UNIVERSITY OF READING

Body Art: Body Modification as Artistic Practice

Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of

Philosophy

Matthew C. Lodder
Department of History of Art
January 2010
Abstract
Body Art: Body Modification as Artistic Practice

This thesis is an investigation into the legitimacy and limits of the term "body art" in

its vernacular sense, wherein it refers to methods of decorating or ornamenting the

body, such as tattooing or piercing. Though the term is widely used and widely

understood, it has rarely appeared in any writing which takes an explicitly art-
historical or art-critical approach, and has never been subjected to any sustained

analysis which uses the methodologies deployed by specialists when engaging with

other forms of art. If tattooing and its coincident technologies are "body art", they

have not as yet been understood as such by art historians.

The arguments made over the course of this work thus amount to a case for the

applicability of art-historical and art-theoretical methodologies to body modification

practice. The thesis first establishes the existence of a rhetorical yet broadly

undefended case for the artistic status of practices which alter the form of the body.
This claim is to be found amongst both the contemporary subcultural body

modification community and amongst plastic surgeons. With particular reference to

theories of art and aesthetics by John Dewey, Richard Shusterman, and Gilles

Deleuze and Felix Guattari, the work investigates whether such claims are tenable. In

light of these investigations, the thesis then presents a number of problems which

immediately arise from such a claim - problems of authorship, ownership,

objectivity and value - and attempts to resolve them through detailed analysis of a

number of case-studies.

1
Declaration of original authorship

I confirm that this is my own work and the use of material from other sources

has been properly and fully acknowledged.

Signed
............................................................................................................
Matthew C. Lodder. January 2010

11
Acknowledgements

This thesis was made possible due to the generous funding of the University

of Reading Research Endowment Trust Fund and my parents' unshakeable

belief in me.

I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisor, Sue Malvern, for her

continued support and assistance over the course of the completion of this
I
project. am deeply indebted to her. Thanks to my friends and colleagues at

the University of Reading and beyond, who have provided invaluable advice

and wise commentary as these ideas developed. I am grateful also to my

employers, the Association of Art Historians, who have been generous in the

accommodations they have made for me in completing this thesis.

This document is dedicated to all the artists whose work I am proud to wear

on my skin - Adam Barton, Steve Byrne, Martin Clark, Bob Done, Simon Erl,

Drew Horner, 'Uncle' Allan Larsen, Allison Manners, Rebecca Marsh and Jack

Mosher.

111
Contents

Introduction 4
................................................................................................................
The Modified Body as Art Object
Chapter One 16
..............................................................................................................
The Myths of Modern Primitivism
Chapter Two 48
..............................................................................................................
IAmArt
Chapter Three 79
...........................................................................................................
"How do you make yourself a Body without Organs?"
Chapter Four 111
...........................................................................................................
The Art and Authorship of Tattooing
Chapter Five 174
............................................................................................................
Tattoos in the Gallery

Chapter Six 217

..............................................................................................................
Tattooing in Conceptual Art
Conclusion 251
...............................................................................................................
Body Modification as Artistic Practice
Bibliography 259
...........................................................................................................
List of Illustrations

Figure 1 Fakir Musafar hanging by flesh hooksperforming an Indian O-Kee-Pa

Ceremony 19
.............................................................................................................
Figure 2 Don Ed Hardy, The Beginning of All Things, 1982 34
..................................
Figure 3 Attributed to Percy Walters, Rockof Ages, 1920s-1930s 42
........................
Figure 4 Don Ed Hardy, Rock of Ages, 1988 43
...........................................................
Figure 5 Installation shot of 'Before'and 'After' imagesfrom I Am Art, apexart
New York, 2009 49
.................................................................................................
Figure 6 Installation shotfrom I Am Art. apexart New York, 2009 50
......................
Figure 7 Orlan, 2004 73
..................................................................................................
Figure 8 Don Ed Hardy, DNA: Tattoo to commemoratesuccessfuloperation curing
total paralysis from auto accident, 1989 126
............................................................
Figure 9 Don Ed Hardy, Monster Surfer, 1989 127
.....................................................
Figure 10 Catalogue illustration advertising one of Percy Waters' tattoo machines,
1928 128
....................................................................................................................
Figure 11 Adam Barton, Untitled, 2002 146
................................................................
Figure 12 Craig Toth, Untitled, 2002 147
.....................................................................
Figure 13 Matt Shamah, Untitled, 2002 148
.................................................................
Figure 14 Horitaka, Untitled, 2002 149
........................................................................
Figure 15 Adrian Lee, Redrum, 2002 154
.....................................................................
Figure 16 Adrian Lee, Action Reaction,2002 155
........................................................
Figure 17 Adrian Lee, Untitled, 2002 156
....................................................................
Figure 18 Adrian Lee, Tattoo on Yuya Nishimura, c. 2006 159
...................................
Figure 19 Ron Earhart, Untitled, 2002 161
...................................................................
Figure 20 Ron Earhart, Tattoo on Patrick Odle, c. 2006 162
........................................
Figure 21 LeeWagstaff looksdown over a self-portrait showing his tattooedtorso in
the RCA's end of year show, 2000 164
.....................................................................
Figure 22 Lee Wagstaff, Baptism, 2000 167
..................................................................
Figure 23 Lee Wagstaff, Legion, 2000 168
....................................................................
Figure 24 David Burrows, Never Nervous Muscular Efficiency, 2004 181
...............
Figure 25 Richard Owen, preparatory design for Untitled, 2004 182
.....................

1
Figure 26 Richard Owen, Untitled (left) and preparatory design (right), 2004.
182
............................................................................................................................
Figure 27 Peter Harris, preparatory design for Tattoo No. 4,2004 183
...................
Figure 28 Peter Harris, detail from Tattoo No. 4,2004 183
........................................
Figure 29 Peter Harris, Tattoo No. 4,2004 184
............................................................
Figure 30 Gavin Turk, preparatory sketch for Untitled, 2004 185
...........................
Figure 31 Wim Delvoye, Tim, 2007 192
.......................................................................
Figure 32 A tattoo on a pieceof human skin showing a male bust and aflower stem
196
............................................................................................................................
Figure 33 A tattoo on a pieceof human skin showing a nudefemale called Flora... 197
Figure 34 A tattoo on a pieceof human skin showing aflower and someinitials.... 198
Figure 35 A tattoo on a pieceof human skin showng a Greekstyle bust of an Emperor
198
and somewriting ...............................................................................................
Figure 36 Japanesewoman being tattooedfor Tokyo University researchproject,
1956 205
....................................................................................................................
Figure 37 Dr Fukushi 207
...............................................................................................
Figure 38 Tattoofrom Dr. Fukushi's collection 208
.......................................................
Figure 39 Skin of leg showing dragon and gambler's playing card designs 208
............
Figure 40 Toi Moko 210
...................................................................................................
Figure 41 The mediabust stagedin front of the Museum of Modern Art to challenge
the legal prohibition of tattooing in New York City, 1976 222
................................
Figure 42 The media bust stagedin front of the Museum of Modern Art to challenge
the legal prohibition of tattooing in New York City, 1976 223
................................
Figure 43 "A successfulforgery ............................................................................... 227

Figure 44 Photographsfrom the tattoo time-pieceby Spider Webb,1976 229

...............
Figure 45 Spider Webb, Blood Print from X Number 204,1977 231
.........................
Figure 46 Spider Webb, X-1000,1977 233
...................................................................
Figure 47 Santiago Sierra, PersonPaid to Have 30cm Line Tattooedon Them, 1998
236
............................................................................................................................
Figure 48 Santiago Sierra, 250cm Line Tattooedon Six Paid People,1999..........237
Figure 49 Santiago Sierra, 160cm Line Tattooedon Four People,2000 238
................
Figure 50 Publicity mock-up of Brent Moffatt's advertising tattoo, prior to the
243
proceduretaking place.......................................................................................

2
Figure 51 Karolyne Smith's advertising tattoo, 2005 245
..............................................
Figure 52 Lord Balkin, c. 1979 252
.................................................................................
Introduction
The Modified Body as Art Object
My intention is to tell
of bodieschanged
to differentforms.
- Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book 1.

This thesis is an investigation into the legitimacy and limits of the term "body

art" in its vernacular sense, wherein it refers, as the OED would have it, to "a

method of decorating or ornamenting the body, such as tattooing, piercing,

etc". The term seems quite straightforward, and is commonly understood and

accepted as a noun which describes a range of technological interactions with

the surface of the body, from the aforementioned tattooing to practices

including branding, scarification, the placement of implants under the skin

and even, occasionally, cosmetic surgery. It appears interchangeably with the

term "body modification" in writing on these practices from every

conceivable discipline: sociology, cultural studies, media studies, literary

studies, psychology, ethnography, criminology, anthropology and even in

articles which approach the topic from a medical or scientific point of view,
including dermatology and psychiatry. Interestingly enough, however, the

term "body art" has rarely appeared in any writing which takes an explicitly

art-historical or art-critical approach, and has never been subjected to any

sustained analysis which uses the methodologies deployed by specialists

when engaging with other forms of art. If tattooing and its coincident
technologies are "body art", they have not as yet been understood as such by

art historians.

4
This thesis lays out the methodological case for looking at the body as an art

object, more than it is an application of the methodology itself. Almost

without exception, critical writing on body modification technologies

throughout history concerns itself with questions of subjectivity and

motivation. Most who write about body modification technologies employ

methodological approaches which limit investigations to the circumstances

which prefigure any modification procedure, and concern themselves

exclusively with issues which deal with that which comes prior to the

modifications being carried out. As such, questions of impetus and impulse

dominate the literature: Why would someone get a body piercing? What

subjective truth are criminals expressing when they tattoo themselves? What

drives someone to alter their body? What cultural coercion is at work when a

woman gets a breast augmentation? What is the ritual significance or utility of

a Maori facial tattoo? What psychiatric disorders are at work in such auto-
destructive behaviours? These are all important, pertinent and interesting
discussions, of course, but they all end, abruptly, once the scalpel blade or

needle touches the skin. Once the procedure has begun, the answers to these

types of question are already apparent; once the body begins to be altered, the

period of interest ends. And with this myopic focus on what comes prior to

the modificatory procedure rather than what results from it, such analyses

studiously ignore what to me has always seemed the most fascinating and

intriguing aspects of modified bodies: their look; their aesthetic; the ways in

which they confound the expectations of a viewer so used to more normal

and normative bodies; the strange and surprising qualities of the quotidian,

transformed. My inquiry thus begins at the point where other discussions of

body modification end: the body art object itself'.

1I deliberately bypass questions more suited to other forms of analysis and already handled
by others. Questions such as the intersection between gender and body modification or

5
Body Art / Body Art

Aside from its vernacular sense, the term 'body art' is more familiar in art

historical and art-theoretical writing as a term coined to describe a the broad

category of the visual art works in which artists foreground their own bodies

within their work, producing works on and using their bodies in specific

performance events (see e.g Vergine 1974). The term used in this way

connotes a particularly and explicitly performative mode of art practice

featuring the artist's own body as the central figure or material, intentionally

and deliberately deployed as an assertively self-conscious art work'.

In Amelia Jones' history of Body Art, Body Art: Performing the Subject, Carolee

Schneemann emerges as the iconic example of the Body Artist and of the

emergent Body Art 'movement' of the early 1960s - "'Covered in paint,

grease, chalk, ropes, plastic"", cites Jones from Schneemann's 1963 notes on
her work Eye Body, "I establish[ed] my body as visual territory, [... ] marking

it as 'an integral material"' (Jones 1998,2). By this rendering, Body Art in this

sense and thus the critical frameworks which it has established for itself

would seem to include or at least be readily applicable to the quotidian

practices of the sort under discussion here, perhaps rendering the entire

question I seek to address immediately moot. There seems to be much in

questions of the history of particular practices for example, are not immediately relevant to
the path this thesis forges; whilst they are interesting and useful, their focus is prior to that
which I wish to devote my attention here. The same is true for questions of cultural and
historical specificity - though I do make occasional reference to body modification practices
beyond the immediate context of the 20th and 21st century West, the conclusions drawn are
intended to apply principally to body modification practices which are consensual,
contemporary and, for the most part, counter-hegemonic.
2I distinguish between the vernacular and performative uses of the term "body art" by
capitalising as "Body Art" instances which refer to performance.

6
common with Schneeman's use of her body as a material and as a surface for

visual transformation and, say, someone who tattoos their body.

Jones would, however, reject the inclusion of tattooing and the other body

arts into this category. Though Body Art is distinguished by Jones and those

upon whose work she relies as distinct from the broader term "performance"

by its specific reliance on the use of the artist's body as object or material

rather than participant, articulating that the particular Body Art "take[s]

place through an enactment of the artist's body", she adds what I will come to

argue is a somewhat superfluous condition, requiring that such a

'performance' "is then documented such that it can be experienced

subsequently through photography, film, video and/or text" (Jones 1998,13).

The 'art' in Body Art is to be found in the presentation of an event, a

performance, a singular and specific use of the body for a limited time in

pursuit of a defined and deliberate set of artistic objectives. The body itself is

an object of artistic relevance only so long as the performance is ongoing or in

the documentary evidence of the performance. Jones suggests that "the body

art event needs the photograph to confirm its having happened; the

photograph needs the body art event as an ontological "anchor" of its

indexicality. " (Jones 1998,37).

As I outline over the course of the arguments to follow, this is not true for

tattooing and the other quotidian body arts, where the body itself comes to

serve as an art object in the world, whether or not it is photographed and

exhibited in a declared artistic venue or not. It is not necessary for a

photograph to be taken in order for the term "body art" to become a

comprehensible label for these aesthetically transformative procedures, as

implicit in the term "body art" as is an understanding that the body itself

becomes an art object and that there is an artistic quality to the processes

7
involved in the alterations. There is no need for supplementary
documentation to provide a fixed index through which the work can be

comprehended, because the body itself, permanently or at least semi-

permanently changed by some purposive, aesthetically affective act, serves

not simply as a testament of an artistic event but as a product of an artistic

process.

Synopsis

When I embarked upon this project, I had initially planned that the thesis

would make the case for the artistic status of the modified body quite quickly,

and then move on to engaging in specific affective analyses of the body-in-

the-world, much as one might produce a treatment of an artwork, or series of

works. The readings, I thought, would follow a chapter or two in which I

outlined and defended the basic and seemingly self-evident statements that
"body art" was artistic and that an art-theoretical methodology could be

utilised in its study. Through the course of the arguments which follow,
however, discussions of methodology and the intricacies of mapping the

ways in which one might think about painting or sculpture to the ways in

which one might think about tattoos or nose-jobs dominate the entire length

of the discussion. Though the term body art is so often used casually and

carelessly, to sufficiently explain it requires a number of complex and

nuanced investigations of authorship, ownership, objectivity and value.

Furthermore, it emerged over the course of my research and reading that

these investigations often yielded conclusions quite diametrically opposed to

the ways in which body modification had so often been written about. If

"body art" is indeed artistic, and if the analogies implicit in the term survive

any sort of scrutiny at all, then much of the writing about body modification

practice is fatally flawed. If the term body art holds, and I will argue that it

8
does, then there are interesting and immediate consequences for a broader

understanding of the interaction of bodies and the technologies which change

its appearance.

There is essentially an entire class of art objects which have been all but

invisible to art historical study, a class of objects which share many of the

features of objects the discipline includes in its purview but which have only

rarely been even cursorily acknowledged as artistic. These object-bodies

present a vast plain of unexplored territory for art historians, who should find
the products of these folk arts rich in history and possibility. The arguments I

present here comprise an initial case that modified bodies are appropriate for

art-historical study, and I hope by laying bare the problems inherent in the
term "body art" and by proposing solutions to many of them, my work will

allow others within art history and its related disciplines to feel confident

enough to think, discuss and write about bodies in terms similar to those they

are used to using about paintings, prints and sculptures.

The thesis is divided into two halves of three chapters each. The first half is

general, describing the ways in which various practitioners and bearers have

described body art in artistic terms, and then going on to outline the

theoretical frameworks in which such descriptions make sense. The second

half is more specific, focussing on one particular mode of body modification -

tattooing - in order to submit the arguments that body art is indeed a form of

artistic practice to closer, more detailed scrutiny. Throughout the thesis, I

continually relate the implications of my reading of body art as art to work

others have done on these technologies. In this way, I am able to highlight

how an artistic model of the modified body both undermines many of the

arguments made about body modification and simultaneously, in many cases,

9
provides a preferable, more useful, more coherent and more concise
framework for critically engaging with its practices.

The thesis begins in Chapter One by revealing a hitherto un-investigated

strand of artistic sensibility at the heart of V. Vale and Andrea Juno's Modern
Primitives, an era-defining work which documented the practices of the body

modification community as it stood at the end of the 1980s.The book, a series

of interviews with influential and important figures in the body modification

scene at the time, has dominated academic discourse on body modification

since its publication, and so the chapter also serves as an introduction to

much of the recent humanities scholarship on contemporary body

modification practice. Most writers who have cited Modern Primitives have
been sceptical of what they read as its driving ideology, and have thus tended

to dismiss it out of hand, in the process also by extension dismissing the

movement the book purports to chronicle. In the course of the chapter, I argue

that these critical readings of the text fundamentally misrepresent the

interviewees, and miss a crucial strand running through the interviews -a

strand which reveals the beginnings of an argument for the artistic legitimacy

of body modification which I build upon over the subsequent chapters. A

number of the contributors to Modern Primitives, principal amongst them

tattooist Don Ed Hardy, see the tattoos, piercings and other modifications

they wear and perform in explicitly artistic and creative terms.

Chapter Two examines what a theory of art which can account for body art

might look like. I present here another body modification practitioner who

sees his work in terms similar to those I highlight in the preceding chapter as

present in Modern Primitives. Anthony Berlet, a plastic surgeon from New

York, curated an exhibition in 2009 called I Am Art, in which he presents his

profession as an artistic one, comparing himself and his colleagues directly in

10
the show's literature and indirectly in its curation to Renaissance sculptor.

