post-real models
I
This past June, I was fortunate enough to be invited to the seminar "Digital Humanities, Computing, and New Methodologies in Doctoral Research," which Dr. Nuria Rodríguez Ortega from the University of Málaga conducted for doctoral students at the University of Barcelona (UB). I'm not a doctoral student myself; a professor I adore had invited me with the kind intention of helping me learn some tools for the handling of data with digital techniques for my final year project. What occurred there was a form of epiphany. I learned everything but digital techniques. In essence, Núria expressed that we should not be afraid to invent parallel realities that have never existed, because investigating these fictional worlds could be as legitimate and scientific a way to advance knowledge as any other. For me, it was an absolute revelation. I left filled with wonder, and I think that my project My Own Private Art History, owns a lot to that courageous thinking, transferred from epistemology to artistic creation. To begin with, the title itself, My Own Private Art History, points to a history that deviates from the canonical one —apart from the references to my personal memory or my artistic prerogatives, to which the name undoubtedly alludes— my project is centred around constructing a parallel history, one that mirrors models from capital-H History without actually being it.
II
Núria Rodríguez, in her article "Post-reality, simulation and other concepts," referring to simulation—in this case used in digital humanities in new forms of epistemological data management —states that the model born from simulation reinvents the reality it projects upon, in order to be able to problematize it. I apply that same logic. The decision to stop operating within reality is a completely deliberate gesture. I take advantage of the artificiality of the generative image—its total disconnection from the real. The alternative model I produce is the one that allows me to ask questions, to place the viewer in a disorienting position that forces them to problematize their entire framework. In other cases, I simply look for subtle poetic flashes that may arise from that total disconnection between the model and the referent, using a slight indexical aberration. Let's take the case of the photograph of the young Black bullfighter from the Visions of Spain series, in this example, the aberration is of a statistical and cultural nature; there is no special effect here, simply the fact that in Spain, a Black bullfighter is like a unicorn. The image is physically perfectly possible—just rare within the Spanish sociological context. It generates a cognitive dissonance caused by the breaking of an archetype. The symbolic figure of the bullfighter is a sign of identity that resonates deeply within a segment of the population. The operation I perform embodies Otherness, quite literally, in the body of its opposite. A kind of visual oxymoron generated from an alternative model of reality —the very model Dr. Rodríguez speaks of. A semiotic provocation that forces the viewer to question the boundaries of the "self" and the “other."
III
These alternative models that I generate, to return to the title of My Own Private History, would be alternative Histories, which, like the data used in digital humanities simulations, also stem from real historical models. One of the central axes of my project is based on the simulation of the eternal iconographic models of Art History, drawing on the paradigm shift that Rodriguez discusses, one that attempts to re-edit the shift: “fromthe idea of representation as an action consisting of restoring the order of what is, toward the critical theory of representation, which assumes the referent not as that which must be reconstructed or recreated, but as the problem that must be discussed.” For me, the referents—instead of those elements of reality to which I no longer feel connected —would be, at least in part, the great perpetual iconographic models of history: Erwin Panofsky's "types" —Images that were systematically reused for centuries.
Studying Art History at the University of Barcelona as an adult has had a profound effect on me. I remember how neither my classmates nor I understood anything about the subject matter of the Iconography course during our first year. In a time when images of every imaginable type are consumed by the millions, it was truly strange that an entire course focused on such a specific and restricted group of images. These were images that, within the course, seemed at first glance too disconnected. We talked about saints, virgins, and Olympian gods; about mythological heroes, shields, and emblems — it seemed like a strange and limited mix. It was shocking to realize how insignificant my own time was in the timeline of history: a world where images of celebrities were mixed seamlessly with terrorist attacks, or Disney cartoons with pornography, all in a single day. It turned out that for almost two thousand years, art hadn't moved beyond perhaps fewer than a thousand pre-established images. Aby Warburg, in the Mnemosyne Atlas—his definitive catalogue and visual memory of the West— included exactly 971 base images.
IV
My use of images from art history as working material may simply be due to something as pragmatic as the fact that they are what I have had closest and most readily available, since these images have been my daily reality for the last four years in the classrooms of the University of Barcelona. But perhaps not. Perhaps these eternal types are so for a reason. Warburg speaks of gestures and emotional expressions that are eternal in images, that come back, reinventing themselves in each era; he called them Pathosformeln (pathos formulas). Yet, beyond these formulas, if these more or less fixed types return time and again, perhaps it is because of their capacity to function as containers of human essences that we haven't found any other way to convey. Fixed types in which someone from 2,500 years ago can be reflected and recognize themselves, just as I recognize myself in the year 2026. It would also seem that the History of Art is one of perpetual recycling. The same models used by Sophocles and Euripides in the 5th century BC are the ones Shakespeare himself used fifteen centuries later. In Rome, they copied even the very gods of the Greeks who came before them. Michelangelo, Raphael, and Leonardo, in the Renaissance, would, in turn, look back to those Greco-Roman classics. Classics that would become Neoclassical during the French Revolution. The cycle is endless. Jesus Christ himself, iconographically, would have been nothing more than a pastiche of Horus and Apollo.
There is a very fine line between collective history, personal history, and memory. I, like so many others, have found in these eternal models the perfect vessels for my own history and memory.