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Carlos Jiménez
When viewing the photograph by Alberto García-Alix, Elena Mar, odalisca en mi patio, from 1987, I cannot help evoking the whole story behind the photo, although there is little left of that story other than the half nakedness of Elena and, especially, her tattoos. It is the story of García-Alix and yet also the story of a generation that, in the Madrid of the 1980s, broke molds and transgressed norms, not in the anticipated arena, via left wing politics, but perpetrated instead by those who celebrated marginality and cheerfully devoted themselves to it. Indeed, there have been many marginalities or regimens of social exclusion, and those established and practiced by Franco's regime can conveniently be deposited into that story of infamy Borges promised us and still owes us. But that of García-Alix and his circle of friends, his gang, was chosen rather than imposed and was therefore never experienced by any of them as painful impotence but rather as freedom and imagination and even fantasy. Elena's freedom to calmly get naked, without a qualm, content to enjoy an irreversible achievement conquered several years earlier by women such as those two who, during an unforgettable summer night, stripped off all their cloths and climbed the statues of Mon and Velarde in the Plaza del Dos de Mayo. Still, the plaza and the neighborhood of residence of emblematic figures of the 'movida' such as the film director Pedro Almodóvar or the actor Antonio Banderas. And of the 'hot nights' and the uncovered hash traffic, which, when cracked down upon, caused bloody clashes between Moroccans and Iranians who were fleeing the Ayatollah Jomeini. And the imagination and the fantasy made obvious by the tattoos on this dancer, who was the constant muse of the photographer, and who served not only to defy the still prevailing prohibition of tattoos on women but also to evoke the image she had created for herself and her world.
Elena's name is Elena although she may have preferred to be Eve or, in any case, assume the condition of sinner, that original guilt felt by women of the Judeo-Christian tradition for having let themselves be seduced by the serpent in earthly Paradise, eating from the Tree of Good and Evil and inciting Adam to do so as well. For Elena did not hesitate to get a tattoo of a snake slithering around her bellybutton. She thus assumed the millenary shame and, moreover, she blatantly exhibited its most recurrent symbol, freeing herself of guilt and openly appropriating its ignominious sign. Another one of her tattoos is upon her right forearm and shows two divergent electric guitars, united by a skull. They represent her world as a dancer and her milieu of rock musicians who provided the accompaniment for her art. It is a clear declaration of intentions as is the rosebud she wears above her left breast and which announces her to be a woman in love and a lover who does not seem to be willing to deprive herself of any of the pleasures of an intense love life. The problem, or the question if you wish, is where Alberto García-Alix' predilection for tattoos comes from? It is obviously not only for aesthetic reasons. If it were, we would have a systematic inventory of them, captured in the most complete way possible so as to guarantee the documentary or ethnological value of each of the photographs of this kind. Instead, García-Alix, as Francisco Calvo Serraller pointed out in a recent text, is not a methodical artist but rather, to the contrary, a photographer in whose work reigns a certain thematic disorder that stems from his inclination to use his camera to seize a great variety of instants, situations and characters, although these are always marginal or about to become so. No, if García-Alix has photographed many tattooed personages, and he got himself tattooed when he was a youngster, it is because, in this way, he wanted to convey that his rebellion is a rebellion of a brave streak, in which admiration or at least sympathy with convicted criminals occupies a substantial role. For the members of this social group, together with sailors and professional soldiers, have demonstrated themselves to be those most given to tattooing themselves. Prisoners tattoo themselves in a gesture that is an outright challenge to the exclusion they are condemned to by the society that judges and imprisons them. Whereas tattoos were employed as punishment in the Chinese Empire, where they were imposed as punishment considered worse than the death penalty or exile, among Occidental convicts, the tattoo, freely chosen, is a means of self ratification of the sentence imposed and the social exclusion accompanying it. This redundancy, this reiteration, is part of the same strategy and the same mechanisms which contribute to the establishment, within the prisons, of a power structure parallel to that of the official prison power structure, and one equally or still more implacable. The prisoners, forcefully deprived of freedom, achieve it, or believe they are achieving it, by organizing themselves into brotherhoods of warriors who follow strict codes of honor. (…)
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