The bodies of the patients and clients he treats become living works of art,

objects to be beholden and admired as art even without the contextual

framing of an institution or performance. The idea that the body is

permanently available for appreciation in artistic terms is not one which is

easy to reconcile with many theories of art, though here I demonstrate its

compatibility with the aesthetic theories of John Dewey and their revision in

recent years by Richard Schusterman. Dewey's fashioning of art as experience

- something to be encountered and enjoyed as well as contemplated and

considered and Shusterman's incorporation of these ideas into a theory he

-

calls "somaesthetics" which describes and promotes the corporeal aspects of

-

aesthetics and the aesthetic aspects of the corporeal art and life
- collapse

together and provide a framework within which the basic premise that body

art is art can be held to be tenable. Moreover, I argue, such a framework

facilitates a re-evaluation of the terms in which criticism of hegemonic and

normative forces on the appearance of bodies in contemporary societies might

be expressed, and suggests a number of strategies by which such forces might

be resisted.

Chapter Three extends this investigation of the implications of

conceptualising technologies which alter the appearance of the body3. Here, I

expand upon the previous chapter's exploration for appropriate theoretical

groundings by drawing on the work of Deleuze and Guattari, whose theories

on art and affect share much in spirit with Dewey. Like Dewey, Deleuze and

Guattari's theories rely on notions of affect, and this chapter describes the

practical, political and analytical consequences of understanding the modified

body in affective terms. I take Deleuze and Guattari's theoretical construct of

3A version of this chapter has been published in a recent edited collection. (Lodder 2009)

11
the Body without Organs (BwO) and map it onto bodies transformed by

several forms of body art practice. The modified body fulfils the criteria for
being understood as a BwO, and over the course of this chapter I examine

how this fulfilment can function both descriptively and inspirationally,

providing analysts a theoretical lexicon to describe and understand body art

and presenting those who would modify their bodies with a map to better

understand the potentialities and pitfalls of their corporeal choices.

In the second half of the thesis, I scrutinise the label of body art in detail,

through an extended and detailed investigation of tattooing as an art form

and as a mode of artistic production. Of all the forms of body modification

that may be understood as body art, tattooing most resembles and is most

often hastily compared to more conventional forms of art making, and the
following three chapters investigate to what extent these analogies hold. The

latter part of the thesis moves away slightly from singularly focussing on the

affective qualities of body art in order to spend some time addressing some of

the features of its production. I make this move principally to illustrate the

flaws inherent in arguments which take an approach which is too

deconstructive and too narrowly focussed on the subjective intentions of the

individual whose body is modified.

To this end, the principal aim of Chapter Four is to rehabilitate the tattoo

artist in the critical understanding of the tattoo. Discussions of tattooing by

cultural theorists, be they laudatory or critical, are usually predicated on a

notion that the tattoo is expressive of some singular, textual truth which

reveals some specific feature of its particular wearer's subjective intention.

This assumption, I argue, is fatally flawed, as (amongst other reasons)

tattooing will almost always involve another person, the tattooist, in what is a

fundamentally intersubjective production process. The chapter firstly

12
examines the ethical ends to which this assumption has been put, explains its

error and then, through reference to various models of collaborative art

practice, demonstrates how thinking about tattooing in developed and well-

rounded artistic terms can offer a solution. The chapter concludes with two

case studies in which this point is borne out. The examples in question
illustrate the limits of singular authorship in tattooing, as in each case either

the tattooist or the bearer attempts, but ultimately and inevitably fails to

produce a work of art which is entirely their own. On the one hand, I discuss

tattooist Adrian Lee and his colleagues at New Skool Tattoo in Southern

California, who over the course of two bounded and considered art projects

attempted to use the skins of their clients in a manner as close possible to that

which they would use a non-living surface. Lee and the other participants set

out to produce a series of large backpiece tattoos, beginning with conceptual

sketches and moving on to full-scale art on skin, though their efforts to

produce truly unencumbered tattoos entirely of their own creative minds

were inevitably thwarted to varying extents by the inescapable fact that the

'canvas' for a tattoo is a living, embodied human being with their own

wishes, desires and opinions regarding their personal aesthetic. By way of

contrast, I present the work of printmaking student Lee Wagstaff, who

entered his own tattooed body as his portfolio for his degree show at the

RCA, as evidence of his artistic endeavours over the course of his degree.

Though he had not carried out the tattooing, he had provided his tattooist

with exacting and precise instructions. And yet as theoretical discussions on

printmaking reveal, the process of printmaking, like the process of being

tattooed, will (usually) involve the assistance of a technical, skilled artisan

with their own particular methods and preferences, all of which impact on the

qualities of the final product.

13
Chapter Five concerns itself with the objective features of the tattoo as an

artwork, and the ways in which tattoos have made incursions into art

galleries. If the tattoo is an art object, it is one whose properties seem at first

glance to render it entirely unlike the other forms of artwork with which it is

often compared: it is seemingly inextricable from the body on which it was

produced; it is literally priceless, resisting, through its inextricability, any

attempt to buy or sell it; and it cannot readily be institutionalised by museums

or galleries. Here, I discuss the ways in which such assumptions have been

challenged through the work of a series of body- and fine-artists, curators,

anatomists and tattoo collectors. In London in 2004, a group of curators

inspired by a Roald Dahl short story staged a show featuring the work of a

number of well-renowned visual artists, produced as tattoos on the skin of a

number of volunteers. In 2008, a tattoo still attached to its wearer was sold for

tens of thousands of Euro to a gallery in Germany. Over the course of the 20th

Century, tattoos have occasionally shown up in museums and private

collections, removed with or without consent from their wearers' bodies after
death. And, most disturbingly, at the end of the 19th Century, Western

galleries were so intrigued by the shrunken, tattooed heads of Maori warriors

for their artistic curiosity, and sought to buy so many of them from the

opportunistic traders bringing back artefacts from the Antipodes, that Maori

chiefs resorted to tattooing and beheading their slaves in return for the

rewards the traders offered them.

Most of the examples used in the thesis rely to a greater or lesser degree on

the artistic qualities of body art being expressed figuratively or decoratively.

In the final chapter, Chapter Six, I discuss the work of two fine artists whose

work features tattooing used towards conceptual ends, where the tattoo's

specific material characteristics carry the conceptual and political content of

their art. The first half of the chapter presents the work of New York tattooist

14
Spider Webb, who produced the world's first conceptual tattoos. Webb uses

tattooing in pursuance of stated political aims and is dedicated to broadening

tattooing's artistic horizons by applying it to ends not constrained by directly

purposive intention or simple representation. His work underscores and

crystallises precisely the broad arguments of the thesis: that the body arts
have both great utility as an engaging and creative form of art-making; that

the body made always into art is a confounding, confusing and potentially

politically powerful object; and that an approach to both producing and

understanding body art which takes notice of its artistic nature is one which is

ultimately useful, coherent and enlightening.

The second half of the chapter discusses the work of Santiago Sierra, who has

paid homeless people, prostitutes and immigrant labourers to each get

tattooed with a single black line. By neutralising the decorative features of

tattooing and by so directly subverting its participants' personal agency,

Sierra's work distils the affective potential of tattooing to its most direct

components. From insights his work generates, the chapter then engages with

the trend for people auctioning space on their bodies for tattooed advertising,

a phenomenon for which it is difficult to produce a coherent ethical treatment.

By comparing Sierra's work with a set of issues arising from tattoos beyond a

delineated context, the thesis concludes by demonstrating how thinking of the

modified body in art-theoretical terms can prove useful to the study of bodies

more generally.

15
Chapter One
The Myths of Modem Primitivism
A good shamanistic answer to 'Why do thesethings? ' is BECAUSE IT'S
FUN! It's more fun than getting on a bus and going to work in the
morning. It's morefun than going to collegeand getting a Ph.D
- Fakir Musafar (in Vale and Juno 1989)

They paint, puncture, tattoo, scarify, cicatrize, circumcise, subincise

themselves.They use their own flesh as so much material at hand for -
what? We hardly know how to characterize it - Art? Inscription? Sign
language?
- Alphonso Lingis (Lingis 1983,22)

Christian Klesse defines "Modern Primitives" as "a subcultural movement in

the intersection of the tattoo, piercing and sado-masochism scenes". This

'movement', he explains, "originated in the 1970s in California, USA, growing

in numbers and significance in the following decades" (Klesse 2000). Virginia

Eubanks' definition is broader: "Modern Primitives", she says, "are loosely

defined as those who participate in contemporary rituals that include

extensive body piercing, constriction (binding), scarification, 'tribal' tattooing,

and branding" (Eubanks 1996). Michael Atkinson describes how the neo-

primitives are considered "the most influential of the new groups of tattoo

artists and enthusiasts". (Atkinson 2003,45). A report by The Institute of

Cultural Research floridly describes how

16
 Today's 'modern primitives' use tattoos, piercings and other
forms of skin design to perform almost exactly the same

functions as that of our ancestors: they use them to forge

'tribal' affiliations - and within that circle they have come to

represent a collective common language and set of aesthetic

values. They may even represent superstitious or magical

belief. More curious still, they do so not in the rain forest, but

in the concrete jungles of our inner cities. (Institute for

Cultural Research 2000)

To take such critics at their word would be to assume that there exists or

existed a vast community of people coalescing around an organising

philosophy, self-identifying as individuals or groups under the labels

"modern primitive", "neo-primitive" and "neo-tribalist". The movement has

dominated the sociological, anthropological and cultural studies literature on

contemporary body modification practices in the West and is so pervasive in

academic discourse that even works which devote themselves to body

modification practices, philosophies and frameworks beyond the "primitive"

paradigm (Atkinson 2003; Fenske 2007; MacCormack 2006; Pitts 2003; Sanders
2008; Sullivan 2001) feel compelled to at least make reference to the notion of

modern primitivism, if only to comprehensively reject its tenets.

It is my contention that this movement never truly existed. Over the course of

this chapter, I want to argue that through a series of fundamental misreadings

and due to a number of unfounded assumptions, the idea of "modem

primitivism" as a movement has been accorded a status far greater than it

legitimately deserves given the ultimately limited influence of the

philosophies accorded to it. Furthermore, I will suggest that in making these

assumptions, academic writing on body modification in general has largely

17
ignored another, more interesting, more vital and more useful set of

conceptualisations of the processes and results of corporeal transformation.

This marks the beginning of a case for body modification as body art,

revealing a core set of explicitly artistic sensibilities in the attitudes and

approaches of a number of influential figures in the contemporary body

modification community.

The term "modern primitive" was coined in the mid-1970s by a body

modification practitioner known as Fakir Musafar4 (Musafar 1996; 2002; 2003;

Vale and Juno 1989). According to Musafar, a "modern primitive" is "a non-

tribal person who responds to primal urges and does something with the

body" (Musafar in Vale and Juno 1989,15), with "primal urges" understood

to mean some aculturally innate drive to mark, decorate or otherwise alter

one's own body. Inspired from childhood by photographs in National

GeographicMagazine and by anthropology textbooks to ape and appropriate

so-called "primitive" body-modification practices including tattooing,

piercing, scarification, branding and flesh-hook suspension, Musafar and a

small clique of associates from southern California developed a philosophy

and way of life based on what they called "body play", which they saw as
directly oppositional to and as spiritually, ethically and even psychologically

preferable to the "civilized" culture of America and the West. Whist tattooing

was by the 1970s already enjoying something of a renaissance in popularity

and artistic ambition (Fleming 2000; Millin 1997; Rubin 1988; Sanders 2008),

until Musafar publicly displayed his body piercings at a tattoo convention in

4 In Modern Primitives, Musafar says he coined the term in 1967. Elsewhere, he says 1978
(Musafar 1996,325). Given that the later date coincides with the coagulation in LA of a
distinct group of people meeting to share their interest in body piercing and the date at which
he has suggested he went "public", the truth is likely somewhere between the two.

18
 I

I
IF
11Rý.
Y

QN

4:) IL fA

1,.:
sý

Figure 1 fakir Musafar hanging by flesh hooks performing an Indian O-Kec'-Pa Ceremony

(photograph by Charles Gatewood)

19
Nevada in 1977 (Musafar 2002,9)5 body modifications such as piercings,
brandings and sacrifications were still so rare as to be practically unheard of'.

Musfar's modern primitivism combines participation in a bewilderingly

disparate set of tribal body practices with an ill-defined and woolly

conception of spirituality. From the piercings of the Masai to the ecstatic

dances of Indian sadhus, from Maori tattoos to Native American flesh-

hanging rituals and from the penile implants of Japanese Yakuza gangs to the

stretched necks of the Padung women of Thailand, any form of body

modification or bodily-orientated ritual with an appropriately "tribal" lineage

is deemed appropriate for appropriation and redeployment in pursuit of self-

discovery.

Of particular importance in Musafar's philosophy is a notion of normativity.

Tribal precedent confers authority upon specific practices, and he is directly

critical of those who modify their bodies in ways not sanctioned by an

appropriately "primitive" antecedent. "There is an increasing trend for

young people to get pierced and tattooed", he suggests.

Some do it as a "real" response to primal urges and some do it

for "kicks" - they aren't serious and they don't know what

they're doing. People are getting piercings and don't know

what they're doing. People are getting piercings in places

where no-one should get them! (Vale and Juno 1989,13)

5 This date is also unclear. Musafar (1996) suggests 1978 as the date, but the revised version of
the same text which appears in A Brief History of the Evolution of Body Adornment in Western
Culture (Perlingieri 2003) revises this to 1977.
6 Musfar claims that "at one meeting in 1975 [... ] we tried to list everyone we knew of in the
subcultures of Western society who had pierced nipples. There were only seven". (1996,326).

20
Musafar demarcates an ethically-significant difference between the same

process used towards "primitive" and "non-primitive" ends. Moreover, he

believes that body modifications should only be undertaken if, firstly, they

have been practiced outside of Western culture, and secondly if the recipient

undergoes the modification with appropriate reverence, ritualism and

awareness of the "primitivism" each modification entails'.

The concept came to prominence following the publication in 1989 of Modern

Primitives - An Investigation of Contemporary Adornment and Ritual by V. Vale

and Andrea Juno (Vale and Juno 1989) and the book, as Nikki Sullivan

explains "has now achieved something of a cult status" (Sullivan 2001,36). It

is the touchstone text for studies of contemporary Western body modification

practices. Every critical engagement with the "modern primitives" or "neo-

tribal" movement is grounded in discussions of it; and it is treated by

commentators as a manifesto or Bible of a defined movement' and the ideas

expressed within it are often taken for the purposes of criticism as

synecdochal of body modification more generally (Turner 2000). The book has

been understood and described as both an ethnographic study of an extant

movement and as the founding inspiration text of a movement that post-

dated it, and, as David Rosenblatt explains, the book itself is often unclear as

to whether it is a polemic text or a dispassionate inquiry. "The book itself

occupies a somewhat ambiguous space between being a commentary on the

phenomenon and a part of it", Rosenblatt argues. "It claims to be an "objective

examination" of modern primitives (according to the back cover copy), yet at

the same time it explicitly endorses their practices as forms of resistance".

(Rosenblatt 1997,300)
.

7 For a clear-cut example of this normative attitude, see Musafar's conversation with Stelarc
about suspensions as described in Body Play and Modern Primitives Quarterly (Musafar 1997)
8 Sullivan correctly claims that "for many it represents the Holy Writ of a rapidly growing
movement" (Sullivan 2001,36).

21
The problem, as I will go on to examine, is not only that nothing that could

truly be called a movement of self-identified "modern primitives" ever

existed either before the book was published or afterwards (and never could
have actually existed in the terms in which it has been criticised), but also that

the book itself has been repeatedly misrepresented, with analysis of large

swathes of the interviews within it almost entirely absent from the literature.

Almost every piece of writing I have cited thus far is harshly and, I would

argue, justifiably critical of Musafar's ideas and ideology. They are idealistic,

idealizing and even potentially offensive. They rely on some extraordinarily

naive and muddled conceptions of traditional non-Western bodily practices.

They pick and choose from practices from an enormous range of time-periods

and geographical locations and attempt to mash them together into a coherent

set of beliefs and aims. In short, they do not hold up to the sustained scrutiny

to which they have been subjected, and cultural critics have taken much care

and time to dissect the concept of "modern primitivism" and undermine its

legitimacy and its sense. Nevertheless, I want to argue that although this

criticism is for the most part entirely correct, it is also almost universally

quixotic.

"Modern Primitives" in Modern Primitives

There are two distinct mistakes which saturate discussions of Modern

Primitives: assuming everyone in the book subscribes to a philosophy

informed by primitivism, and that this philosophy is reflective of how a larger

movement of individuals relate to their bodies and the modification practices

they undergo.

22
The first error is born out of a shallow reading of the book as a whole:

Musafar's ideas do not make up the whole of Modern Primitives; they occupy

only 36 of its 200-plus pages, and Musafar cannot legitimately be said to be

ideologically representative of anything other than his own ideas9. When

writers such as Eubanks and Klesse write about "modern primitives", what
they are doing is writing only about Fakir Musafar and "a handful of other

activists"10 (Musafar 2003,28) from his immediate social circle in southern

California in the 1970s. Rosenblatt argues that "looking at the book, it seems

as though the whole history of Western speculation about other cultures has

been tossed into a blender with more than a little New Age mysticism and

some contemporary sexual radicalism thrown in besides" and that "this is

some sort of fun- house mirror image of the mobilizations of "tradition" that

are such a striking feature of the contemporary Pacific" (Rosenblatt 1997), but

whilst this certainly applies to much of Musafar's philosophy, this criticism

cannot fairly be levelled at the book as a whole.

