The South Wing

Alex Ward spends an average of two hours a day polishing and sterilizing his scalpel, needles and other paraphernalia. Alex isn’t a surgeon. He is a tattoo and scarification artist who works at a popular body art parlor called Cassiopia

in the West Village. But his work does warrant clinical precision; one wrong move would render his canvas irrevocably scarred.

Scarification is the creation of an “aesthetic scar” by cutting, branding, or using a cauterizing tool on the skin. While tattooing is largely accepted by the mainstream today, scarification is not. This body art form has been performed for centuries among tribal cultures in Africa, Asia and Polynesia. In the United States, it emerged in San Francisco as part of a new body modification movement in the 1980s. And by the early 1990s, members of a neotribal, or “modern primitive” movement began propagating it. These modern primitives, led by San Francisco-based Fakir Musafar, were interested in trying to get in touch with a more authentic or spiritual experience of the body.

The human body has long been used as a canvas to express cultural identity and social status. In the modern context, body manipulation isn’t an alien concept: Plastic surgery, Botox and even piercing are merely sophisticated avatars of the human desire to exaggerate and beautify. But while plastic surgery is still sanctioned, scarification has yet to achieve that sort of social acceptance. Perhaps its associations make for bad publicity: punks, risqué lifestyles, and often drugs. It has few takers, which is why Alex operates this practice out of his residential studio in Bushwick, Brooklyn.

As the 22-year-old describes his sophisticated setup at home and his licensing procedures, he transcends stereotypes of irresponsible punk kids. But Alex is a curious contradiction himself. One moment he is all eloquence; the next he is an overgrown teenager passionately refuting any allegiance to Goth culture and pointing out the difference between “them” and “us.”

Browsing through his design sheets, I see recurring elements tied together by a dark undercurrent: menacing skulls, demonic reptiles and bleeding hearts. However, like his persona, his designs hold dualities. The dark skulls drown in neon colors, demons embrace angels and bright flowers sprout from mutilated hearts. These diametrically opposed elements add dynamicity to the compositions and invoke contrast, a pertinent aspect of artistic vocabulary. Placed next to a pink bud, the dark skull appears even more menacing, and the delicate bud more fresh and beautiful. A consistent design philosophy runs through his work–hope. In these tattoo sketches, there is beauty after death, an angelic alter ego to a demon and a burst of color in a drab monotone.

An artist’s work is reflective of his personality. And hope has definitely brought him where he is today. Caught smoking marijuana at the age of 12, Alex was forced to attend a teen facility in upstate New York. At 16, he escaped what he calls a “psycho religious institution” to live penniless on the streets of New York. Eventually he got himself a job as a flier boy for Cassiopia and picked up tattoo and scarification from senior artists who took him on as an apprentice. Today, charging $150 an hour, he’s a virtual advertisement for his skills with more than 30 tattoos and six scars across his body, many of which he’s done himself.

The modern primitives of the 90s had articulated their mission as trying to get in touch with a more authentic or spiritual experience of the body. In keeping with that, Alex argues that people no longer know authentic pleasure or pain. He believes that there is a way of attaining spiritual knowledge through pain but concedes that that’s not always the reason people get tattoos or scar designs. “Body modification is in fashion today. College kids come in to get pretty tattoos or Chinese symbols they don’t understand. But it’ll soon go out like everything else,” he says with distinct anti-consumerist angst. Alex is conscious that his art makes an impact on his audience because it changes the way they perceive their bodies. By way of metaphors, he is doing that already. The word tattoo comes from the Samoan tatao

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. It means “to mark.”

I ask him to pick a favorite design. But his favorite work, he explains, is the work he hasn’t done yet. “It’s stuff that’s brewing inside my head,” he says. “I want to create something fantastic; I want to leave my mark.”