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EDITORIAL Rosa Olivares
When we were small we used to write down our friends' telephone numbers, or the things we had to remember to do, on the back of our hands. We wrote the names of the people we loved best, the people we most desired, on desks, tree trunks and, of course, on our arms. We wrote with ink. Time and soap and water rubbed out those traces, changing these obsessions, which seemed like something eternal, into indistinct stains. Those little reminders we used to write on the palm of our hand were only useful for school exams, then they would get rubbed out with sweat and disappear from the surface of our skin, and then from our memory. But at those moments the skin, our skin, became the book of our needs, a fragile and perishable diary. We write on our bodies and time marks us indelibly, making our skin the parchment which sums up our lives. It is writing loaded with memory, absolutely symbolic, which can only be deciphered in the first person; monologues that make up the one single book that is our biography. We write on the skin incessantly and repeatedly: yes, I have lived. Each wrinkle, each mark, each scar, is the summary of a moment, a relationship, the pleasure and pain which centre themselves first and especially on the pure surface of ourselves, our skin. The scars of an accident remain in the memory, but also on the skin; the marks of operations; the pain and tensions which are translated into wrinkles... it is life which gradually writes upon us and we only interpret the role of living.
With plastic surgery the aim is not to be rejuvenated or look more beautiful, more perfect. The attempt is to rub out time, to eliminate part of that physical memory, without realising that surgery is a different stage, another stage, another story which will also leave its trace on our skin, without eliminating everything before, without rubbing out any experience. Just as we cannot forget the life of our loved ones, the disappointments, nor the times we have been abandoned. Nor can we forget the happy moments and some marks remind us of these forever. Nevertheless, man always wants to guide history, and above all his own history. We want to clarify, define, write in detail what we want others to understand about ourselves. Body painting by primitive tribes and the make-up of modern tribes are, in actually, rather similar. In different dimensions, with different styles and languages, they define attitudes (hunting, sacrifice, initiation...) which are repeated in all cultures and in all periods of history, albeit in different forms. Tattoos are a good example of this. With tattoos the ancient tribes defined the categories of warriors and marked social hierarchies. With painting festivals and rites were celebrated. Today painting, make-up, is a daily rite close to the rites of classic mating (and Robert Altman develops this very clearly in his film "Flying is for birds"). Tattoos have now diversified into different formulae that define those that wear them like a neon billboard on their foreheads. Tattoos today have ceased to be exclusively a mark of misfortune, the branding of an identity for beggars, convicts, sailors, and women fallen upon difficult times. Today adolescents from wealthy families wear seductive tattoos on their hips, thighs and chest, as well as piercing of a clearly tribal origin. The groups of bikers, rockers and other urban tribes tattoo themselves systematically in a demonstration of many different things. Whereas the origin of tattoos can be traced back across distant seas and over almost mythical journeys of explorers and adventurers, their present existence can be found in any street of any city. Without a doubt, many of the young people who tattoo themselves today are not conscious of the true meaning of what is written on their bodies, just as many writers repeat formulae, copy others' texts, or simply write without even knowing what they are saying.
But there are many others who do know what they are writing: they are conscious of what they are doing with their bodies. They do not confuse actual adornment with the concept itself, they do not confuse the essential with the frivolous. They are recounting to us their personal history, they are talking to us -in code- it is true, about their own lives, their unique experiences. Tattoos, over the course of their lives, make up a suit with which they gradually clothe their whole bodies, the only suit that will accompany them for good. The following pages talk of the origins of tattoos, of their different meanings and significance, images are offered in which painting and marks talk to us of many different stories and of many other ways of approaching these articles. Art has not been particularly concerned with tattoos. Only early photography, in its most documentary-type work, took it upon itself to record people with tattoos. It is also anthropological drawings, paintings as a documentary record of journeys, works on indigenous peoples, which have adopted tattoos as an element in their works. Photography and cinema, on the other hand, have taken them on board to a much greater extent, perhaps also because they have concerned themselves much more frequently and in depth with sectors of the criminal underworld, the Japanese yakuza, delinquency, prostitution, the world of adventure and crime, and what is marginalised.
But if tattoos represent -although it would be better to say used to represent- marginalised sectors, there are so many ways of writing on skin that we cannot talk of marginalisation. The Maori people seen from Lisbon, may be marginalised, or the Yanomami tribe in Brazil, seen from Amsterdam. But all of us, in Lisbon, Amsterdam, New York, Madrid, Lagos or any other place, are marked by time, we all have scars of a surgical nature, from a dispute, a childhood accident... we all have marks on our bodies, signs in our memory which mark our lives. This is what is discussed in the texts and images which follow. We said that the cinema has perhaps reflected this better than any other art, always very much assisted by photography. It has occupied itself with this aesthetics of body, from cult works like Pillow Book by Peter Greenaway, in which the bodies of different individuals serve as parchment for exotic forms of calligraphy and narration which make up an entire book; even a bad book with a good idea -possibly only one- such as Memento by Christopher Nolan, in which a man continually marks his body, writing phrases, codes, in order to remember who he is, to remember his history. In order not to get totally lost, the protagonist of Memento recurs to photography and marks, words and numbers on his body. We have chosen two artists with very different works for the centre pages of this edition: Miguel Rio Branco and Alberto García-Alix. Rio Branco works on time, on feelings, on the most profound of life: those things, those sensations which cannot easily be named without risking something. In that world the protagonists are marked in many ways. Rio Branco sees the passage of time on skin, either in the form of marks, scars, ritual paintings or tattoos like another way of speaking and explaining oneself, like a demonstration that life exists with its pain and pleasure, its light and shade. In contrast, Alberto García-Alix centres his work on tattooed characters of urban tribes, people close to him, with stories and lives very often parallel to his own. But it is not just Rio Branco and García-Alix who reflect these different forms of writing on skin. Tattoos are present in the images of Robert Mapplethrope when he photographs characters from the other side of society, in Kurt Marcus's boxers series, and on the back of Araki's Japanese lover. Arnulf Rainer paints his portraits and Annette Messeger draws her fragments of bodies, her memories, just as Tatiana Parcero projects maps on to bodies, and other artists reflect the interior of bodies outside them. So many, like Rosangela Rennó in her male torsos marked with words and child's drawings. Like so many lonely convicts who write to themselves on their skin not what they want to remember -because the memory does not need texts- but rather to name their desires, to repeat themselves and reread themselves in their loneliness and distance. In difference.
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