If you enjoyed May's branding performance, you won't want to miss this one! In an encore presentation, Keith Alexander, on of NY's premier piercing, cutting and branding enthusiasts returns to the Learning X-Change to present a lecture and live demonstration on one of today's most popular forms of body art… Cutting/Scarification. In a riveting presentation, Keith discusses the art's origins, rapid rise in popularity, social ramifications and present day applications, and demonstrates proper preparation and sterilization, tools of the trade, creating an applying the design, cutting techniques, aftercare, how to achieve optimum scarring special effects, etc.
If you're a reader of Occult Vibrations you may have seen a recent update with a few early 1990s tattoo shop fliers with art by bio-mech legend Guy Aitchison; discovering them happy accidents since I was looking for a piece of correspondence for a future SD update and found a stack of unsorted mail that hasn't been out of storage in at least a decade. I still haven't found the piece of mail (a letter from Bud Viking Navaro to Jack Yount) that I was looking for, but this stack yielded the Aitchison fliers, a letter from "J" (from J: Story of a subincision) and a few from Keith Alexander.
I had forgotten about his Learning X-Change Scarification class; the flier included didn't include full information (day and month, no year given) and the envelope's postmark is unreadable so I can't say for sure when this class- $10 per person to learn the basics of scarification- was offered. It was likely 1996 (judging from the MAPS Corporate Seal on the enclosed letterhead) or shortly after when scarification was just beginning to receive any outside of the community media attention.
It might shock modern audiences to see technique classes offered to the general public, especially at so low a price, but the crossover with cutting in a S/M context "democratized" the modification, with a large segment of the clients looking for scars and brands in the 1970s-1990s a part of the fetish lifestyle and the amount of professional scarification artists worldwide offering safe, sterile cutting a small minority.
Posted on January 31, 2016 by Shawn PorterPosted in 1990s, Events, Historical Figures, History, Keith Alexander, Procedures, Scarification, Scarification ArtistsTagged 1990s, Keith Alexander, Scarification.