Resumen de Revealing the Mask Behind the Face: Daniel Alonso Mallén’s Photomontage Satire
This article focuses on the prolific sonic and graphic montage visionary, Daniel Alonso Mallén. Daniel Alonso is the lead singer, keyboardist, and promotional artist for the Seville-based four-piece indie band Pony Bravo. In this article, I examine the photomontages Alonso creates to promote Pony Bravo concerts in which he employs a range of local, national, and international semiotics to critique the drivers of crises occurring within the neighborhood and across the world. Alonso integrates images and icons which belong to diverse semantic chains into a cohesive narrative imagery that addresses both Spanish and global issues (specifically, national immigration policy and rhetoric, royal embezzlement, the global climate crisis, and the Iraq war) by subversively rearticulating an array of national and international signifiers both past and present. These crises are brought about by the Spanish embrace of international and supranational neoliberal economic policies which have undermined the sovereignty of the national populace. Corporate capture of government power has created a situation in which a failed state masquerades as legitimate. The rebirth suggested by Alonso begins with the unmasking of the thuggish and racist operatives that have appropriated the levers of government and a consideration of the consequences of their actions. Through this article, I hope to add to this collection one such approach to the kinds of expression that are privileged in the face of uncertain times: caustic in its satire, Alonsós bricolage art reveals what Slavoj Zizek refers to as a kind of mask behind the face of atrocity incarnate.
