La autobiografía de artista en la contemporaneidad española

Abstract

This doctoral thesis explores the relationships between art and autobiography in contemporary Spain through the cultural artifact known as artist's autobiography. Despite the difficulty of defining each term separately, the artist's autobiography could be formulated as a retrospective account in prose that a real artist makes of his own existence, emphasizing the interaction between life and work. The argument starts from the verification that autobiographies written by visual artists have been marginalized from the general canon of autobiographies and, in the specific case of Spain, that other prejudices derived from the profession of their authors were also added to the recurring topics in the national history of the Literatures of the Self. The turn that this thesis proposes consists of taking precisely those aspects which excluded artists’autobiographies from the great stories and using them as a basis for speculating on its specific characteristics.The starting hypothesis is threefold: first, that the artist has an entity as an autobiographical subject and consistency as an authorial collective; second, that this position comes from relatable discursive traditions, and therefore that it does not follow the orthodox references of Saint Augustine, Saint Teresa or Rousseau but rather those of their colleagues: Michelangelo, Cellini or Frenhofer, as presented, respectively, by the biography, the artist's autobiography or the novel; third, that discourses on art promote differential subjectivation processes, since the anachronism, materiality and aura of the work of art go beyond the usual conceptions about time, space and identity. In accordance with these premises, the thesis presents the artist's autobiography as an interface in which word and image, narrativity and visuality, interact at the same time, and adopts an interdisciplinary approach in line with the epistemologies and methodologies of cultural analysis...