xxThe Burden of History Project

David Rosales.Claremont Graduate University.Spring 2000

We are all burdened by extraneous forces that control our lives and productivity as human beings, these forces control how we live and how others expect us to live and act, this is the burden of history. I have been burdened by my cultural history as a Chicano artist for many years and it is my aim to rid myself of any need to rely on this burden to create artwork. Through mono-cultural technology this burden of cultural reliance is relieved by standardization, simplification of individual thought, diminished spiritual expression and relaxation of motor processes. For us to be free from the burden of culture and history we must dissect and remove those modular parts that are unimportant to art making and visual dialogue and discard the old ideologies and embrace a new pluralism, a new digital realism. Within the new technologies we can explore arenas of artmaking that do not have a precedent or cultural prejudice ingrained or pre-ordained in them. Through mono-cultural technologies we can attain a singular world view where cultural identities fade together and force a leap forward into the next step in the evolution of self-perception. To force ourselves into the next level of this cultural evolution we must modularize and simplify every aspect of the personal and reposition these parts to create a new whole, but it is a new whole that can be re-created in infinite ways by stacking parts of modular information/data in different and interesting ways, not unlike breaking through the windows in a computer or rearranging pixels in the artwork displayed on a monitor. My way of explaining this way of displaying modular pieces of cultural and historical identity are the “Information Stacks”. These “Information Stacks” are the visible physical manifestation of my dissection and resurrection of my cultural and historical identity/data as a Chicano artist. The exhibition “Burden of History Project” consists of plural-modular units of information and data called “Information Stacks” and are built on the walls of the gallery. These “Information Stacks” contain modular pieces of information in the form of Digital and Analog works. The paintings in these “Information Stacks” are painted in a pre-modernist technique of monochrome on wood panel. I have chosen to use a pre-modernist panel technique not only for its graphic and literal qualities but for the fact that it translates into my digital dialogue in a manner that modernist painting cannot. The failure of modernist painting is that it cannot speak to my digital thoughts as correctly as pre-modernist academic painting that relies heavily on representational drawing over use of tactile materials or color theory. At the heart of this exhibition is the website “Burden of History Project”. This website contains the five levels of History and Culture that are found in the “Information Stacks”; “Digital Glyphs”, “Colonial Memories”, “Califas after 1895” and “2050”. The website is built with similar images and modular parts of information/data as the “Information Stacks”, but this website is independent of the gallery exhibition and can be accessed from anywhere in the world http://www.elpayaso.com this information/data is available anywhere at any time to anyone and this is the value of the Internet and mono-cultural technologies. Mono-cultural technologies are cold and efficient and conceal age, gender or nationality. I can recreate myself into anyone I wish if it suits my modular need for the cultural anonymity of a non-Chicano. In the gallery the modular pieces of information/data are placed in the same historical order in every “Information Stack”. On the bottom layer of these “information stacks” are the “Digital Glyphs”, these “Digital Glyphs” are the visual representation of the digital codex’s of idealized indigenous people of present day California who exist and create their mythological images and stories on computer without the last 500 years of Christian Spanish influences. These indigenous peoples are fiercely territorial and call themselves “Chicanos”. The second level of the “Information Stacks” are the “Colonial Memories” of Mexico, but these memories are a bit dim as my family has lived in California for over 100 years. The third level is the Post-Colonial environment of “California after 1895”, I refer to the year 1895 because it is the year that the first members of my family immigrated from Mexico. The fourth and top level of the “Information Stack” is “2050” where the “Children of the Burden of 2050” exist, namely where the character of “Spaz” presides as the symbol of the next fifty years of Chicano struggle in California. In fifty years California will be of predominately Latino population and it is at this time that the Californian identity of the Latino will have evolved beyond the point of the “Pocho” “Chicano” “Hispanic” or “Mexicano” and truly become the “Californiado”, the native Californian.