9 Mindy Fenske analyses Musafar's influence over the text in some detail, suggesting that his
"body, his ideas, and perspectives are the gateway and subsequent interpretative frame
provided for readers as they navigate the world of the text" and that his "representation
performatively constructs the imagined "tribal" culture that authorizes much of the modern
primitive discourse in the text" (Fenske 2007,118).
10 A previous version of Musfar's article published elsewhere renders this as "atavists"
(Favazza 1996,327. Quotes in original) - meaning a throwback or reversion to an earlier type.
The two words suggest rather different, though not mutually exclusive, conceptions of how
Mufasar saw the role of his circle of friends and acquaintances in bringing practices such as
body-piercing to a wider audience. In the first version, which is printed as the Epilogue to the
second edition of Armando Favazza's psychiatric study Bodies Under Siege, "atavist" seems
better to fit the general context of the work in which it appears, succinctly and defensively
summarising Musafar's nostalgic and backward-looking philosophy. In the second version,
"activists" is used (without quote marks). In a book published by one of Musafar's students
which explicitly positions itself as drawing a continuum between historical and
contemporary body modification practices, and which is explicitly sympathetic to Musafar's
philosophy, it is not surprising to see Musafar - an advertising executive - presenting himself
more explicitly as having engaged in an active and directed programme of cultural activism.
As the paragraph in which the term appears follows descriptions of his first public
presentations of his modern primitive philosophy, and has him describing his "popularity
and influence", "activist" does not seem to be simply a mis-print.
Klesse's article is a glaring example of this tendency to treat Musafar's ideas

as presented in Modern Primitives as not only representative of a coherent

philosophy espoused by all those Vale and Juno interviewed, but also as a

synecdoche of all body modification practice in the West. "Vale and Juno's
influential book", he explains, "contains a sample of interviews with people

(mainly tattoo artists) who locate themselves within Modern Primitivism"

(Klesse 2000,17). This is not true: as Cyril Siorat points out, "many of the

contributors to Modern Primitives do not refer to themselves as 'modern

primitives' but share some sensibilities with some aspects of the agenda of

this particular network" (Siorat 2005,208). Of the twenty-four interviews in

the book, only two - Musafar and his close friend and acquaintance Jim Ward
describe their own practices in these specific terms. Several -
- explicitly
including Leo Zulueta, Jane Handel, Hanky Panky and Vaughn - are inspired

by certain aesthetic features of blackwork tattooing, which is quite different

from a full-scale, metaphysically-inspired appropriation of "primitivism" as a

defined set of ethical behaviours. Others, like Genesis P.Orrige, seem to define

their relationship with tattooing and body piercing in terms conceptually

quite oppositional to those espoused by Musafar: "I don't think [these

practices] are primitive", he states (Genesis P. Orrige in Vale and Juno 1989,

178). And for others, the term "primitive" does not seem apposite at all: how

can the term sensibly apply to Sheree Rose or Raelyn Gallina, for example,

whose interviews reveal both to hold a liberated, queer and resolutely

modern model of empowered female sexuality and whose preferred body

modifications - genital piercings and sado-masochistic cutting - have no

direct analogue in tribal societies? Gallina even explicitly distances herself

from the primitive paradigm, telling Andrea Juno that "I haven't done any
[scarifications] the way different African tribes do it for social or sexual

reasons; i. e. a woman is available or a woman has gotten married" (Gallina in

Vale and Juno 1989,104).

24
This overly broad conceptualisation of the motivations of Modern Primitives'

interviewees also appears in Eubanks' article Zones of Dither. Whilst she

rightly claims, for example that "the motivation for Modern Primitives'

modification of the body varies widely from subject to subject", she goes on to

assert that "a common impetus is a fascination with non-European ritualistic

practices" (Eubanks 1996,76), a statement that does not apply to Gallina, to

Satanist Anton LaVey, to sideshow performers Tattoo Mike and Captain Don,

or to several of the tattoo artists and collectors featured, including Vyvyn

Lazonga and Ashleigh Raffloer. Often, even in interviews where non-

European practices are referred to, it is only as part of a broader modification

narrative that does not fit within the paradigm of atavistic essentialist

romanticism Eubanks criticises and Musafar's philosophy normatively

requires: Bill Salmon, who gets a traditional Samoan tattoo as only one

amongst the vast number of others he has acquired, falls into this category, as

does Jane Handel, who claims "I wanted work that was inspired by

traditional tribal designs, but contemporary too, and abstract in the sense that

it wasn't rigidly symbolic of any religious or cultural references" (Jane Handel

in Vale and Juno 1989,77). Whilst she is correct to accuse Musafar of "blatant

disregard for the history and context of the symbols and practices involved"

(Eubanks 1996,74), this is not an accusation that can be levelled at those such

as Handel who do not seek to directly appropriate specific tribal practices.

Moreover, whilst I agree with her criticisms of the essentialism of the modern

primitive philosophy and its particular approach to "authenticity", gender

and race, those criticisms do not hold for many of the other interviewees.

The mistake is understandable: the lack of clarity may at least in part be

blamed on Vale and Juno themselves. Mindy Fenske, for example, has argued

persuasively that leading questions and some misleading editorialising on the

part of Vale and Juno contribute at least in part to the assimilation of every

contributor into what has been perceived as the over-arching schema of the
book. Focussing on the interview with "Tattoo" Mike Wilson, a heavily-

tattooed sideshow performer based out of New York's Coney Island, Fenske

firstly identifies that there are no explicit textual or visual references to non-

Western body modification within his section of the book, and goes on to

notice that the editors italicise a very particular sentence in Wilson's narrative:

Seeing more and more circus photos inspired me. Also, when I

was thirteen, I was studying a lot of Surrealist art. I saw

photos of a stage production of jean Cocteau starring a heavily

tattooed man and this became a key, signifying a possible way

of going through the looking glass for me to achieve a whole

other frame of reference, and to elicit experiences beyond the

"normal"
... presenting yourself as a signal beacon drawing

things to happen to you. In other words tattoos as a passageto

another life. However, I've never had an absolute philosophical

or religious program behind what I was attempting to do. But

getting heavily tattooed definitely made interesting things

happen to me! (Tattoo Mike in Vale and Juno 1989,38-39 as

cited in Fenske 2008,129)

"The highlighted text focuses on the modern-primitive orientated discourse of

tattooing as metaphysical experience", illustrates Fenske. "The editors italicise

the word that might cut against this non-neotribal message" (Fenske 2007,

129).

Nevertheless, I find this accusation of conspiracy too strong. Fenske's reading

is justifiable, but it is undermined by a close reading of the editors' own

words. Vale and Juno's own editorial introduction to Modern Primitives (the

only place their voice is heard outside of the context of the interviews) points

out that the book "presents a wide range of rationales, ranging from the

functional to the extravagantly poetic and metaphysical" (Vale and Juno

...
1989,5). They caution against a "cliche-ridden allusion to what is primitive"

and state quite explicitly that primitive societies have been "dubiously
idealized and only partially understood". When glimpses of their own

conceptions of body modification emerge, they differ starkly from the

reductionist and backward-looking ideas Musafar espouses, praising

unbounded, agency-driven corporeal creativity, and claiming (in a citation

from Roger Cardinal) that body modifications "are not something tapped

from the cultural reservoir" (Vale and Juno 1989,4). And whilst they cause

considerable confusion by calling their book Modern Primitives, their every use

of the word "primitive" or "modern primitive" in their introduction and

throughout the book is encapsulated in qualifying speech marks, suggesting

they are not themselves necessarily endorsing the philosophies inherent in the

terms. Rather, it seems that they can be said to be using them simply as

nomenclature or as a convenient shorthand for the practices the book

contains. A fully-formed reading of Modern Primitives must account for its

multi-vocality and how it represents (and is intended to represent) a snapshot

of a heterogeneous subculture and not the singular manifesto of a normative

philosophy.

One final note of caution must be extended to those who would attempt to

frame all contemporary body modification in primitive terms, as Bryan

Turner has done (Turner 2000). Although he does not refer to Modern

Primitives directly, he does expressly refer to tattooing as "contemporary

primitivism", and is caustically critical of the appropriation of traditional

body modifications, seeing them as "ironic", "thin", "cliche" and ultimately
meaningless given that those in the West who engage in them are
disconnected from any explicitly tribal context. Turner can only come to this

conclusion by assuming that contemporary modifiers are attempting (and

failing) to reproduce the social significance of traditional body practice, rather

than deploying them in pursuit of a different set of motivations and with a

different set of objective and subjective ends. When even Fakir Musafar

himself has described that even many of those who came to him to get pierced

or scarred did not share his primitive drives", it makes no sense to suggest

that everyone with a tattoo is necessarily and inescapably being "ironic",

even if that tattoo's aesthetic is influenced by traditional styles.

Modern Primitives as Movement

The second mistake made repeatedly in academic and popular readings of

Modern Primitives and body modification subcultures in the 1990s is that the

book either describes or went on to inspire a large and identifiable

"movement" under that name. (Atkinson 2003; Atkinson and Young 2001;
Campbell 1998; Cummings 2001; DeMello 1995; Pitts 2003; Rosenblatt 1997;

Sweetman 1999; Torgovnick 1995; Turner 2000; Wojcik 1995). All of these

articles either refer directly to "the Modern Primitive movement", more

generally to "modern primitives" in a broad context beyond an analysis of the

book, or, in Bryan Turner's case, ascribe "primitivist" views to anyone

tattooing and piercing themselves.

In some cases, this error is intertwined with the first's implicit assumption

that any and all body modifications should inherently be thought to be

"primitive". For example, Kleese's working assumption, as I have already

11"Some of the reasons were radically skewed from those of other cultures, reasons never or
seldom heard in tribal cultures" (Musafar 1996,329).
discussed, is that everyone chronicled in Modern Primitives either self-

identifies with this label or can be defined in the terms Musfar demarcates for

modern primitivism in the book's first chapter. From this initial error, he

allows the assumption of an underlying primitivist philosophy to leak into his

more general discussions of the role of body modification in Western culture.

"Although Modern Primitives rigorously reject the materialism of Western

consumer culture", he asserts on the basis of a reading supported only by

citations from Musafar and other critics such as Marianna Torgovnick who

make the same error (Torgovnick 1995), "small-scale businesses of

professional piercers and tattoo artists have been established in all larger

cities" (Klesse 2000,21). This is a fallacious argument: it is certainly not the

case that all or even many tattoo shop owners would subscribe to the form of

primitivism Kleese is (correctly) critiquing in his article (see for example

Sanders 2008). From the simple categorical error formulated in a hasty

reading of Modern Primitives, Kleese has proceeded to ascribe to a vast

number of individuals an identity, a politics and even a metaphysics which

they themselves would likely make no claim to.

A further problem with these readings is a chronological one. Fakir Musafar

himself has argued that the "modern primitive movement" followed from the

book - that the book's global success inspired the formation of a group of

individuals who took the label upon themselves "The role models and

archetypes that they found in Modern Primitives encouraged a whole new

generation of people to use their bodies for self-expression", he explains. "The

Modern Primitive Movement had been born. " (Musafar 1996,327) If this is

true, however, it is hard to see how those in the book can be read as belonging

to something representing a large "movement" at the time the book was

published.
There is a tendency in many readings of Modern Primitives to read the book

simultaneously as both an anthropology and as a manifesto, something

Rosenblatt notes, albeit awkwardly. Though he acknowledges that "not all of

those interviewed would necessarily employ the term", "out of these sources

and observations no single coherent meaning of modern primitive adornment

emerges" and "certainly body modification is practiced and understood in

multiple frameworks", he still analyses those within the book as if they

represented a homogenous set of opinions:

The book itself occupies a somewhat ambiguous space

between being a commentary on the phenomenon and a part

of it. [... ] The book is perhaps best understood as a native

metacommentary, and as such it reflects a particular point of

view within the community of people interested in body

modification. (Rosenblatt 1997,298)

Here, he reduces the multifaceted viewpoints expressed within Modern

Primitives to "a particular point of view" simply to broaden the range of his

legitimate criticisms of Musafar's ideologies. And he continues:

People get tattooed, pierced, and scarred for a variety of

reasons, and there are no "experts" who hold the key for the

observer. Indeed, the people who hold forth on body

modification are for the most part self-consciously

individualistic. Yet certain themes recur in the reasons they

give for their acts. As much as they strive to connect with

some primitive human essence, they express peculiarly

Western concerns with the relation between the "self" and the

social whole. This shared concern with the self is one of the
 things that unites the practices grouped under the heading

"modern primitivism. " (Rosenblatt 1997,298)

Over the course of a single paragraph, Rosenblatt moves from an acceptance

that body modification has a "variety of reasons" to ascribing to them a

common goal. There is no good reason to do this, and it conflates two

separate issues. It is perfectly possible, for example, to critique the primitivist

philosophy without reference to this strand of selfhood Rosenblatt sees as

indicative of it, which implies that selfhood is not sufficient to define

primitivism. Furthermore, it is similarly possible to critique the tendency for

body modifiers to frame their body modifications in terms of selfhood and the

social without reference to any primitivist ideology (Oksanen and Turtianinen

2005; Velliquette et al. 2006). If Modern Primitives is a commentary on a

defined movement, then there is no reason for Rosenblatt to extend the scope

of his criticisms to people who get tattooed in general. Criticisms of the

modern primitives should not hastily be applied to anyone who happens to

modify their body. If Modern Primitives is not a description of a specific, self-

identified movement, but instead simply a compendium of divergent

viewpoints from people who happen to engage in the same set of practices,

then using the views of one participant in order to criticise the others is

grossly unfair.

Assertions as to the existence of a "modern primitives movement" also suffers

from a lack of credibility. Criticisms of modern primitivism rarely cite any

primary sources other than Modern Primitives or Body Play and Modern
Primitives Quarterly (a magazine Musafar edited) for their descriptions of

what the "movement" believe or even who is supposed to constitute it. If

there is a modern primitives movement, it speaks almost entirely through one

man. Siorat makes this point well: "If there is such a thing as a 'modern

primitive movement', he explains

it is likely to be localized, on the west coast of the USA, and

within the context of a network evolving around a particular

individuals such as Fakir Musafar. [... ] I am not suggesting
that people in London were not inspired by the Modern

Primitives publication, and subsequent work in that field, but

that the identity marker 'modern primitive' seems to be

almost always assigned by non-body modifier individuals, 'in

the know', rather than used as a self-expression of identity

(Siorat 2005).

It is doubtless the case that Modern Primitives introduced countless people to

body modifications of which they were previously unaware and that Musafar

and his friends from southern California paved the way for what became the

modern-day body-piercing industry, but it does not follow that the book's

philosophy (as critics have read it) was absorbed by readers. There is no

empirical evidence to suggest the wide-spread take-up of "modern primitive"

as a label of self-identity. Evidence suggests that rather than wholeheartedly

embrace the defining tenets of primitivism as Musfar understands the term,

with its attendant metaphysical baggage, the book's principle influence was

simply to popularise procedures and aesthetics. As Rosenblatt points out

Vale and Juno's interpretation of body modification did

become compelling within the community. If tattooing,

piercing, and scarification were not already grouped together,

they certainly became so after Vale and Juno's book was

published. This is shown not only by sweeping references I

32
 heard people make to "body decoration" but also by such

volunteered statements as "I could see getting my nose

pierced, but I really wouldn't want to pierce my nipples"

(Rosenblatt 1997,299)

There are occasional exceptions, of course - Blake Perlingieri, owner of a

piercing studio called Nomad in Portland OR is explicit in his acceptance of

the label (Perlingieri 2003,141) and Norwegian performance artist Havve Fjell

openly acknowledges the direct and formative influence Modern Primitives

and Fakir Musafar had on the development of his work (Fjell 2003) but these
-
rare exceptions do not reflect the vast multitude of participants one would
imagine after reading much of the academic literature.

Art and tattooing in the West

The drive to call "modern primitivism" a movement is further undermined by

how the separation of the aesthetic of traditional tribal tattooing from the

ritualism that accompanies it in its original context was already well

established in the West some years before Modern Primitives was published.

Spider Webb released Pushing Ink: The Fine Art of Tattooing in 1979 and Don

Ed Hardy released Tattootime: New Tribalism in 1988, both focussing on the

aesthetic and formal qualities of tattooing as an art form rather than its

spiritual or ethical potential. Alongside presentations of tattoos from the

American naval tradition and tattoos in a fine art context, both works also

feature images of tattooing from New Zealand, Borneo and Samoa, but with

none of the ethical philosophy which categorises Musafar's contributions to

Modern Primitives. Webb is clearly interested in the pre-history of tattooing,

though tribalism does not inform his own work, which owes more to the

avant-garde of conceptual art than it does to any notions of primitiveness or

33
any desire to appropriate ritual significance or symbolism from pre-modern,

non-Western societies.

Figure 2 Don Ed Hardy, The Beginning of All Things, 1982

(photograph by Trina Von Roesenvinge)

In Cliff Raven's contribution to TattooTime, his interest in tattooing as a

decorative art, and in the "treasure trove of form" becomes apparent as he

waxes at length about the visual qualities of geometric black tattoos (Raven

1988). For Hardy himself, "neo-tribal" tattooing "does provide a powerful

option for the repertoire of contemporary creative tattooing" (Hardy 1988b).

The fascination is in the beauty of the abstract tattoos which accentuate and

34
ameliorate the body they adorn, and the work of these tattoo artists and their

contemporaries were already incorporating "tribal" elements before the term

"Modern Primitives" had any currency at all (for example Hardy's work

featured on the cover of New Tribalism (Figure 2) mixes a brightly-coloured

snake in a contemporary American style with abstract blackwork tattooing

which is inspired by but which does not appropriate the stylistic lexicon of

any particular tribal community).

Arnold Rubin's edited collection Marks of Civilisation further underlines this

point. Like Hardy's New Tribalism, Marks was published in 1988, the year
before Modern Primitives (Rubin 1988), and several of the papers in it argue for

a radically different understanding of contemporary body art practice at the

end of the 1980s than has been read in Modern Primitives. Though it is

subtitled "Artistic Transformations of the Human Body", the papers in

Rubin's book are for the most part methodologically anthropological,

cataloguing and describing tattooing and other body modifications from

across the globe and over a great period of time. Nevertheless, in the book's
final section, a number of contributors who devote themselves to the study of

tattooing in "contemporary Euro-America" do discuss tattooing's artistic

qualities. Their essays present the same moment in time as Modern Primitives,

chronicle the some of the practices and make mention of several of the same

people who appear or are mentioned in Modern Primitives, but their analyses

of tattooing in the 1980s runs contrary to the broad-brushed critiques found in

those who have used Modern Primitives as their primary and principal source.

