with its literary source,
we never see the faces of any of the players. Figuration is absent.
Instead, we are offered "candy dishes" - delicate and
seductive glass objects that look as if they could be domestic ornaments,
human organs or drug-taking paraphernalia. Dallas Seitz's starting
point for the piece was the dysfunctional family in Brett Easton
Ellis' brat-pack classic "Less Than Zero" (1985) where
the only presence of the parents’ lives for their screwed-up
children is the constantly refilled candy dishes they find upon
returning to their empty Los Angeles home…
Ironically, the absence of parents and their figurative presence
in this work exists almost in opposition to their process of construction.
Dallas Seitz worked closely with his own father – a skilled
glassblower- to realise the piece. The involvement of his own family
in the process of making his work is not only restricted to this
work and he has also involved them in making other pieces in other
media – such as film and video- for which he is, perhaps,
best known.
The absence of figuration in building a discourse about a relationship
is also a feature of the work of Maria & Natalia Petschatnikov.
Their small paintings depicting pairs of everyday objects –from
the 2005 series, “Private Property”- seem to immediately
tell as about their own view of their specific relationship as twins
collaborating in making art. But looked at more closely, perhaps
there is the wry humour of twins gazing out at the viewer, reflecting
back at us our expectations that we hold about specific relationships,
for example, about the nature of the relationship between twins.
Dark unclear narratives with a more erotic tone and expectations
about specific relationships also permeate Risk Hazekamp's recent
video work. On the surface, a simple family holiday video of a visit
to the Eiffel Tower, the viewer soon becomes aware that there is
something unusual about the pretty young "man" in the
film. As the drag king's day trip shifts from a scene of surprisingly
little interest from passers by to a candidly filmed sequence in
which a man on a bench takes a more than passing interest, an interest
that is being unknowingly filmed, questions emerge. What exactly
is going on? Some secret sex game in which a lesbian uses the subject
of the film, her lover perhaps, as bait in some unclear sexual game?
A cruel revenge via candid camera on unsuspecting men? Or is it
a challenge to the viewer to reconsider the relationships between
"the public" and individuals bonded in secret ways in
the spaces that the public inhabit?
Public group identity and how it is constructed and subsequently
perceived is at the heart of the expansive "Exactitudes"
series of Ari Versluis and Ellie Uyttenbroek. Taken as a whole,
some of the discussions the body of work raises include those relating
to how the socially evolved processes that define group identities
-once associated almost exclusively with supposedly "biological"
families and clans of relatives- have been subverted or appropriated
by other "tribes" or new group identities. However, within
the series, individual works address the issue of family identity
(and its socially constructed and understood nature) more directly.
In "Carry Daddies", for example, the images of young fathers
and their children is striking not only because of its very traditional
nature, but also that it simultaneously raises the possibility of
a non-traditional reading, of the possibility of family relationships
that are not the traditional norm.
The shifting nature of "reality" is at the heart of Jasmina
Fekovic's film works. Perhaps this is rather odd for someone who
was first trained and recognised as a documentary filmmaker. Rather
than focussing solely on the discussions within the documentary
film sector itself, Fekovic has instead developed an artistic practice
in which the mode and language of the documentary film are used
as a medium for artistic exploration. Family and, in particular,
her own displaced experiences of growing up fuse with the content
that she makes about public figures - artists, musicians, muses-
to whom she is attracted. In a sense, the exploration is sound:
her work examines the connection points between the personal individual
and the public personas made available to us all through mass media.
Her most basic question -what is it in me that is attracted to a
particular public figure?- is deeply sensible. What makes the work
unique and engrossing is the fusion of languages that the viewer
does not usually encounter. Hers is a seductive hubris in which
the boundaries between our idols and who we are blur. We were all
formed alike; in families, no matter how not normative.
Each of the included artists exhibit work in which the family dynamic
is clearly visible, either fore grounded or more obliquely. And,
of course, in the context of the curatorial practice, the aim is
to explore the meta (family) dynamic. As a review of some contemporary
practices, what is the dynamic that results between them? Between
the pieces of work? What family narratives and dynamics emerge as
the audience -almost uncontrollably- projects its own readings and
fantasies onto the artists who produced such works?
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