Being alex diamond (about the mask) | by Maike Moncayo

written for the book "Don't worry 'bout a thing - Being Alex Diamond", Verlag GUDBERG, Oct 2009

Alex Diamond is both fiction and fact. His biography has been hidden from the beginning of the project. Yet, the compelling imagery, the recurrent symbolic references and themes in his work such as the bizarre hairy mask, reveal a strong authorial imprint. This feature allows genuine criticality and reveals multiple possibilities for the viewer. There is no obvious biographical inscription in the body of work per se; there is no vita; and there are no anecdotes around the figure of the author that would impose a specific, subject-based reading of the work. Alex Diamond hasn’t really given up on Alex Diamond as a generator of visual and creative exploration just yet. What he has given up on conceiving the project itself is the tendency to succumb to the co-optation of the artist as an entertainment puppet, the viewers’ and the lifestyle media’s interest in and their celebration of the artist’s persona, his eccentricities, his supposed authenticity and outsider position; the desperate need to dissect the artist’s fashions, likes and dislikes. Artists today cast themselves into a living brand. And it seems as though the artwork has been reduced to legitimizing the media frenzy around the artist’s persona, revealing the artist’s brand to be supported by the artist as a personality and his notoriety, rather than by the artwork itself. The mask belongs to the recurrent symbolic imagery in Alex Diamond’s work and has become the signifier for the artist’s persona and the protagonist in his last work series “Being Alex Diamond”.   A bizarre hybrid of gasmask and animal, you start to wonder what this mask with its blonde curls and tentacles is alluding to. Alex Diamond undermines the need to seek the artist behind the artwork, since the mask is both signifier and void. As much as it works as a strong and recognizable visual reference to the artists’ brand, and therefore, to the artist himself, the connection is corrupted and ridiculed by the fact that the bearer of the mask is always changing throughout this series of photographs. The artist reflects upon such a need but not without making an ironic statement about it: everyone can be Alex Diamond, or more accurately, Alex Diamond can be everyone. And as much as he seems to promote the idea of a democratization of art, meaning that everyone can be an artist, he stresses the fact that the artist figure has become but a mere hologram, whose life and personality have become the value object and the centre of attention, rather than the artwork itself. The exhaustive repetition of the same motif – the mask - reminds us of the mass production and ubiquity of cultural images, such as the images of pop culture icons produced by the media in the manner of Warhol. Only this time, it is the caricature of the artist, the masked freak, who is exposed to the public.

maike moncayo is a very good friend. she has been working for galleries such as iguapop (barcelona) or heliumcowboy artspace (hamburg), has a total understanding of the whole alex diamond thing, is a great writer, lives in barcelona and is unusually pretty.