As Rubin explains in his introduction to this final set of papers,

"contemporary Euro-America body-art represents a distinctive and highly
idiosyncratic synthesis, where the past is demonstrably prologue. " (Rubin
1988,207). Rubin identifies in the "renaissance" of tattooing that was already

emerging by 1988 a fundamental move away from primitivism and atavism

35
towards a "new, broad-based investigation of the expressive possibilities

embodied in tattoo". He even identifies the incorporation of "tribal" styles as

part of this emergence of an innovative "avant-garde" in American tattooing

from the 1950s onwards (Rubin 1988,236); an understanding of contemporary

tattooing almost entirely inverse to those who have read the spread of

blackwork tattoo styles as indicative of a retrograde, primitive move.

Rubin's book, like Modern Primitives, features Don Ed Hardy prominently.

Hardy, one of the key figures in the history of 20t'-Century Western tattooing

(Rubin, 236), is interviewed at length by Vale and Juno, as are number of

people who have been tattooed by him, but his philosophy of creation and
innovation is at odds with Musafar's insistence on authenticity. Hardy's

understanding is that contemporary tattoo collectors get tattoos which are

directly or indirectly "tribal" in origin principally for aesthetic reasons, even if

they suggest reasons which may also include an awareness of and even

reverence for the source of their designs. This makes far more sense
intuitively and empirically than calling everyone who gets a blackwork tattoo
"primitive" and then criticising them on the basis of this label, a label they

would not apply to themselves.

Margo DeMello says that TattooTime was "extremely influential, in

...
creating and promoting a new tattoo style" (DeMello 1995,44), though she

also credits it, along with Modern Primitives of fuelling the uptake of a

primitivist ideology. I think she is incorrect to connect the two works so

definitively, as she is conflating Hardy's conception of a subculture of

tattooed people united by an interest in an eclectic set of aesthetics with the

Modern Primitive notion of an innate drive to modify one's body for self-

orientated, metaphysical ends. And as she herself acknowledges, "TattooTime

does not actively promote this type of lifestyle" (DeMello 1995). She has

36
further argued that the rhetoric of both Modern Primitives and New Tribalism is

indicative and generative of the idea that "primitivism" is an implicit feature

of the way tattoos are discussed and understood, and that this shift in
discourse represents a move on the part of middle-class body modifiers in the

1990s to de-stigmatise tattooing and to conceptualise body modification as

"natural" or "normal". Primitivism, or conceptions of body modification

which resemble it, are problematically responsible for many of the

motivations behind contemporary tattooing and body piercing. "The concepts

of "tribe" and "tribal" have since become," she suggests, "a metaphor for the

entire tattoo culture, incorporating as it does notions of both community as

well as the currently popular ideology of "primitivism"' (DeMello 1995,45). In

a later piece of writing, she argues that "the creation of this new past

sanctions a cultural tradition that was once seen as low class and, through the

essentialist language of primitivism, naturalizes it". (DeMello 2000,183). For

her, the appearance on the market of magazines such as Tattoo Savage

illustrates the profound effect both works had on popular culture's

conception of tattooing. Whilst this may be true to a certain extent, the type of

"primitivism" DeMello finds in such magazines resembles Hardy's

celebration of a multiplicity of aesthetics much more than it does the

philosophy of fully-articulated and normative primitivism which she argues

Modern Primitives contains. (DeMello 1995,49).

I think DeMello's reading is too lacking in detail, and that the influence of

primitivism is narrower than DeMello suggests. Atkinson has argued that

many people learn from tattoo magazines, websites and that rather than being

honest reflections of motivations, these types of responses are the appropriate

and accepted modes of response to the types of questions cultural

commentators like DeMello ask (Atkinson 2003,192). Responses which cite

motivations which reflect the themes of modern primitivism (self-hood,

37
spirituality, innateness) tell us more about the discourse of tattooing than they
do about the genuine motivations or attitudes of those expressing them. She

even casts doubt on her own thesis when she admits that "not everyone today
finds the kinds of meanings in their tattoos that I have been describing [... ]

Many people I interviewed had no readily prepared narrative" (DeMello

2000,183). In focusing on the subjects whose ideology seems to reflect her

contentions and in minimising the importance of those who do not, she

misses a set of powerful counter-arguments within the same works and from
the same individuals she uses as the target of her criticisms.

Modern Primitives and Body Art

The result of all these misreadings and unsupported extrapolations is that

other interesting philosophies which are threaded through Modern Primitives

have more or less been entirely overlooked. Amongst the collection of

quotations which make up the book's final section, Vale and Juno cite one of
Oscar Wilde's famous aphorisms: "One must be a work of art, or wear a work

of art". This quotation, I want to argue, encapsulates and epitomises the most
important and most useful of these unexamined strands: the model of the

body itself as a work of art. With its imperative verb, Wilde's quote is rousing,

inspiring and perhaps even political. It immediately conjures up images of

flamboyant dandies, resplendent in vivid outfits, louche and gauche and

loud. It suggests that the body itself be turned into a masterpiece for others to

gaze upon, ponder and enjoy. Moreover, it draws upon every Romantic trope

of what an artist is and should be, encouraging creativity, dynamism,

inspiration and novelty. To see the body as a work of art seems resolutely

opposed to Musafar's retrospective philosophies of primitivism, which

actively resist novelty and reject creativity.

38
Though Vale and Juno bury this quote in a cacophony of others at the back of

the book, its sentiments echo in the words of several of Modern Primitives

interviewees and even those of the editors:

These body modifications perform a vital function identical

with art: they "genuinely stimulate passion and spring

directly from the original sources of emotion, and are not

something tapped from the cultural reservoir.... Here that

neglected function of art: to stimulate the mind, is unmistakably

alive (Vale and Juno 1989,5)

Over the next section of this chapter, I want to embark on a close reading of

how this strand, and how its principal proponent in the book, Don Ed Hardy,

constructs a model of body modification founded in the art and aesthetics of

body modification. Though I will later test the validity and limits of the

premise which frames body modification as art and in artistic terms, I want
initially to highlight the ways in which this premise emerges from Modern

Primitives supposedly univocal interviews. I will refer again to Hardy in

Chapter Four, where I probe his particular attitude to authorship as it relates

to the act of tattooing, but here I want to focus first and foremost on how

Modern Primitives presents his attitude to the artistic content of the tattoo and

the tattooed body, and the interconnection as he sees it between body

modification and artistic practice.

The earliest use of term "body art" to refer to body modifications appears in

English in 1932 in an article by Eugen J Harnik in the Psychoanalytic Quarterly.

Harnik's article is concerned with producing psychoanalytic readings of

clothing and adornment, and in one section addresses some brief commentary

to tattooing and scarification practiced "among primitive races" (Harnik 1932,

39
236)12.Harnik cites a use of the term in a 1927 text in German called Primitive

Kunst und Psychoanalyse("Primitive Art and Psychoanalysis") by Eckhardt

von Sydow, making it clear that he considers the term to be of Sydow's

invention. "Although we gladly accept Von Sydow's happily applied term

"body art"", Harnik acknowledges, "we can not as yet foresee how a sharp

differentiation between body art and other types of art can be carried

through" (Harnik 1932,238)13.For Hardy, this inextricable continuity of body

art and art as it might more traditionally be understood is deeply embedded

in his practice, his philosophy and his personal history.

Don Ed Hardy grew up in Southern California in the 1950s, and developed an

interest in tattooing in his childhood, intrigued and inspired by the tattooed

sailors he had seen in his neighbourhood. (Govenar 2009) Whilst he was

studying fine art at the San Francisco Art Institute, he describes how he

"realized that tattoo was the great undocumented folk art" (Hardy in Vale

and Juno 1989,64), a realization that propelled him to become both a tattoo

artist and a keen historian and ethnographer of tattooing. In their salutary

introduction to his interview, Vale and Juno hail Hardy as "one of the

foremost practitioners of the ancient art of tattoo [... ] a philosopher, historian,

painter and innovator" (Vale and Juno 1989,50), and over the course of the

discussion, it becomes clear that there is a vast conceptual gulf between his

philosophy and the primitivism which precedes it in the book's schema. "His

goal", the editors declare, is "to raise artistic standards and extend the range

12The term has since gained a large amount cultural currency, and has come to be entirely
synonymous with the term "body modification" in vernacular usage and in academic
writing. Victoria Pitts (2003) uses the term interchangeably with "body modification", and
both Michael Atkinson (2003) and Daniel Wojcik (1995) use the term in the titles of their
books.
13John Dewey's 1934 work Art as Experiencecalls body modifications "plastic arts" (Dewey
1958,227). See Chapter Two.

40
and complexity of symbolism depicted, while reinvestigating and preserving
traditions". (Vale and Juno 1989,50)

The first thing that is striking about Hardy's presentation of his work and his

attitudes to his profession is just how focussed he is on the tattoo and the

tattooed body as objects, rather than on the subjectivity of the embodied self

which so preoccupies Musafar. "Tattoo is in fact a medium", he explains -a

medium he describes as often more rewarding, but equally often more

frustrating than that of paint, a medium bounded in any respects by the limits

of the (embodied) material it requires, but a medium nonetheless. (Vale and

Juno 1989) Whilst Hardy does (and is prompted to) discuss the motivational

and emotions drives of his clients, the roles tattoos play in their lives and their

narrative conceptions of selfhood, and whilst he considers these drives

important and exciting, when given space by his interrogators to speak at

length about tattooing, he always returns to questions of form, aesthetics and

artistic influences. Compared with Musafar's interview, which dwells on the

purity and universality of the drive to interact with one's own body, the pain

of body modification and the libratory potential of the processes he espouses,

the conversation with Hardy is lighter on meditations on the process than it is

on straightforward excitement about and reverence for tattoos. In one

remarkable section, Vale pushes Hardy on his metaphysical perspective,

stating leadingly "It's like the tattoo opens a door to another dimension"

(Vale and Juno 1989,56). Hardy briefly agrees, though he then turns this

question into an opportunity to describe how he is something of a

connoisseur of tattooing, able to discern from the iconography of old sailor

tattoos the date they were applied and the artist who applied them.

41
Figure 3 Attributed to Percy Walters, Rock of Ages, 1920s-1930s

Image from Mod erne1'rimilii es, p. 66

42
Figure 4 ton to Hardy, Rock of Ages, 1988

From Modern Primitives, p. 67

In a bock which has so often be read as a compendium of individuals who

explicitly reject Western and Judeo-Christian culture, Hardy's interview also

stands out for containing two photographs (Figure 3 and Figure 4) featuring

an iconic Christian image, the Rock of Ages (Vale and Juno 1989,66-67) that

entered the contemporary tattoo lexicon from the designs favoured by early to

mid-2011' century American servicemen. Though Hardy's interest in the design

is not predicated on its Christian allusions he also ascribes layers of pagan

-

43
symbolism to the image - the inclusion of these images completely

undermines any homogeneous reading of the book or the culture it has been

purported to represent. Hardy is as reverent about traditional Western

tattooing as he is about that from Polynesia or Japan, and it is difficult to

understand why this resolutely non-primitive influence on a key contributor

has been overlooked by every critic who has written about Modern Primitives.

The book has so often been read as an rejection of Western values, and yet it

features Hardy talking at length about not only Christian symbols, but also

tattoos obtained during military service and his thoughts on the evocative

nature of the images that had become part of the American tattoo

vernacular14.

The interview is liberally interspersed with literate references to art history

one would expect from an arts graduate. Hardy rapidly intermeshes

discussions of tattooing with references to Surrealism, Impressionism,

abstract expressionism, Minimalism, the art market, Kandinsky, Cubism, the

role of institutions and even Kenneth Baker -a far cry from the 1911'
century

anthropology which informs Musafar's modern primitivism. In fact, in what

reads like an express rejection of modern primitivist ideals, he even explicitly

dismisses those who would directly appropriate traditional non-Western

tattooing: "I mean, it's all right if some people really want to ape the Japanese,

or whatever, but the most exciting possibility for me as an artist is to do this

fusion" (Vale and Juno 1989,54). Though he is both aware and respectful of

the history of tattooing in tribal cultures, unlike Musafar he professes no

desire to mimic or simply reproduce them for their own sake. Unlike in the

normative expression of modern primitivism, which sanctions only specific

74See Rubin's chapter 'The Tattoo Renaissance' in Marks for more on Hardy's appreciation for
contemporary Western tattooing, a style Rubin terms "International Folk Style" (Rubin 1988,
233-260)

44
types and configurations of modifications, Hardy's model allows the
"primitive" practice to become simply a means of creating something with

currency and immediacy. In this conception, tattooing is no more

philosophically "primitive" than early forms of painting or sculpture are,

even if the label might be chronologically apposite.

Elsewhere in Modern Primitives, though never as lyrically as in Hardy's

interview, similar models of the body and the tattoo as art objects occasionally

rise to the surface. Jane Handel, for example, explains that "something totally

unique is experienced as one relinquishes one's own body to be used as the

artist's canvas" (Jane Handel in Vale and Juno 1989,78). At the foot of the
interview with Bill Salmon, one of Ed Hardy's apprentices, Modern Primitives

includes a list of the 47 artists whose work Bill has "collected", even going so

far as to compare tattoos with "books in a used bookstore" (Vale and Juno

1989,106). Dan Thome, a merchant seaman who learned to tattoo from native

Mirconesians and whose ideas might plausibly be read in terms of a modern

primitivism Musafar would agree with, repeatedly stresses that tattooing is a

medium, and that innovation is a qualitative factor in telling good tattooists

and bad tattooists apart.

Conclusions

Understanding the body as an art object is not without its problems or its

I
complexities, as will come to discuss in the next chapter. Nevertheless, it has

been sufficient here simply to acknowledge that such a model exists, and

exists at the core of a text which has usually been read as a testament to the
hollow atavism of contemporary Western body modification. Modern

Primitives is undoubtedly the most widely influential work on body

modification practices in the West yet written - it can not unreasonably be

45
said to have been the impetus for the first wave of a nascent body piercing

industry which rippled across North America and Europe in the early 1990s,

bringing exotic body modifications to the attention of countless people, many

of whom were inspired to copy them. And yet its status as a philosophical or
ideological text remains unclear, despite scholarly assertion to the contrary.

There never has been a "movement" of Modern Primitives, driven by

explicitly and avowedly "primitive" desires to seek a higher state of

consciousness through direct manipulation of their own flesh. Musafar's

philosophy is too prescriptive and too esoteric for that ever to have been the

case.

What does emerge from a different reading of Modern Primitives is that at the

same time and the same place as Musafar was developing his notions of

primitivism, another set of individuals, exemplified by Don Ed Hardy, were

asserting a rather different model of body modification. DeMello interviewed

Hardy for her book Bodiesof Inscription. "Ed Hardy", she says, "is both critical

of modern primitivism and how he influenced it".

It's intriguing to see it [primitivist rhetoric] used by people as

essentially the new kitsch. They're not very original designs,

but they pick up on this thing how it's meaningful for them,

how it's a journey or a rite of passage and all that stuff, and

it's kind of incredible that that's going on. You know it makes

them feel better and they like it and that's OK. I get so sick of

hearing all that stuff, and of course I know that I started a lot

of it because I started focusing on that in the first TattooTime

just kind of to make people aware of it, but it's just so corny

now. (Don Ed Hardy interviewed in DeMello 2000,182)

46
Though DeMello insists that Hardy's writing is directly responsible for the

spread of the concepts of primitivism, his attitude here illustrates precisely

that he has unwittingly been co-opted by cultural critics and some tattoo

collectors into a discourse of primitivism which he wants to have nothing to

do with. Those who read in Hardy's contributions to TattooTime and Modern

Primitives a singular commitment to primitivist philosophy fundamentally

misrepresent Hardy's attitudes and the attitudes of body modifiers in general.

Hardy is clear: his interest is and always has been primarily in the aesthetic

dimension of his craft more so than any specific notions of selfhood. What is

important, rather, is the art of the tattoo, the art of body art.

47
Chapter Two
I Am Art

Art is not nature, but is nature transformed by entering into new

relationships where it evokesa new emotional response
- John Dewey (Dewey 1958,79)

Does it make sense to think of the human body as an art object? If the

vernacular body arts are credibly to be understood as artistic and the

modified body as an object of artistic study, this is a problem which needs to

be examined from first principles. Over the course of this chapter I will

approach the fundamental question of whether or not the human body can be

thought of as art or not through an examination of a recent art exhibition

which makes a claim for the artistic status of the human body in the plainest

and most direct of terms.

Plastic Surgery as Artistic Practice

Between March 28th and May 9th 2009, a show entitled I Am Art - An

Expression of the Visual and Artistic Process of Plastic Surgery was held at

Apexart, a small not-for-profit gallery in New York City. Curated by Anthony

Beriet, M. D, a plastic surgeon and trained architect, the group show exhibited

a series of 'before', 'during' and 'after' photos of aesthetic surgery patients,

videos of a selection of procedures and what are described in the

documentation for the exhibition as "Sculptures (three-dimensional

reconstructions from actual patient photographs)" (2009b, 6). From the

48
Figure 5 Installation shot of 'Before' and 'After' images from I Am Art, apexart New York,
2009

(photograph courtesy of apexart).

49
 ýV,
r

Figure 6 Installation shot from I Am Art. apexart New York, 2009

(photograph courtesy of apexart).

reconstructive and highly medicalised images labelled "Bilateral cleft lip

-

repair with columellar (nasal column between nostrils) lengthening" by

Antonino Cassisi or "Staged nasal reconstruction following traumatic

avulsion from dog bite" by Scott Spiro - to surgeries more straightforwardly

aesthetic - "Breast enhancement" by Michael Cohen, "Rhinoplasty" by Berlet

himself the show exhibited documentary evidence of a diverse range of

-

procedures with a variety of intentions, aims and results. Children, young

and adult men all displayed in large-format photographs prior to

women

surgery, then covered in blood at the hands of the surgeon-artist, then made

beautiful, or at least apparently normalised.

