"The modern man who tattoos himself is either a delinquent or a degenerate. There are prisons where eighty per cent of the inmates are tattooed. The tattooed who are not in prison are latent delinquents or degenerate aristocrats". Adolf Loos, Ornament and Crime, 1908.

ALPHONSE BERTILLON, Ficha de identidad judiciaria de A. Bertillon, 1981

Or radical artists. The meticulous Adolf Loos forgot about artists when he wrote this invective in his celebrated article, Ornament and Crime. In his opinion, modern life must abandon all atavism, and decoration was just that, especially decoration of one's own body: the paradigm of the tribal condition, of symbolic waste. Around the same time, Cesare Lombroso appears to pay more attention to varieties of deviation and includes artists in the list of nervous mentalities, along with delinquents, madmen and also, curiously enough, people with tattoos.

From apocalyptic Vienna to the Moscow of the first avant-garde movements: only five years after Ornament and Crime, Mijail Larionov and Ilya Zdanevich explain in their manifesto Why do we paint ourselves? that the hieroglyphics and signs appearing on their faces or bodies form part of that avant-garde premise which makes of the future a savage return to the tribe. There is no futurism without History's cure of oblivion. Faced with this, art wielded the weapons of the prehistoric past: the first words (Dadaist babbling), the first gestures (signs on the skin, tam-tam, masks, incoherent dance...) These are the most explicitly primitive aspects of the Cabaret Voltaire. Their anti-modern attitude denounces the institutional delinquency of the military state, the furious madness of war. Nevertheless, it is they who were considered eccentric, nihilists (synonym of anarchists) and delinquents, perhaps only because they covered their faces with tribal masks or painted their bodies.

ANDRES SERRANO, The Morgue (Knifed to Death), 1992

The tattooed, for Loos, were delinquents of decoration, squanderers who, moreover, acted against their own interests since, individualised by their drawing on their own skin, they made their bodies into an accusing language, an open book in the face of authority. Right from its origins, court photography has framed the face of the delinquent, as this is the part of the body which concentrates together the maximum information on the individual: hair, eyes, ears, nose, mouth, chin...; but a tattooed person, with his ornamentally perverse gesture, makes his skin an additional text, a detailed story of his deviation. Delinquents' tattooing is a representation of their misdemeanours, a "graphic vignette of their exploits or destiny", writes Foucault.

In 1913, Larionov walked around Moscow with his face covered with hieroglyphics, proclaiming his condition of savage and also - not only from the point of view of ornament - of delinquent, activist in reaction to the well-meaning atony of Muscovite society. Those who came across him on the street could not imaging that his gesture was a form of art; perhaps they thought it was a product - as Loos did - of "latent delinquency or degenerate aristocracy". But they were mistaken, these young people who walked around Moscow with their faces painted were not delinquents, they were not even dangerous; rather they were the authentic founders of what we have conveniently called modern art.

And they had precedents, like Charles Baudelaire, who had had to appear before the judge in 1857 after the publication of Les fleurs du mal, accused of "offending public morality and good habits", or Edouard Manet and his Déjeneur sur l'herbe, rejected in the Salon of 1863, an event which began a life parallel to modernity. And these artists were to have descendants for a long time; in fact, one of the unwritten rules of the avant-garde, by then at the historic stage, but also in the time of the late avant-garde, is the generic idea of artistic creation as an attitude opposed to the law, like clandestinity or transgression, like offence or provocation. The Dadaist nihilism, the trifling of the futurists or the beauté convulsive of the Surrealists pointed towards the economy of transgression, that handling of limit which is characteristic of the historical avant-garde movements.

ANDY WARHOL, Most Wanted Men, nº 12, Frank B., 1964

In some cases, the experience of the avant-garde appears like a chaining of transgressions, a life mentally outside legality. Though Apollinaire had been arrested and imprisoned in La Santé in August 1911, implicated in the robbery of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre, not long afterwards, in April 1914, it was Arthur Cravan who went to prison after a trial for affront to Apollinaire, whom he had called 'Jew' in his article in the magazine Maintenant on the exhibition of the Independents. In the public apology ordered by the judge, Cravan admits that Apollinaire was not a Jew but a 'Roman Catholic', although in the text of the apology itself Craven once again calls him 'Jew'. This was life on the tight-rope of an artist who proposed transgression as one of the Fine Arts and who created a school.

First of all the Dadaists. The Italian or Russian futurists. The vitalist coquettishness of the Marinettis, Hausmann, Mayakovsky, Heartfield, Tzara or Dalí; artists who disregarded the law as a way of expressing an energetically subversive stance towards art and the environment in which it was being produced during the war, for through internationalism, for instance. In the Zurich magazine, Dada, the artists stated that "the signatories to that manifesto live in France, America, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, etc., but they have no nationality". Amongst their collaborators there was a "stateless person", as well as a "deserter from 17 countries". "We had no confidence in culture. Everything was there to be demolished. We had to start again. In Cabaret Voltaire we began to amaze the public, to demolish their ideas on art, attack common sense, public opinion, education, institutions, museums, good taste and, definitively, the entire established order". (…)

En algunos casos, la experiencia de la (...)