Rosa Olivares
The Eternal and the Ephemeral: Body Stories

"He said he wanted to write his life history on my skin starting with his birth at my lips and his falling in love at my breasts. The rest of my body he was going to devote to our lives together."
(From "Nagiko's Journal," from The Pillow Book by Peter Greenaway)

ZHANG HUAN, 1/2 (#1), 1998

In the film directed by Peter Greenaway in 1995, The Pillow Book, we witness a continual ceremony of devotion to literature and love. A visual homage to the body and the word, to the calligraphy and the magic of narration. We use our bodies as texts, books more or less open to the contemplation and reading of others. Nagiko, the protagonist of the film, is accustomed, since childhood, to her father writing each one of her birthday greetings on her face, on her body. When grown up, she will ask her lovers to write on her body, and she herself will look for lovers on whom to write her own story so her editor can read it. Books that walk, people who have Nagiko's stories written on their skin, all over their bodies. One lover writes so hard he makes her bleed, another uses her for his political slogans, each writing from his own perspective, with his own handwriting. "I could not be sure which was more important: the calligrapher who was a good lover, or the lover who was a poor calligrapher," Nagiko is to say at one point. What we are not sure of is what is most important: the body written on, the story told or the sheer beauty of the handwriting.

TEO SABANDO, La imaginación, 1993

This story takes place in Japan, where nobody wants to seem different, a place where, however, corporal tatoos have reached a level of beauty and own certain characteristics that make them outstanding worldwide. A country in which calligraphy is an art. The examples of Japanese tatoos are famous and imitated throughout the world, most often personified in the mythology of the yakuza, the peculiar Japanese mafia. But what stands out on this occasion in The Pillow Book is that it is not the tatoos that are discussed, but the writing on the body, the use of the body as a book for others to read. When Nagiko sends her lovers, with writing all over their bodies, to her editor, they get undressed to reveal the calligraphy, at times blurred by sweat, and the editor's secretaries copy these texts before they totally disappear. They are written over the entire surface of the body, on the throat, the chest, the legs, the genitals, around the eyes... But this writing is not meant to endure forever, they are not tattooed, they are written. What is the difference between the tattooed body and the painted body?

The marked, painted or tattooed body is only a body with a story. With a story it tells to anyone willing to read, for those who can understand. Like in all literature, form is heeded as well as content, and also heeded is who the reader is going to be. A hidden tattoo is not the same as a visible one. A body tattooed profusely and one with a small flower on the shoulder are not the same either. Not only are two different stories thus told, but we go from an epic narration to an advertising spot. Hence, to speak about tattoos, about marked bodies, we will have to approach literature rather than the plastic arts. For those bodies are books, the image they project is full of symbols, they are hieroglyphics, like Japanese calligraphy, beautiful in themselves, horrible at times, but the important thing is what they are speaking about. In this sense, painting, fine art has little to do except to offer its own body as a symbolic reference.

JANA STERBAK, Generic Man, 1987-89

Painting presents us with bodies marked according to Christian tradition: Saints with stigmas, sacred scars, bodies bearing the weight of sanctity and sacrifice. Scarification, scars, are also ways of tattooing the body, their content is beyond the mark itself, prolonged in it eternally. Until death. And after death, only the art remains: the painting, the photography, the mixture of the two, the film. The body is written on, the body is marked, but the artists mark, and they also paint on the painted body, on the representation of those bodies. They are doubtless different marks, but they sometimes contain even more violence; on occasion, they are of a superior lyrical force. And, above all, they are marks on a body of fiction, not on a real one, which allows them to be repeated, varied, made into series, much like the manuscript and the book in a facsimile edition. (…)