In the press release for the show, Beriet explains that

50
 plastic surgery is a most challenging art form-perhaps the

most challenging art form, for our materials are not canvas

or clay. Yes, we embrace the great obsession of artists

throughout the ages: the human body. But our material is

the human body. We are asked, on a daily basis, to do the

impossible, to make the real ideal, to bridge the gap

between reality and fantasy. Plastic surgery is the constant

struggle between beauty and blood supply.

There is art in everything we do. The initial evaluation

requires a keen eye. The surgery plan requires artful

preparation. The execution can best be described as a well-

choreographed ballet of many different steps. Through this

dance of medicine and art, science and aspiration, we seek

an outcome as beautiful as any painting or sculpture.

Every day, we strive to outdo Pygmalion. Is perfection

possible? We know it is not, and yet, that is our calling. We

work with terrible constraints, not the least of which is the

subjective nature of art itself. (Berlet 2009a, n. p. )

The show aimed to re-position the often-contentious field of plastic surgery

within a more worthy and legitimate (and legitimising) set of discourses -

those of art, art criticism and art history - by making the claim that the plastic

surgeon is a craftsman, an artisan and an artist, and therefore that his patients

are his canvas. The rhetoric of the show's documentation is laced with self-

congratulation, where plastic surgeons are compared to Picasso and

Pygmalion, to sculptors and ballet choreographers, though it also often reads

as defensive and justificatory. It is as if Beriet and his colleagues feel they

have something to prove to an audience and a public sceptical of the plastic

51
surgeon's motives. Such rhetoric deliberately and almost didactically

positions the exhibition against the type of criticism so frequently aimed at his

profession, so regularly critiqued and criticised by both popular and academic

writers. "Our field is sometimes associated with excess", he says, quite

bluntly. "This exhibition aims to convince you otherwise". (Beriet 2009b, 4)

The photographs which make up the exhibition are mostly of a format

instantly-recognisable to anyone who has ever flicked through the back pages

of a tabloid magazine. In the images featuring reconstructive procedures, the

grotesque and the abnormal and the damaged body parts in the 'before' are

emphasised by foregrounding blood and scars on faces again conspicuously

pale through lack of make up; compare the lustrous, pretty faces of women

and bonny-eyed children hung next to them in the 'after' images (Figure 5).

In those of the unashamedly aesthetic procedures, pale, pasty faces in profile

feature prominently in the 'before' images, mouths turned down at the

corners as if to emphasise the subjects' dissatisfaction with their features; in

the 'after' images, a slight hint of a smile, faces pink with blusher and make-

up and eyeliner and the warm glow. Two sets of images of a rhinoplasty

patient exemplify this (Figure 6, left-most series of images): in her before

photos, she is shrouded in shadow; her portrait shows no hint of teeth

revealed by a smile; her hair looks unbrushed and unstyled. In the photos

after the operation, in which her nose has been reshaped and made smoother

and daintier, and its slight hook removed; she is bathed in a warmer light; she

is visibly smiling, her teeth are visible, and her hair is smoothed, styled and, it

seems, highlighted. "Noses may have a bulbous tip, or a large hump, or a

wide bridge with essentially no hump", explains the show's brochure, "and to

recreate and reshape such a nose becomes an artistic process with an

architectural fundamental principle". (Beriet 2009b, 2)

52
The work of the plastic surgeon has been held as emblematic of all that is to

be despised about contemporary culture and its purportedly shallow

obsessions with beauty, youth and homogeneous artifice (Davis 2003; Haiken
1997; Wolf 1991), and this exhibition seems to be attempting to construct a

bulwark for the profession within the rarefied world of high-art. There are

marked and immediate concerns to be raised in connection with the

exhibition's purported focus on the idealised and normative, concerns the

show does not engage with directly. Nevertheless, it would require a separate

volume of research to properly probe the issues around the aesthetics of

plastic surgery and the political issues of beauty in a contemporary society

where such surgical interventions are ever-more available and ever-more

sought out, let alone the implicit socio-psychological claim of the smiling
'Afters' that surgery truly makes you happy. These issues are tangential to the

thrust of the arguments I wish to present here, and the work of a great

number of other scholars afford this difficult issue the critical space they

deserve. 15 I do not shy from the fact that such issues are present, complex and

pointed, but wish instead to apply thorough scrutiny to the principal and

overt artistic claim of the exhibition's title, rather than produce a treatment of
the socio-political issues surrounding plastic surgery.

And the principal claim is a presumptuous one. What is interesting about this

exhibition is not its politics, particularly, nor its place in the well-worn
landscape of debates surrounding the ethical value of beauty. Rather, what

seems to be most vexing is the question of whether or not the aggrandising

15Amongst the numerous thinkers who have taken issues of beauty and cosmetic surgery as
their central topic, one may list well-known second-wave feminist criticisms of normative
beauty, such as Naomi Wolf's Beauty Myth (Wolf 1991), in which plastic surgery is held to be
a vicious and oppressive tool of the hegemonic class; more specific critical investigations of
plastic surgery by Elizabeth Haiken (1997) and Kathy Davis (2003); and the work of several
recent writers who have sought to engage with such an undertaking from a different, more
sympathetic standpoint - see, for example, Etcoff (2000), Scott (2005) or Pitts-Taylor (2007).

53
central conceptual axiom of I am Art is tenable. Are these plastic patients art?

Crucially, the media collected for the I Am Art show is not intended as an

illustration of performances, encapsulated in documentary form. Nor are

viewers invited simply to admire the photographs on display as objets d'art in

their own right, to consider their composition or their qualities as visual

objects. Instead, as the title makes explicitly clear, Berlet's show makes a

grander, bolder claim: that the subjects of the photographs themselvesare

living, breathing works of art; that their quotidian bodies have been

transformed by the artist-surgeon into human sculptures, testaments to the

skills, talents and gifts of their creators. And whilst a detailed examination of

the photographs themselves and the extent to which their particular

characteristics serve to forward the curator's agenda would doubtless be

interesting, such an examination will always be secondary to discussions of its

overt proclamation. The show's title belies its particular conception as to

where the art lies: in, and on and even as the bodies of the subjects

themselves, beyond the gallery space and beyond the operating theatre. As

such, the images collected for the show (are intended to) function as candid

backstage photographs from the artist's studio might; snapshots of the

making of a series of masterpieces.

A set of vexing questions immediately follow from the claim that bodies

altered by plastic surgery are art objects. If the body itself is to be taken as an

art object in the same way as a marble sculpture might be, then profound

questions of authorship, of ownership, of value, of commodification, of moral

character and of ethical consequence arise. In a review of the show, for

example, art critic at the New York Times Holland Cotter acknowledges the

problems in the perhaps overly-direct presentation of the images, and the

obvious criticisms of plastic surgery as hegemonic, culturally-specific and

patriarchal (all the surgeons exhibited are men, most of the patients women),

54
and asks "Who defines the terms 'too little', 'just enough' and 'too much?

Who defines beauty, perfection the ideal? " (Cotter 2009,7 -8). All legitimate

questions, but peripheral to the fundamental assertion being made. The

exhibition must necessarily succeed or fail first and foremost on the

plausibility of its central assertion: the prima facie artistic status of a

reconstructed face. Are plastic surgery patients art objects? Is a plastic

surgeon justified in claiming, as Berlet does, that "to recreate and reshape

such a nose becomes an artistic process with an architectural fundamental

principle"? (Beriet 2009b, 4). Are those individuals who have undergone

surgical procedures (no matter what the driving reason for the decision in the

first place) truly in the same category of objects as a marble sculpture or an

intricate fresco? Can the claim that surgeons such as Beriet and his forebears

and contemporaries deserve a place in the canonical pantheon of great artists,

to be hailed and critiqued alongside painters and sculptors and makers of

beautiful things, in and on the same terms, be taken seriously16? And if so, on

what grounds? Only once this central claim is investigated can the

supplementary issues be tackled.

The Human Body as Art Object

To begin to investigate this question, it is necessary to note that Berlet's claim,

though bold, is hardly an unusual one. The claim that the body itself is an art

object is one that permeates a number of discourses, and it is one that sits as

comfortably in romantic poetry'7 as on the cover of a newsstand magazine.

The particular concept of the human body as an art work produced by a

16Eva Karcher hails No Pitanguy, an eminent Brazilian surgeon immortalised in sculpture by

Salvador Dali, as "The Michelangelo of the Scalpel" in an essay of the same title (Karcher
2005).
17See, for example, Ruth Owen, The Body as Art in Early-Twentieth-Century German Poetry
(Owen 2004)

55
divine creator is a frequent theological theme, for example", and it is often to

be found deployed as a pre-cursor to some broader argument - in support of

body-building, in defence of a creationist metaphysics, in debates on what

constitutes pornography, etc. - as a first-strike in a more extended

metaphor19. There are certainly obvious metaphoric and even direct parallels
to be made between Berlet's use of a scalpel and a sculptors use of a chisel,

hewing a perfect nose from each discipline's raw material, rock and flesh;

marble and skin. To call the work of the plastic surgeon artistic makes sense,

intuitively, and might best be described as a structuring concept, giving form

to an amorphous but instinctively understood set of thoughts which feed into

and from notions of beauty, of aesthetics and of naturalism that extend their

roots deeply into Western culture, and have done for centuries. It is so

common that it has become something of an axiom, oft stated but rarely

examined in any critical detail.

An typical example appears in a review article in the Journal of Cosmetic

Dermatologyby Derek Barker and Megan Barker. Their article, `The body as

art', begins with the statement "To be human is to be an artist" (Barker and

18This idea is to be found in numerous theological works, including in the work of Saint
Augustine of Hippo (Mitchel Morse 1957). Marjorie O'Rourke Boyle describes this moral
concept of God as artist of the body as prevalent in the Renaissance, tracing its origins to
early Christian theology. "The apologist Tertullian", she says of the second-century
theologian, "complained of cosmetic women, who, dissatisfied with the creative skill of God,
censured it by adding to his work from a rival artist, the devil" (Boyle 1998,125). Jonathan
Sawday cites the work of 16th Century poet Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas to make the
same point, explaining that "[Du Bartas] came to celebrate the 'divinest Maister-Piece of Art'
which was the human body, his own metaphors were gilded with images of the human body
as a painterly creation. God was the 'Admired Artist, Architect divine' in whose greatest
work - the human body - was discovered [... ] a pictorial assembly of the creator himself"
(Sawday 1995,96).
19One exception to this is an article by Karin Wurst, whose article "Spellbinding: The Body as
Art/Art as Body in Attitüden" (Wurst 2001) does actually make a definitive connection
between bodies and artworks. Her article deals with Lady Emma Hamilton's Attitüden -
mimetic dance-performances in which performers would strike poses from and perform
scenes based on figures from classical painting and sculpture. In a very direct way, the
Attitüden represent the most obvious use of this concept, as the dancers' bodies take on forms
reflective of celebrated art objects.

56
Barker 2002,88), boldly expressed with all the same axiomatic fervour to be

found in Berlet's exhibition. The article nonetheless does not offer any

arguments in support of its claim, the authors instead being content to repeat

anthropological observations on eating disorders, beauty, hair length, sun

tanning, corsetry and even "subcutaneous fat" without any sense of how

these practices may be understood in an artistic context, or what, if any,

relevance art has to their arguments. In fact, though the article is entitled 'The

body as art', the word "art" does not appear again in the body of the text,

save for a passing mention of the fact that, in their opinion, Ruben's nudes

looked different to women in Edwardian portraiture. As an exposition of the

claims made by its title, the article fails.

Another example appears as the sub-title of a book titled DecoratedMan - The

Human Body as Art (Virel 1979), an ethnographic overview of traditional body

rituals from skin-painting through scarification to tattooing and even masks

and costumes. Here again, the "body as art" claim is axiomatic; once more

this central assertion is a starting point for a broad catalogue of descriptions

of practices the reader is expected to accept and understand as artistic rather

than a detailed investigation as to whether the term "art" is apposite in the

first place. In Virel's book, for example, practices which are markedly

different from each other in functional, intentional, ritual, cultural and

practical terms (jewellery of the Kenyan Masai, cheek-painting of Brazil's

Nambicura, traditional British formal attire, ear stretching in Borneo, ) are

...
assumed to have enough in common to tie them into the book's theme

without the need for justificatory commentary. There is a conflation of "art"

in the book's title and the use of "ornament", "decoration", "transformation"

and "adornment" throughout its text, with no reflection as to whether or not

such a conflation is valid. In its introduction, the book, like Barker and

Barker's article, takes the artistic nature of body modification and body

57
adornment as axiomatic, and like Barker and Barker's article, the artistic

status of the body is never questioned. Virel makes passing reference to the
body as a "blank page" (Virel 1979,12), but the book as a whole is dedicated

to describing the form and function of various types of adornment, ornament

and body modification, hardly ever referring to these practices as artistic or in

artistic terms, save for a single sentence comparing Picasso's works with the
face-painting of Papuan women.

These pieces of writing share a common central claim with I am Art - that the

body itself is an art object - and yet this claim is hardly defended. I refer to

Berlet's exhibition, Virel's book and the Barkers' article, though, precisely

because the gap between the starkness of their premises and the weaknesses

of the cases mounted in defence of them is so vast. Each use the claim that the
body itself is an art object in their titles, but each assumes that simply stating

this is enough. To their creators, it appears that their titles are simply matters-

of-fact; simple statements of an obvious, self-evident truth that the human

body itself functions as an art object following an interaction with a particular

type of technology. Berlet takes almost for granted that the relationship

between the surgeon and the breast-enlargement recipient is one of artistic

production; Barker and Barker simply assume that getting a suntan or a

haircut are the products of an intention that may obviously be called `artistic'.

Virel presumes that the full spectrum of adornments he illustrates in his

compendium might properly be called "art". Though all these works may be

forgiven for their lack of critical engagement with visual theory, what is

striking is that they stumble into the methodological sphere of visual theorists

so unwittingly.

58
Art as Experience

The view that the body itself is 'art' even when removed from any implicitly

artistic context is not one that has often been taken seriously by philosophers

of art, nor does it fit comfortably within most formal theories of aesthetics.

Whilst questions of what is, and what is not legitimately to be called art have

been vexing for centuries, and whilst artists have repeatedly and deliberately

defied any conceptions critics and philosophers dared commit to paper,

nearly every answer has relied on assigning the art object a delineated set of
distinguishing criteria which establishes for it a clear and explicit context".
And even though bodies have featured as the site of and material in the mode

of artistic production that became known as "performance art", within

academic thinking on art little has been ever been made of the possible artistic

status of the human body in day to day life, beyond the confines of a

delineated artistic setting. The idea that Bertlet's patients are art objects when

removed from an explicitly artistic context - when doing their grocery

shopping, for example - is not one that makes sense within the frames of

reference many art theorists use and have used to think about art objects.
Even though the phrase "body art" in the way Berlet uses it is

comprehensible, at least, and even though the concept of the body as an art

object makes sense at some intuitive level, it is not one that aesthetic theory

generally has much conceptual space for. Art and life have generally had to

stand apart for the very concept of art to have any meaning at all.

20Arthur Danto's work deals at length with problems of this type. "In my own work, for
example", he writes reflectively in The Abuse of Beauty, "I was from the first anxious to find a
way of distinguishing real things from art works where there was no obvious way of doing so
by examination, as in the case (my favourite! ) of Brillo boxes and Andy Warhol's Brillo Box -a
problem that did not and perhaps could not have arisen in Hegel's time" (Danto 2003,64).

59
Despite the weight of opinion to the contrary, certain theorists have sought to

disagree. In his 1934 book Art as Experience,John Dewey expounds his theory

of aesthetics which aims to "restore continuity between the refined and

intensified forms of experience that are works of art and the everyday events,

doings and sufferings that are universally recognized to constitute

experience" (Dewey 1958,3). Dewey felt that intellectual aesthetic theories of

what he called the "official" arts of painting and sculpture which privileged

spirituality, connoisseurship, and hierarchical divisions were somehow faulty

or incomplete; such theories could not readily account for the full diversity of

objects and activities that are popularly acknowledged to be artistic. In

essence, his work is borne out of a frustration that the disembodied, idealist

and morally worthy aesthetics of Kant and Hegel" had walled off art objects
from the experience of every day life and placed art objects on an arbitrary

intellectual and ethically superior pedestal.

"The trouble with existing theories", says Dewey,

is that they start from a ready-made compartmentalization, or

from a conception of art that "spiritualizes" it out of

connection with the objects of concrete experience. The

alternative, however, to each spiritualization is not a

degrading and Philistinish materialization of works of fine art,

but a conception that discloses the way in which these works

idealize qualities found in common experience. (Dewey 1958,

11)

21 Dewey explicitly sets himself against Hegel and Kant as well as Aristotle and
Schopenhauer.

60
In direct opposition to the idealists, Dewey argues that the artistic is not, as

Hegel had insisted, fundamentally distinct from the quotidian. Aesthetic

theories which define art as rarefied or transcendental, or which arbitrarily

divide artistic production into classes within an implicit or explicit hierarchy

of value ("fine", "high", "decorative", "applied") fail to account for the way in

which people genuinely and usually feel about art. Dewey goes so far as to

call these hierarchies "stupid" (227). Theories which privilege classical

formalism, technique or intellectualism, or which rely on formal or even
informal institutional frameworks (the "museum conception" (1958,6)), miss

so many classes of object and modes of production which are generally

described and experienced in aesthetic terms, and cannot adequately make

sense of many of the aesthetic aspects of people's lives. How can a

disinterested theory of aesthetics says Dewey, understand jazz? Or comic
,
strips? Dance? Or pulp literature? How it
can account for the aesthetic status

of domestic objects and the decorative arts - rugs, mats, jars and the like? And

how can it coherently distinguish between such objects in use, and such

objects presented on the walls of a museum?

