Vienna Tattoo Festival Offers Waltz on Wild Side

(April 8) -- Planning a trip to Vienna? Fair warning: This quaint city on the Danube is about to host an onslaught of about 10,000 devotees of a less-than-quaint lifestyle -- lovers of tattoos and body piercing, freak shows, exotic dancers and Harley motorcycles.

After a seven-year hiatus, the Wildstyle & Tattoo Fair is coming back to town April 10 to 11. From 1995 to 2003, the rollicking, traveling tribal gathering drew more than 1 million visitors to Vienna and some 90 other Austrian and German cities and towns.

Jochen Auer, the Austrian promoter of the earlier fairs as well as this weekend's "Reunion of the Original," offers this explanation for the revival: "There are a lot of kids who have never seen a show. Also, a lot of older people got interested in tattoos in the past few years."

One reason for the fair's lengthy hiatus, in fact, was that it had gotten a little too successful for its own good.

"When we started, we wanted to bring tattooing and body piercing to a bigger crowd," Auer says. "We got more than we wanted."

That sounds about right to Clayton Patterson, a New York artist-documentarian who's helped promote the event since day one and a man well accustomed to living outside the mainstream. The 61-year-old Patterson is billed on the fair's new Web site as "America's underground reporter No. 1," and the tag is not hyperbole: His efforts to document police brutality have earned him several beatings and more than a dozen arrests (not to mention four gold front teeth, compliments of a cop's nightstick).

Now working on a book about the history of tattooing in New York City, Patterson thinks tattooing and the lifestyle that goes with it have moved from the fringe into the mainstream, both in Europe and the U.S.

"When something is outlawed, there's a mystery to it," he says. "Once tattooing got to the point where every town in Germany and Austria and America had quality tattoo artists, some of the mystery got left out. Tattooing became more homogenized and gentrified, just like the whole country, just like the whole world. Now doctors and lawyers and teenage girls have tattoos, and the world is saturated with fine tattoo artists. It's much harder to be a genius today."

Despite these laments, Patterson is gung-ho about the fair's revival. "This is taking the sideshow and kicking it up to the highest level," he says.

Joining Auer and Patterson in Vienna will be more than 200 exhibitors, performers and cult figures, including legendary tattoo artists Jack Rudy and Xed LeHead; Lucky Diamond Rich, "the world's most tattooed man"; the Modern Primitives freak show; plus drummers, musicians and exotic dancers. There will also be slide shows and movies about the history of tattooing, body piercing and scarification.

"The idea is to show the whole not-normal, not-mainstream culture," Auer says.

But he'll admit that the line between normal and not-normal has blurred considerably in recent years. "Now everybody's tattooed," Auer says with a rueful chuckle. "Maybe in 10 years you'll be more of an outlaw if you don't have any tattoos."