A properly-formulated aesthetics must take account of these classes of objects

and modes of production, and what they have in common with the rarefied

objects and buildings of the Western canon. For Dewey, this commonality is

the types of experience they generate. Art, as the title of his major work

summarises, is experience;
what dance and artworks and architecture share is a

specific experiential quality in our reactions to them. In Dewey's formulation,

"art" is not to be thought of truly as a noun, but as an adjective denoting a

broad, indivisible but infinitely variable quality - much like 'sweet' or 'sour' -

which human beings understand only by experiencing corporeally. Art is thus

something which is properly understood as a characteristic of objects, modes

61
of production and states of being understood only by virtue of humans
interacting with them, rather than something they ontologically are.

This is not to reduce the delineation of art simply to personal whim. The art

experience has a number of dimensions particular to it. Dewey scholar

Richard Shusterman summarises these as follows:

First, aesthetic experience [for Dewey] is essentially valuable

and enjoyable; call this its evaluative dimension. Second, it is

something vividly felt and subjectively savored, affectively

absorbing us and focusing our attention on its immediate

presence and thus standing out from the ordinary flow of

routine experience; call this its phenomenological dimension.

Third, it is meaningful experience, not mere sensation; call this

its semantic dimension. (Its affective power and meaning

together explain how aesthetic experience can be so

transfigurative). Fourth, it is a distinctive experience closely

identified with the distinction of fine art and representing art's

essential aim; call this the demarcational-definitional

dimension. (Shusterman 1997)

Within this formulation, then, art becomes a property rather than a class, and

can be applied broadly - broadly enough, certainly, for plastic surgery

recipients to be included. In fact, the theory might be said to have been

designed with the types of arguments Beriet wants to make deliberately in

mind: Dewey himself makes explicit that there is space in his theory for what
he calls "automatic" arts, or arts which "have the human organism, the mind-

body of the artist as their medium" including "dancing, singing, yarn-

spinning [and ] "bodily scarifications, tattooings, etc" (Dewey 1958,227).

62
If these four dimensions of the Deweyan conception of the aesthetic

experience are compared with the case Bertlet makes in his own defence, a

number of parallels emerge. When Bertlet talks in his literature of 'fantasy',

'beauty' and 'perfection', he is making an evaluative statement and a naked

appeal to visual pleasure. When he discusses the "symmetry" he restores to

his patients' breasts, or exclaims that "nowhere are human feelings more

various and more complex than in perceptions of the body and of the self" he

belies the phenomenological affect he considers his own work to have. And

when he explains that his patients are fighting against age, or deformity, or

even reconstruction, he is outlining semantic - specifically meaningful -

expressions he intends his surgically-produced art-bodies to convey.

The most obvious correlation, though, is the overlap between the most self-

serving aspects in I am Art's documentation and the definitional dimension

Shusterman isolates in Dewey's theory. The demarcational or definitional

aspect of experience is the line between experiences that are aesthetic and

those which are not; whilst Dewey wanted his theory to resist hierarchical

categorisations, he did acknowledge that in order to be of any utility at all,

some discrimination was to be made between the aesthetic and other forms of

experience, and such discrimination would define what was, and what was

not art. In seeking for himself the high-status title of 'artist', Bertlet is

attempting the same thing that Dewey attempts in Art as Experience,which is

to unpick the commonalities between objects unproblematically understood

as art (namely painting and sculpture) and other objects or even modes of

production in order to class them into the same conceptual group.

Dewey would probably find little to disagree with in Berlet's exhibition. The I

Am Art show takes an almost straightforwardly Deweyan perspective on

what is required for a particular practice to be understood as art. Plastic

63
surgery, when viewed through the particular lens Beriet is using, feels like an

artistic process, and seems to mirror other forms of artistic production in

uncontroversial ways. From an experiential point of view, at least for the

surgeon, the work of plastic surgery seems sufficiently analogous to the

production of sculpture to merit calling art. Dewey's theories begin with the

goal of bringing everything commonly understood, talked about and

experienced in artistic terms into the same theoretical space as canonical

classes of art object by making explicit connections between the ways in

which the canonical and the quotidian are experienced. Beriet is doing the

same when he draws direct parallels between sculpture and surgery. And yet

understanding Beriet simply in these terms is problematic. Whilst Dewey's

theories are, as Shusterman puts it, useful "for provoking recognition of

artistic potentialities and aesthetic satisfactions in pursuits previously

considered non-aesthetic" (Shusterman 2000,23), they have largely been

discredited and discarded by recent philosophers of aesthetics because they

present a number of clear and present issues.

Most prominent of these is Dewey's instance that the aesthetic experience be

"appreciative, perceiving, and enjoying" (Dewey 1958,47). The conservatively

evaluative dimension Dewey describes as a cornerstone of aesthetic

experience, whereby art must be pleasurable and enjoyable, means that his

theories cannot account for bad or banal art, ugly sculptures or any art work

which produces a negative reaction such as shock, disgust, fear or anger. And

yet as Norman Goodman has it, "being aesthetic does not exclude being
...
aesthetically bad" (Goodman in Shusterman 1997,35). There is no scope in a

purely Deweyan framework for negative evaluation of artworks. And though

it is not expressed explicitly, if one's experience is not pleasurable, it is not

aesthetic, and if it is it
not aesthetic, cannot, for Dewey, be art.

64
Beriet would certainly wish people to aesthetically experience his patients in

the way Dewey imagines; the rhetorical push for legitimacy and cachet made

in I Am Art's documentation is predicated on precisely this notion that art

objects are beautiful, skilful, transformative, ameliorative and worthy. But

because he builds the case for his art on what he sees as its qualitative worth,

it is all too easy to reject Berlet's proposition outright if one does not see

anything of aesthetic or moral value in his work. Beriet wants to be taken

seriously as an artist because he is creating beauty, but beauty is, of course, in

the eye of the beholder. As he builds his case for artistic legitimacy by directly

comparing himself to a master sculptor, and wants to be considered an artist

because his work is good, the artistic nature of Berlet's work can be easily

rejected in his own terms if one feels plastic surgery is morally problematic, if

one feels squeamish about the process or even if one dislikes the particular

aesthetic decisions Beriet has taken. In other words, if someone does not find

plastic surgery beautiful or enjoyable, they can reject its claims to be an art
form out of hand.

Cotter's review of I Am Art anticipates these types of rejections. Immediately

after outlining the quandaries the show engenders, he goes on to defend the

show's axiomatic core, if not its moral fibre. "I have no problem with

accepting the work in "I am Art" as art", he says.

A thing of beauty is a joy forever or for a day, and if a doctor-

artist can turn you into one, that's art to me. And if he can

rescue a body from serious ruin and a soul from despair, God

bless him; he's as good as Michaelangelo. Does he cater too

much to the rich and charge too much? Check out all those
drecky Picassos still selling for huge prices at auction. Do all

65
 the nose jobs look pretty much alike? Check out paintings in

Chelsea galleries these days. (Cotter 2009,7)

In other words, even if he says so himself, Beriet cannot simply be an artist

and his nose-jobs works of art because they are aesthetically refined,

classically-proportioned and deftly produced. The comparison is too

simplistic, too clumsy, too open for criticism. And yet, as Goodman explains

and Cotter understands, even "drecky" art is still art, and even if he fails to

make his case in convincing terms, perhaps it still maintains some

plausibility. What an analysis of plastic surgery in these terms demonstrates is

that if it is "art", it cannot simply be because it is decorative, or beautiful or

skilful.

The Body as Somaesthetic Object

Though Shusterman is critical of the gaps in Dewey's theory, he does, as I

have already mentioned, find value in the affective and experiential approach

Dewey proposes. Whilst he is critical in general of Dewey when Art as

Experienceoverreaches itself, and in particular when Dewey's theories attempt

to define the aesthetic experience as necessary, sufficient and co-extensive to

art, he does hold Dewey's theories to be of interest and of use to his own

thinking. He embraces the founding principles of Deweyan thought in that he

recognises the importance of the phenomenological and experiential quality

of art and of the aesthetic, but he rejects the imperative which seeks to

categorise everything which engenders aesthetic experience as art. Instead,

the aesthetic experience for Shusterman is better viewed as something to be

sought out in art and in life more generally; a "heightened, meaningful and

valuable" experience which should serve to orientate or direct us toward it.

66
Shusterman's particular philosophical programme, built unashamedly on
Deweyan foundations, unpicks the ways in which particular practices create

these aesthetic experiences; and of particular interest in the context of the

discussion at hand is his lengthy treatment the status of the body as an

aesthetic object and the myriad ways in which it is put to use.

Aesthetic philosophy has, in his view, almost entirely neglected the live

human body (as opposed to the body in representation) both in terms of an

object of systematic aesthetic contemplation and a material subject to

aesthetically-driven alteration. Shusterman traces this neglect right back to the

foundation of aesthetics as a discipline in Alexander Baumgarten's work

Aesthetica of 1750, whose conception of aesthetics is as a broad program of

philosophical self-perfection rather than simply the narrow study of fine art

which it has since become. Baumgarten's theories implore reflection on

natural beauty, taste and the poetry of the visual in order that one might

become of better character and of more cultivated mind, and by this

formulation, aesthetics is to be understood as a meliorative discipline as well

as a set of analytic theories".

Nevertheless, missing from his account and yet, for Shusterman, "logically

required", is any mention of cultivation of the body. "Baumgarten defines

aesthetics as the science of sensory cognition and as aimed at its perfection",

he explains. "But the senses belong to the body and are deeply influenced by

its condition. Our sensory perception this depends on how the body feels and

functions, what it desires, does and suffers" (Shusterman 1999,301). Over the

course of a number of articles and books, Shusterman establishes a

methodological approach to re-introduce the body into aesthetic philosophy.

22 Tobin Siebers briefly addresses precisely this point in his introduction to the edited
collection The body from
aesthetic: fine art to body modification (Siebers 2000,1).

67
He calls this approach somaesthetics,in which he applies the strategies and

terminologies of aesthetics to the body in an attempt to both explain and

examine certain bodily practices, and to establish a polemic programme of

bodily self-awareness built on solidly-founded methodological grounds, with
the intention to apply the critical and meliorative aspects of the aesthetic

tradition to the body as an object, and the way in which human beings relate

to their bodies.

The most direct statement in Shusterman's work of exactly what he envisages

the term somaestheticsto entail appears in an article entitled Somaesthetics:A

Disciplinary Proposal (Shusterman 1999). He explains that

somaesthetics can provisionally be defined as the critical,

meliorative study of the experience and use of one's body as a

locus of sensory-aesthetic appreciation (aesthesis)and creative

self-fashioning. It is therefore also devoted to the knowledge,

discourses, practices, and bodily disciplines that structure

such somatic care or can improve it. If we put aside traditional

philosophical prejudice against the body, and instead simply

recall philosophy's central aims of knowledge, right action

and its quest for the good life, then the philosophical value of

somaesthetics should become clear in several ways

(Shusterman 1999,302)

With its focus on improvement, in this definition Shusterman's re-

deployment of Dewey's evaluative criterion for aesthetic experience emerges.

Rather than a defining characteristic of the aesthetic experience, quality and

the genesis of positive feelings become the desired goal of those engaged in

68
aesthetic production. If aesthetic experiences are enriching and improving,

they are all the more so if focused very directly on the body.

The broad methodology of somaesthetics can be broken down into three

conceptual dimensions. The first is what he terms "analytic somaesthetics",

or the description of bodily perceptions and practices in ontological and

epistemological terms of the kind deployed, for example, by Foucault,

Merleau-Ponty, Butler, Bartky and de Beauvoir (Shusterman 2003,112). The

second is "pragmatic somaesthetics", which Shusterman describes as the

comparative critique of varying bodily practices which may take on even a

normative or prescriptive character. The third is "practical somaesthetics",

which Shusterman sees as the practical undertaking or doing of bodily

practices as a "philosophical discipline concerned with self-knowledge and

self-care", or the pursuit of particular set of personal aims and objectives

through considered use and alteration of the body.

Somaesthetics, as an evaluative discipline or methodology rather than a

demarcational category, retains Dewey's insistence on the value of experience

in assessing bodily practices (the "automatic arts"), but does away with the

need for necessarily assessing them positively. This is a subtle but crucial

reformulation: it retains the full logic of Dewey's proposition that there is a

fundamental continuity between how we relate to the fine arts and how we

relate to practices like tattooing or dance, but it does not require a necessary
insistence that all such practices, in all circumstances, are worthy of uncritical

praise. It acknowledges that practices such as plastic surgery have both

affective and performed dimensions; that they are properly to be discussed in

aesthetic or artistic terms; and that they are experienced aesthetically by both

the surgeons and the patients, but at the same time it permits pragmatic

evaluation of their value.

69
Shusterman's reading of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (Shusterman

2003) -a work he considers a paradigmatic example of somaesthetic thinking

- illustrates this very point. He identifies throughout SecondSex a pragmatic

approach to beauty, fashion and attention to the body which, on the one
hand, serve to oppress and belittle women, but which also retain the power, if

re-deployed in certain ways, to allow self-improvement, empowerment and

emancipation. If the female body and the normative feminine aesthetic is

demonstrative of submissiveness or weakness or objectification, then

attention to reformulating this is

aesthetic of fundamental importance to any

reactionary project. Any such reformulation, though, must be approached in a

way that does not simply further the original oppression. "Make up or hair-

do can substitute for creating a work of art". Moreover, "modern aesthetic

concepts permit her to combine beauty and activity; she has a right to trained

muscles, she declines to get fat; in physical culture she finds self-affirmation

as subject and in a measure frees herself from her contingent flesh" (de

Beauvoir 1997,549). However, if these practices are carried out with a

delegation of the will - that is, if they are carried out principally to keep a

man or the system of power content - they must be criticised. "The subjection

of Hollywood stars is well known", she exclaims. "Their bodies are not their

own" (de Beauvoir 1997,583).

A pragmatic somaesthetic evaluation of Dr. Berlet's show would take into

account not just the formalist aspects of the process of surgery, but also the

extent to which rhinoplasties serve a positive somaesthetic purpose for the

patients and for society more generally. We might acknowledge that what he

and his colleagues are doing is artistic, but at the same time evaluate his

works as bad, bland or boring. We might question the normative impetus for

his practice. We might worry, perhaps, that the narrow aesthetic range of the

70
bodies Beriet is responsible for creating is disturbing. In other words, it

becomes possible to address the value of plastic surgery in the aesthetic terms

Beriet establishes for his show without necessarily having to buy into his own

case that framing the discussion in such terms means he is an artistic genius.

Even if we take Beriet at his word and accept that, conceptually, aesthetic

surgery patients are art, art historians are not beholden to take them as good

art, interesting art or politically-agreeableart.

Orlan

I havegiven my body to art (Orlan 2005,315)

It is of course impossible to talk about the intersection between cosmetic

surgery and art practice without reference to French artist Orlan and her

series of performances entitled The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan or Image New

Image(s) (1990-1993), during which she underwent a number of simultaneous

surgical procedures on her face in order to construct a burlesque parody of

the idealised female face. I mention her work at this point because it shares a

number of features with the Beriet show, but diverges in some potentially

interesting ways.

The first difference, of course, is that Orlan is by most definitions

uncontroversially an artist. Though working within a fairly recent artistic

tradition - that of performance art - her work is certainly canonical. What this

does mean, however, is that it isn't immediately obvious if her work makes

the kind of conceptual shift Berlet's show aims to when it asserts the artistic

status of the body beyond the context of an artistic event. Orlan is a

performance artist, and whilst documentation is produced and exhibited in

galleries in the same way as Berlet's photos, the explicit work of art in her case

71
is the performative act of surgery itself and not her body as an object in its

own right.

Orlan staged her surgeries in art galleries as theatrical performative pieces,

with surgeons bedecked in costumes by Jean-Paul Gaultier, with music,

narration and a live audience. As commonly read, the artistic content here is
in the temporal, contextualised and site-specific performance. The

performances have titles, for example, and are discussed and analysed as

singular pieces of work, with most emphasis on the performances and

surgeries rather than what Orlan looked like after them. Drawing on the

theories of Gerard Genette, Kate Ince categorises these performances as "fully

temporalized" (Ince 2000,101), locating the work in a discrete, bounded

process rather than in the object-body it leaves behind; Ince explains that

"What matters most in the processof modification" and, citing Orlan herself,

that she is "not interested in its final, plastic result, but in the surgical

operation-performance and in the modified body as a site of public debate"

(Ince 2000,46). In another analysis, Robert Ayers evaluates the affective

qualities of the Interventions, how shocking they are, and how powerful and

polemic, but goes on to state that the "sort of claim that I am making for them

only holds good while the Interventions were actually being made" (Ayers
2000,174). When the show is finished and the audience have left the building,

its affective power is neutered, Orlan's body stripped of the meaning it has

when undergoing the procedure in a performative context.

72
Figure 7 Orlan, 2004

(photograph by Joe Kohen / Associated Press). This is a candid shot, not a shot of a
particular performance. Note forehead bumps.

These types of conceptualisations strike me as quite problematic. Quite

obviously Orlan's body does not cease to exhibit or express what Ince calls

"issues central to an understanding of the female body in contemporary

Western culture" (Ince 2000,112) once the pre-ordained duration of the

performance has elapsed. In fact, thinking of her work as affective only whilst

the performance is underway seems to me to negate the critical aspects of her

work and emphasise the shocking, locating all its power in the visceral sight

of Orlan's blood being spilled and not in the curious aesthetic of the face the

surgeries produced. Orlan must walk out of the gallery with the scars and

sutures and silicon implants still present, still visible, still subject to the gaze

of an audience (Figure 7). Ince cannot draw a curtain down on Orlan's face, or

the effects it has on those who see it, or on its inter-relation with the cultural

fabric it is explicitly designed to critique. It makes no sense to me to look at

Orlan's surgical interventions only as finite, bounded performance work,

because their product Orlan herself is present in quotidian life in all the
- -

73
same ways it is during the performance. If her expressed purpose is to engage

with a particular set of discourses on beauty in Western culture and in

Western art, then her face is even more able to stimulate thought, debate,

discussion and deliberation beyond the gallery than inside it does

- one not
doubt that her striking appearance is discussed in hushed tones on any buses

she takes and in any bars she happens to find herself in. The challenge her

face presents to beauty norms is not simply in its mode of production but also

in its disconcerting aesthetic, all smooth and strange and re-proportioned,

with plumped lips and a bumpy forehead.

Interestingly, Ince does acknowledge the continuity from performance to life

when she addresses criticisms of Orlan's work from Kathy Davis, whose own

writing deals critically with the plastic surgery industry. Davis acknowledges

that the ordinary women she interviews share a number of concerns with

Orlan, principally in their self-identification as willing agents reshaping their

bodies to their own ends, but ultimately concludes that "Orlan's project is not

about a real-life problem; it is about art" (Davis 1997,126). Calling this

"wrong-headed", and despite her earlier insistence on the temporality of

Orlan's performances, Ince retorts

Davis can in fact only disable the comparison between Orlan

and the majority of women who have cosmetic surgery by

imposing a rigid binary of opposition between art and reality,

or art and life, that is wholly inappropriate (Ince 2000,127)

"I would argue", she continues, "that Orlan's self-transformation away from a

pleasing womanly appearance towards a less well-proportioned face gives an

important critical twist to the conventional suffering of women who choose to

have cosmetic surgery". (Ince 2000,129). In engaging in such lines of inquiry

74
and by making these types of arguments, Ince is in fact extending her art

criticism beyond the narrow temporal context of the named and delineated

performance event, and using the frames of reference she establishes for
talking about Orlan's performance to discuss her body in the world. She is, in

essence, engaged in the type of analysis Berlet implores for his patients,

though in rather less salutary manner.

When critical attention is focussed on the surgical process, issues of pain, of

disgust, of the fragility of the body and of abject horror can overwhelm

reactions to the work and interfere with or distract from more measured

examination of the complexity of what Orlan's surgical interventions achieve.

Amelia Jones, for example, states that "Orlan's work points to the fact that

plastic surgery, rather than allowing us to gain control over our bodies,

exacerbates our subordination to their vulnerabilities (Jones 1998,228)", and

Victoria Pitts-Taylor considers that "feminists have largely understood her

work as enacting a spectacular, if disturbing, feminist opposition to cosmetic

surgery" (Pitts-Taylor 2007,83). When critical attention is focussed principally

on the messy and disturbing process of the surgery itself, it is quite easy to

read Orlan's work as laying bare the horrific violence and brutality of the

cosmetic surgery operation, and as a precautionary illustration of what

happens behind the glossy and glamorous exterior of the plastic surgery

industry. But if attention is shifted onto an examination not of the surgical

process in Orlan's performances, but of the particular body Orlan must walk

out of the gallery with, such criticisms seem to me harder to sustain.

"My work is not intended to be against plastic surgery", Orlan says, "but

rather against the norms of beauty and the dictates of the dominant ideology

which is becoming more and more deeply embedded [... ] in flesh". (Orlan
2005,314). By engaging in a bold use of the technologies of plastic surgery to

75
produce an eclectic and heterogeneous human aesthetic, Orlan is actually

exploring the meliorative and critical potential of the medium, and because
her particular aesthetic has so much affective power, Orlan is an ideal
illustration as to how a pragmatic assessment of plastic surgery using
Shusterman's somaesthetic approach might operate. Orlan demonstrates that

the tools which surgeons like Berlet use are capable of producing some quite

extraordinary looks, and the value and interest in her work as an engagement

with questions of beauty seems to rest quite squarely in the unconventional

face her surgeons created for her. Orlan and her surgeons are creating

successful, interesting and engaging art which generates debate on the role of

appearance in the West and creating a pluralistic aesthetic; Beriet is working

within a narrowly-defined set of beauty norms, producing bodies which are

not particularly visually arresting, nor the product of a rabidly creative, novel

aesthetic.

Martin Jay has argued that Orlan "both mocked conventional standards of

beauty and compelled the horrified viewer to share her self-inflicted pain...
.
evoking in a very different register Dewey's appeal to overcome the
distinction between artistic and aesthetic experience" (Jay 2002,62), and cites

her in an article connecting Dewey via Shusterman to the particular type of

contemporary performance art which is focussed on the bodies of the artists

involved. If Jay is to be correct in his assertion that body art such as Orlan's

"might be seen through its explicit resistance to the disciplining and

normalization of the docile body" (Jay 2002,66), and a mode of achieving the
Deweyan goals of aesthetically-inspired living, then body art must have a

resonance beyond the boundaries of the performative event. The reason that

performance body art is capable of such profound comment (and the reason

that Shusterman's proposal of somaesthetics as a discipline is able to have any

76
critical power) is precisely because the bodies of the artists are real bodies-in-

the-world, and not just abstracted representations.

Conclusions

Beriet may be attempting to inculcate himself with the art establishment for

reasons which it is easy to be suspicious of, but in asserting artistic status for

the bodies of his patients he makes a important and useful move. With the

bodies of plastic surgery patients re-conceptualised as artistic or aesthetic

objects, it becomes possible to on the one hand judge their value and the ways

in which surgery is commonly undertaken, and on the other to imagine

strategies through which a myriad of bodily practices might be used for the

kinds of affective ends usually reserved in theory for the canonical forms of

artistic production. Over the chapters that follow, I want to examine in more
detail the consequences of this reconceptualisation, and the potentialities

which follow from it. As Shusterman puts it, there is a "tradition in aesthetics

that affirms a greater unity of art and life, of making and doing", and that

making this tradition not just descriptive but useful can serve

to revive this aesthetic tradition: not simply to recall its

ancient message and later formulations but also to

...
promote its development through newer pragmatist
directions. By legitimising an aesthetics of popular art

together with an embodied ethics of self-styling, we could

forge a wider, more democratic concept of art. If its master

genre, the art of living, could be practiced by all, then beauty

would express itself much more fully in moral integrity,

political fairness, and social harmony - not just in works of

art. If the shaping of life and character is not only the highest

77
 art but one which all can practice, then aesthetics should pay

closer attention to the concept of self-styling" (Shusterman

2000,202)

Shusterman's work has an avowedly political dimension: a somaesthetic

approach in self-fashioning and in evaluating the fashioning of others reveals

novel modes of political engagement and critical analysis. In the next chapter,
I wish to examine the ways in which such engagement might occur, be

understood and be deployed and, in the process, present a further set of

theoretical tools with which body art can be evaluated and examined.

78
Chapter Three

"How do you make yourself a Body without

Organs? "

The work of art is a being of sensationand nothing else:it exists in itself

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (Deleuze and Guattari 1994,164)
-

My approach to body art qua art is grounded in theories of art which prioritise

analyses of the affective and aesthetic qualities of the art object over any

potential deconstructive, textual, cultural or psychoanalytic readings it might

lend itself to. In his recent work on the utility of Deleuze and Guattari's

philosophies of art, Simon O'Sullivan cites Jean-Francois Lyotard's criticism

of much writing about art and its reception.

Art is thus confused with a cultural object and may give rise to

any of the discourses to which anthropological data in general

lend themselves. One could do a history, sociology or political

economy of it, to mention just those few. One can easily show

that its destination, anthropologically speaking, undergoes

considerable modification depending on whether the artwork

`belongs' to a culture that is tribal, imperial, republican,

monarchical, theocratic, mercantile, autarkic, capitalist, and so

on, and that it is a determining feature of the contemporary

work that it is obviously destined for the museum (collection,

conservation, exhibition) and for the museum audience. This

79
 approach is implied in any 'theory' of art, for the theory is

made only of objects, in order to determine them. But the

work is not merely a cultural object, although it is that too and

always has been, and if it holds out or is able to hold out a

promise of an infinity of forms and commentaries, and

through this infinity, a promise of community of feeling,

because it harbours within it an excess, a rapture, a potential

of associations that overflows all the determinations of its

'reception' and 'production' (Jean-Francois Lyotard in

O'Sullivan 2006,39-40)

What Lyotard saw as too narrow a focus on the cultural conditions of art

works applies equally to the study of the technologies we call body art.
O'Sullivan seizes upon the work of Deleuze and Guattari in his attempt to

produce a work of art criticism which redresses the problematic imbalance

Lyotard identifies, and I intend, in my analyses here, to produce a work in the

same spirit. "In thinking about art", he says, "in reading the art object, we

missed that which art does best, in fact we missed that which defines art: the

aesthetic". (O'Sullivan 2006,40).

In the previous chapter, I outlined the contention that the body itself might be

viewed through the lens of aesthetic philosophy and visual theory, and that

the bodies produced by body modification technologies may be thought of as

artistic objects in their own right. The Deleuzean concept of affect is

particularly apposite to this line of argument; the Deleuzean model of the

affective ontology of art-works lends itself neatly to conceptualising the art of

life. In this chapter, I want to examine some of the further consequences of

this position. As O'Sullivan points out at some length, approaching aesthetics

from a Deleuzean perspective involves primarily thinking about what art does

80
 "We no longer ask the interminable question : 'what does art, what does this
-
art work, mean?But rather, what does art, what does this art work, do?" [sic]

(O'Sullivan 2006,22), and with this in mind I want to evaluate the work of

body art and the affective and political potential of somaesthetic projects.

Desiring-Production and the Body without Organs

Chapter 6 of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus asks a

very precise question -'How Do You Make Yourself a Body without Organs?'

(Deleuze and Guattari 2004c, 165) It is perhaps interesting to note that this is a

riddle to which Deleuze himself offers no substantive resolution2l. The essay

in Plateaus,which bears this conundrum as its title, establishes at length what

the Body without Organs (BwO) is, how it functions within the apparatus of

desire Deleuze conceived, and offers examples of various types of bodies that

seem to meet the designated criteria of the BwO, but it never actually

adequately suggests an appropriate methodology through which a Body

without Organs might purposively be obtained. With reference to body

modification technologies in general and to some specific technologies in

particular, I intend to posit one such methodology, one possible solution to

this particular riddle. In contrast to much of the other work on these types of

technologies, which are often monopolised by questions regarding the

intentionality that precedes them, this analysis foregrounds the technologised

body as an object of ontological, phenomenological and visual interest in its

own right and, as such, moves beyond the preoccupation with the

pathologising "why" towards the "how" of the modified body in the world.

Like Shusterman's program of pragmatic somaesthetics, the production of a

23Brian Massumi suggests that this chapter contains "practical tips on how to [achieve a
BwO] successfully" (Massumi, 1992: 175n62). I find this claim far too strong.

81
BwO is also, as Simon O'Sullivan puts it, "very much a pragmatic project"

(O'Sullivan 2006,48).

The BwO as Deleuze describes it is born out of the Capitalism and Schizophrenia

project's24 conception of desire as a real flow or force actively produced by

what Deleuze terms 'desiring-machines'.

What a mistake to have ever said the id. Everywhere it is machines

ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines,

- real
machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary

couplings and connections. An organ-machine is plugged into an

energy-source-machine: the one produces a flow that the other

interrupts. The breast is a machine that produces milk, and the

mouth a machine coupled to it. The mouth of the anorexic wavers

between several functions: its processor is uncertain as to whether it

is an eating-machine, an anal-machine, a talking-machine, or a

breathing machine (asthma attacks). Hence, we are all handymen:

each with his little machines. For every organ-machine, an energy-

machine: all the time, flows and interruptions. Something is

...
produced: the effects of a machine, not mere metaphors. (Deleuze

and Guattari 2004a, 1)

In this sense, desire flows through an endless, recursive circuit of desiring-

machines. Desire produces reality. Within its superstructure there is no

differentiation between product and process of production: everything is to

be understood as a machine, from human organs through human organisms

24The BwO concept is first mentioned in the first chapter of Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze and
Guattari 2004b). Collectively, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus form the philosophical
project known as Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

82
and out into the natural world, all conduits producing, mediating and
interrupting the flows of desire. Particular modalities of flows are understood

to produce particular conditions of existence and particular political and

social structures, and, as Paul Patton puts it, desire's ubiquity 'is the basis for

their [Deleuze and Guattari's] analysis of territorial, despotic and capitalist

forms of social organisation in terms of the different abstract machines of

desire present in each case' (Patton 2000,68).

This unquenchable circuit binds human subjects within its apparatus of desire

and the universal usine of the desiring-machines, giving rise to human

experience in all its turbulent forms. As individual human beings are

themselves components within desiring-production, they too mediate flows

of desire: 'Desiring machines make us an organism; ' says Deleuze, 'but at the

very heart of this production, within the very production of this production,

the body suffers from being organized in this way, from not having some

other sort of organization, or no organization at all' (Deleuze and Guattari

2004b, 8). What he means here is that the human body is biologically

constructed, subjectively experienced and socially managed in such a way

that the particular way the over-arching mechanism of the desiring-machine

is experienced is inescapable, and due to the very parameters of our

embodiment, we are prone to suffering. In essence, our biological specificity

facilitates the oppressive potential of oppressive types of desiring production.

But there is hope. If the organisation of the body could be transformed, the

treadmill of the particularly oppressive forms of desiring-machine structures

might be able to be If
resisted. the rigidly-organised body is at the root of our

subjective entrapment in such circumstances, then it becomes possible to

imagine that a different kind of body, or a body organised in a different way,

must surely also provide an escape route. This body is the Body without

83
Organs. The BwO is presented as a method of resistance within and wilful

perversion of the desiring-machine superstructure, still within the confines of

the production circuit but as an element which liberates the flows, redirects

and repulses them in subversive ways, appropriates the mechanisms of the

productive purpose for its own ends, and generally disrupts the authority of

desire in order to undermine its influence.

'Body without Organs' is a term appropriated from theatrical iconoclast

Antonin Artaud's poem To have done with the judgement of God, and its context

is important to note:

Man is sick because he is badly constructed

We must decide to strip him in order to scratch out this animalcule

Which makes him itch to death,

god,
And with god

his organs.

For tie me down if you want to,

but there is nothing more useless than an organ.

When you have given him a body without organs,

then you will have delivered him from all this automatisms and restored

him to his true liberty (Artaud 1995,307)

Artaud had long suffered from delusions, hallucinations, divine visions and

violent episodes, and whilst writing judgement, although not having explicitly
been informed of the fact, he was already riddled with the intestinal cancer

84
which would eventually kill him five months later. The poem is, as Clayton

Eshleman so eloquently explains, 'preoccupied with the hopeless

vulnerability of the given human body and the necessity to reconstruct it' (in

Artaud et al. 1995,37), and it reads like the exhortation of the final, forlorn

hope of a man yearning for a body which could finally liberate him from his

endless torment. The term, with all its polemic urgency and its capacity for

subversion already intact, had its genesis in the desperation of a dying man

longing to escape the prison of his abjectly broken physical form. Artaud's cry

was intensely and actively political; it pleaded for '[a]n autopsy, in order to

remake his anatomy' (Artaud 1995,307).

An autopsy dissects and flays the dead body in order to diagnose the cause of

death. It is invasive and messy. It dismembers and reconfigures the human

form and is often necessarily deconstructive. The pathologist is

simultaneously clinical in his approach and violent in his action; his

purposive means justify his destructive ends. An autopsy alone, to make

Artaud's BwO, is not enough though. Unlike the care a surgeon must take in

to keep his patient alive, a pathologist is not bound by such

order

restrictions25. Artaud's plea is rhetorical, of course, but if Deleuze and

Guattari are seeking to propose methodologies for putting his rhetoric into

service, one fundamental question leaps above all others: How can one

remake the body if it is already post mortem? There needs to be a remaking

following the dismantlement, and that dismantlement must come before the

desire of death has completed its flow through Artaud's body (see: Deleuze

and Guattari 2004b, 9).

15 Katherine Park writes of unsubstantiated yet "not completely preposterous" rumours

in 1530s Spain, telling that famous anatomists of the period were indeed
which circulated
vivisecting human beings. (Park 1994,19).

85
Consider, then, the case of Andrew, the subject of an interview with

sociologist Victoria Pitts:

I've had bipedal flap surgery below the erectile ligament and trans-

scrotal surgery, a bipedal flap surgery on the anterior wall of the

scrotum, a subincision that's two weeks old, three ten-inch long

chest cuts, a full upper chest brand with a cautery scalpel, three
facial cuts echoing the contours of the chest cuts that are

respectively 41/2to 31/2inches, a symbol scarified on the forehead

with a scalpel, two equilateral frenums to balance a center frenum,

three other frenums, a ladder of eight 6-gauge scrotum piercings at

once [... ] a full back piece as the first tattoo, and tribal jewelry

bands [tattoos] on all appendages26. (Pitts 2003,172)

The multitude of cuts, incisions and piercings which make up Andrew's body

modification project are approaching the invasiveness of the autopsy carried

out on, and by, a living subject. Like the pathologist, a subject undergoing

modificatory procedures will select specific corporeally destructive

technologies and deploy them for specific ends (though they are

transformative and not diagnostic). Andrew's 'autopsy', like the one Artaud

so clamoured for, is destructive only in its method, and it's aim is to deploy

the pathologist's tools (the dermal elevator, the needle, the suture, the scalpel)

to its own reconstructive and, crucially, living ends. Andrew's is a body

produced by the deliberate and purposive autopsic processes of invasive

technology. His is a body which is the end product of body modification

practices which are purposive (not pathological), elective (not enforced

26'Frenums' here refers to male genital piercings which are performed through the surface
skin of the main shaft of the penis but which do not enter the urethra or the principal tissue of
the penile shaft itself.

86
universally as the result of a normative cultural practice such as the

circumcision of infants) and transformative (not intended to return the body

to an approximation of its previous form following an accident).

Might Andrew's body, and bodies like his, provide an answer to Deleuze's

question? Deleuze uses the bodies of the hypochondriac, the schizophrenic,

the junkie and the masochist as his illustrative examples of BwOs, but all of

these models are unsatisfactory as none of them are purposively able to be

obtained, nor sustainable in any usefully productive way. As strategies of

resistance within oppressive forms of desiring-production, masochism and

drug-addiction are entirely useless and ineffectual, as although they do
demonstrate what form resistance might take, they are unsustainable and

unable to address how one can actually makeor purposively produce a BwO.

Power, politics and purposive actions

Positing potential for purposive action is often contentious within certain

modes of academic discourse, particularly those which consider the inter-

relations of power and desire. In a system where power is pervasive,

omnipresent, hegemonic and oppressive, it often becomes difficult to accept

that any kind of freedom of choice, or indeed any kind of freedom at all, is

even possible. 27

Enter Deleuze. In Deleuzeand the Political, Patton describes Deleuzean ethics as

'an ethics of freedom' (Patton 2000,83), though he is careful to explain how

this differs from an understanding of freedom in a classical liberal sense. His

analysis is worth expanding upon at some length: Deleuze certainly does

27This is a key problem in certain readings of Foucault (see, for example the essays collected
in Diamond and Quinby 1988; similar observations can be found in Patton 2000,74).

87
privilege creative transformation which emphasises some form of individual

agency, though this is not to imply that everyone is free to do anything at any

time. Quite the contrary. Freedom in the liberal tradition, Patton explains,

'remains tied to a concept of the subject as a given, determinate structure of

interests, goals or desires'. In this sense, then, freedom 'still refers to the

capacity of the subject to act in pursuit of a given set of interests, rather than

the capacity to alter those interests' (Patton 2000,84). Liberal freedom is

entirely predicated on the preservation of subjectivity. Critical freedom, the

implicit concept of freedom within Deleuzean thought, though, 'differs from

the standard liberal concepts of positive and negative freedom by its focus

upon the conditions of change or transformation in the subject, and by its

indifference to the individual or collective nature of the subject' (Patton 2000,

83). 'Critical' here is intended to indicate the transitional moment, or crisis-

point, in the metamorphosis from one state to another - critical freedom,

then, is 'the freedom to transgress the limits of what one is presently capable

of being or doing, rather than just the freedom to be or do those things'

(Patton 2000,85). Deleuzean freedom is not the freedom to act

indiscriminately in pursuit of selfish self-interest, but instead the capacity to

challenge one's individual modes of being, or, more affirmatively, to affect a

transformation in oneself, to become. Quoting James Tully, Patton goes on to

say that critical freedom 'refer[s] to this capacity to "question in thought and

challenge in practice one's inherited cultural ways"' (2000,85)28.

In certain circumstances, body modification can be said to function in this

way, enabling the transformation of subjectivities rather than simply existing

as a product of deterministic desires (as I will expand upon further), and, if

the Deleuzean model is correct, it seems that body modification practices are

28 Mindy Fenske has also discussed issues of body modification and critical agency in
Deleuzean terms. (Fenske 2007,148).

88
able to act in a specific set of politically useful ways. The principles of political

engagement within the Deleuzean project are perhaps best summarised by

Michael Foucault in his preface to Anti-Oedipus, wherein he sets out the

practical utility of Deleuzean thought to working against oppressive social

structures:

'This art of living counter to all forms of fascism, whether

already present or impending, carries with it a certain number

of essential principles which I would summarize as follows if I

were to make this great book into a manual or guide for

everyday life:

" Free political action from all unitary and totalizing

paranoia.

" Develop action, thought, and desires by proliferation,

juxtaposition and disjunction, and not by subdivision

and pyramidal hierarchization.

" Withdraw allegiance from the old categories of the

Negative (law, limit, castration, lack, lacuna), which

Western thought has so long held sacred as a form of

power and access to reality. Prefer what is positive and

multiple, different over uniformity, flows over unities,

mobile arrangements over systems. Believe that what is

productive is not sedentary but nomadic.

" Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be

militant, even though the thing one is fighting is

abominable. It is the connection of desire to reality (and

not its retreat into the forms of representation) that

possessesrevolutionary force.

89
 " Do not use thought to ground a political practice in

Truth; nor political action to discredit, as mere

speculation, a line of thought. Use political practice as

an intensifier of thought, and analysis as a multiplier of

the forms and domains for the intervention of political

action.

" Do not demand of politics that it restores the 'rights' of

the individual, as philosophy has defined them. The

individual is the product of power. What is needed is to

'de-individualize' by means of multiplication and

displacement, diverse combinations. The group must

not be the organic bond uniting hierarchized

individuals, but a constant generator of de-

individualization.

" Do not become enamored of power. (Michael Foucault

in Deleuze and Guattari 2004a, xv)

What Foucault is calling for here is not that each individual subject act

pursuant only to their desires, but that each individual be mindful of the

critical potential of their actions within power structures. Power cannot be

escaped, and as such resistance must instead take the form of (positive, active,

queer) perversion. An individual is obviously not 'free' to engage in body

modification projects in the sense that the means and the modes of body

modification practices are universally available. They certainly are not. They

are, however, free in what might roughly be called an existentialist sense,

resembling that praised by Simone de Beauvoir in The Ethics of Ambiguity. The

assignation of freedom in this way is certainly individualistic, 'if one means

by that that it accords to the individual an absolute value and that it

90
recognizes in him alone the power of laying the foundations of his own

existence' (de Beauvoir 1948,156), though this should not be seen to accord

with what de Beauvoir calls 'the anarchy of personal whim'29

When Foucault, in summary of Deleuze, encourages individuals to'[d]evelop

action, thought, and desires by proliferation, juxtaposition and disjunction',

he is essentially encouraging an active deployment of individual freedoms in

precisely these terms. Conscious (or purposive) somaesthetic engagement is

but one way of expressing these critical freedoms. Critical freedom is

inalienable even if liberal freedom is not, and the conditions for critical

freedom are always present in individual subjects; each embodying infinite

potentialities for becomings. In other words, the modifier is free to chooseto

transform their body.

BwO and the Affective Art Object

The BwO, says O'Sullivan, is "a kind of aesthetic machine". The BwO might

be even said to be coextensive with art: "Art might be a name for these

experiential modes of being, these strange and exciting (and sometimes

frightening) 'new' images of thought" (O'Sullivan 2006,115-116). The

concept brings together aesthetics, politics and pragmatism.

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri explicitly cite body modification as a tactic

of resistance to the hegemonic forces of what they call "republicanism" in

their polemic text Empire. "Today's corporeal mutations constitute an

anthropological exodus and represent an extraordinarily important, but still

29A similar, though methodologically distinct, perspective on the inalienable freedom of

human subjectsarisesin Daniel Dennett's FreedomEvolves(Dennet 2003)

91
quite ambiguous, element of the configuration of republicanism "against"

imperial civilization [... ]", they exclaim. And further:

We certainly do need to change our bodies and ourselves,

and in perhaps a much more radical way than the

cyberpunk authors imagine. In our contemporary world,

the now common aesthetic mutations of the body, such as

piercings and tattoos, punk fashion and its various

imitations, are all initial indications of this corporeal

transformation, but in the end they do not hold a candle to

the kind of radical mutation needed here. The will to be

against really needs a body that is completely incapable of

submitting to command. " (Hardt and Negri 2000,215-216)

Their work is cited by O'Sullivan, who finds parallels between their praise of

a "fundamentally affirmative and creative production" and the Deleuzean

world-view, equating Empire's affirmative and productive politics with the

political art practice suggested by Deleuze. (O'Sullivan 2006,77). It seems

reasonable to suggest therefore that the "aesthetic mutations" Hardt and

Negri praise resemble the types of political art practice O'Sullivan imagines.

And he is not the only one to make this type of connection: in his essay

Somaestheticsand Democracy,Martin Jay suggests that Dewey's aesthetics and

Shusterman's somaesthetics also work towards the political goals of Empire.

In his terms, Hardt and Negri's praise of body modification "brings us almost

full circle back to John Dewey's Art as Experience" (Jay 2002,67), emphasising

the potential interconnection between affective aesthetics and counter-

hegemonic political practices.

92
Resisting stratification

Counter-hegemonic practice, if it is to be possible, must be aware of the

oppressive structures it is to work against. As P. O'Connor has explained,

[r]esistance is directed at not being a docile or useful body [... ]

resistance happens when we stop the search for our 'truth', when

we fight against the experts telling us who and what we are, when

we refuse to be docile bodies. If power is targeted at the body, then

it is the body that is the site of resistance' (P. O'Connor quoted in

Cooper 1995,124)

That is to say, even when power is understood to be everywhere (which the

Deleuzean model, with its universal assemblages, certainly concurs with),

freedom is still attainable if it is pursued conscious of the ways in which

power structures function. A politics which cannot conceive of an active mode

of resistance is no politics at all. This is at the core of my argument here,

though it is hardly a novel or controversial statement - the body is the site of

resistance.

The BwO exists necessarily as a resistant entity, and as a concept which is, by

its very nature, in opposition to the status quo. Its very parameters are

defined by the way in which is it is able to problematise and undermine the

desiring-production process, and thus it seems pertinent to examine how the

theoretical antagonisms of the BwO are born out by the material experience of

those who choose to modify their bodies. As I hope to show, this conflation of

antagonisms allows us not only to posit body modification practice as a

usefully subversive act (through disrupting our quotidian corporealities), it

also serves to counter certain inadequacies in arguments which have

93
understood body modification in a less than sympathetic way. In this way,

the examination will be reflexive, as I will contend that the modified body is a

body without organs, and simultaneously the BwO framework is a useful tool

for conceptualising the somaesthetic body.

To what, then, is the BwO resistant? Deleuze insists that there are three strata

that 'directly [bind] us'. These three things are the sum of the desiring-

machine's power. The imposition of organisation, subjectivity and

signification on the body is at the heart of desiring-production's continued,

recursive hegemonic influence, and the BwO's principal power comes from its

antagonism to these three quite specific demands:

You will be organized, you will be an organism, you will articulate

your body otherwise you're just depraved. You will be a signifier

-
and signified, interpreter and interpreted - otherwise you're just a
deviant. You will be a subject, nailed down as one, a subject of the

enunciation recoiled into a subject of the statement - otherwise

you're just a tramp. (Deleuze and Guattari 2004d, 176 -177)

Throughout the Capitalism and Schizophrenia project, Deleuze describes the

organism, the signified and the subject as 'strata', functional components of

desiring-production which in specific circumstances serve to oppress human

beings and prevent them from reaching the 'plane of consistency', the point at

which flows and intensities may move freely and the moment at which

complete liberation may be achieved.

Whereas the organism ducts and channels flows in predictable ways, the

BwO produces a plane of consistency upon which desire can gush

unencumbered. Deleuze imagines this plane as a 'movement of generalized

94
deterritorialization in which each person takes and makes what she or he can,

according to tastes she or he will have succeeded in abstracting from a Self'

(Deleuze and Guattari 2004d, 174); desire is still present, but instead it is

liberated from the desiring-machine apparatus. The Deleuzean masochist, for

example, uses 'suffering as a way of constituting a body without organs and

bringing forward the plane of consistency of desire' (Deleuze and Guattari

2004d, 172), which is to say that he is able to use painful procedures to liberate

his body in order to achieve a desire not limited by the bounds imposed by

the system of desiring-production. The BwO is the (de) construction which

makes the plane of consistency possible and the limit at which the plane of

consistency exists.

Each stratum is intertwined with a particular specificity of phenomenological

experience, and each specificity must be detached from its corresponding

stratum if a full BwO is to be obtained. The organism is the stratum of the

organs and it imposes an oppressive organisation on the body itself.

Signification is the stratum of the unconscious, and it encodes the content of

expressive desire in a restrictive manner. Subjectification is the stratum of the

conscious, and is the process through which the modes and forms of

expression themselves, abstract of their content, are restrained.

I will come to each of these in turn, but I wish to examine in the first instance

the organisation of the organism. Organism here refers to the totality of the

human body and the specific organisation of its organs which precipitate the

flow of desire. Hunger, want, need, lust; all these intensities and flows are the

product of the organisation of the organs which we call the organism. We are

subdued into finding comfort in this very organisation by the flows of desire

themselves, and are in bondage to our physiology. That the intact body is

docile and submissive allows the establishment of medical and political

95
authority, and that this organism we call the body is so inherently fragile,

easy to break, quick to become infected, malignant or cancerous only

exacerbates our capitulation to desiring production. The organism can only

function if all its parts are intact, and indeed, the very desire for the body to

remain intact is in itself a method whereby the influence of oppressive power

structures is keenly observed.

Deleuze and Guattari's polemic is rich with exhortations of dismantling and

deconstruction, daring subjects to 'walk on your head, sing with your

sinuses, see through your skin, breathe with your body' (Deleuze and

Guattari 2004d, 167). In terms of resistance to the organism, the most obvious

correlation between the Deleuzean model of the Body without Organs and the

modified body is the scant regard body modifiers such as Andrew seem to

show for the fragility of their bodies and the wilfully joyous way in which

they seem to embrace this same fragility. Seizing upon the malleability of the

flesh as something to be revelled in and not dreaded, they cut, excise,

bifurcate, implant, pierce and scar their bodies with abandon. Such practices

show no deference to the organism and its desires, and the parallels with the
Deleuzean model seem straightforward.

Whilst no technologies yet exist, of course, which permit the sinuses to

actually sing, even some quite simple body modification practices do

undermine and expand upon bestowed biology. For example, a small cabal of

people have experimented with the implantation of magnets in the fingers

which allow the individual to 'see' magnetic fields30, the interactions of the

magnets and their nervous system providing tangible sensation when in the

30 These experiments, whilst expanding the spectrum of sensation, have proven

technologically problematic. See http: //www. bmezine. com/news/pubring/20060115. html and
/20060115.html as well as associated articles for more details.

96
presence of magnets or magnetically induced currents. Tongue splitting, the

separation of the tongue into two halves by slicing between the lingual

muscles with a scalpel, actually produces what is essentially a new organ,

blessed with ranges of movement and sensation inexplicable to someone

cursed from birth to only have had one tongue. Subincision, the flaying open

of the male genitals by cutting from the urethral opening down the shaft, also

permits a new range of sexual sensation and behaviour anyone with a

fundamentally organic penis can never experience. Desires and intensities

never possible when the organism is intact are suddenly able to flow freely.

These are critical moments; becomings.

The eventual capacity to reorganise the human body is limited only by our

technological audacity. It is a matter of excited discussion amongst cultural

theorists, biologists, futurists and transhumanists, amongst others, as to

where the limits of capacity to modify and technologise the human body

might be found. These discussions are controversial and often ethically

troubling (see debates raging over xenotransplantation and stem-cell research

for example) but, nevertheless, it becomes ever easier to postulate a utopian

corporeal future where any body, of any conceivable sort, is not only possible

but available to all. In the meantime, even operations which are relatively

quick to carry out and require few tools outside of a scalpel and a steady hand

can result in a radically different phenomenological ontology and a body

which is a transgressive anathema to many people, as only small changes are

required to upset the delicate totality of the organism. Even those who study

body modifiers in depth from a psychiatric perspective often remain

confounded by the behaviour of these individuals, precisely because these

types of procedures resist the holistic integrity of the organism, and the

modified body that results from them is an affront to common notions of

corporeal wholeness. Moreover, they are procedures which are dealt with

97
harshly by most hegemonic power structures: Western countries frown upon

practising medicine without a licence; British law as established in R. vs.

Brown forbids the defence of consent against charges of assault; 2003 saw

several US states explicitly ban tongue splitting; corporate and educational

structures are able to exert great control over the bodies of those within their

organisations.

Essentially, as the Deleuzean model predicts, deviation from a consensus

understanding of what is acceptable corporeal practice in relation to the

organism's organisation is met with confusion and condemnation. Why is the

modified body so confusing? The deliberate construction of a disarticulate

body leads into the second of desiring-production's oppressive strata -

signification. There is a certain resistance to signification which arises simply

from the previously described antagonism, because interpreting an

organism's signification is to some degree grounded in a structuralised

understanding of its organisation. '[S]ignificance clings to the soul just as the

organism clings to the body' (Deleuze and Guattari 2004d, 177). However, a

body's signification is not wholly how it is to be understood, but what it

unconsciously wishes to be understood as, and the BwO in the first instance

seems to actively refuse to express any coherent message at all.

This lack of coherency is frustrating. Simplistically, it is possible to suggest

that much of the disdain for body modification practice arises from a lack of

empathy caused by modified body's inability or unwillingness to articulate

itself fully. Like the BwO and as a BwO, the modified body simply makes no

sense to the organism. 'In order to resist using words composed of articulated

phonetic units', the BwO 'utters only gasps and cries that are sheer

unarticulated blocks of sound' (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b, 10). Armando

Favazza, a clinical psychiatrist, seems to concur with this, also drawing upon

98
an auditory analogy in expressing that the 'desperate measures [of self-

mutilators] are upsetting to those of us who try to achieve these goals in a

more tranquil manner' (Favazza 1996,323, emphasis mine). If there is such a

thing as a language of the body, then the language of the lasting, visible

testaments to the moment of wilfully inflicted wounding is entirely alien to

the intact organism, for whom it is human nature to avoid injury, to prevent

pain and to conceal disfigurements.

And yet the modified body's capacity for interjecting into signification also

works at another, more subtle level. I wish to illustrate the ways in which the

modified body further fulfils the BwO's mode of resistance to signification

with particular reference to the act of tattooing, particularly as it would seem,

at first glance, that tattooing is an inherently signifying process. The tattoo has

been and continues to be simplistically read as the writing on the body of a

semiotic sign produced by particular signifying subject. For example, if the

fact that Theresa Green's Tattoo Encyclopediaeven exists is not proof enough of

this phenomenon, a quote from its introduction will demonstrate precisely

how pervasive this model is:

[T]attoos are forms of expression.... The thought that the tattoo is

capable of expressing so many different concepts, and is therefore a

means of communication, is not a new one. Writers, observers,

tattooists and the tattooed have all remarked upon this aspect. We

seem to intuitively seek something beneath the surface and behind

the obvious to explain what we see. The silent exchange that takes

place between the bearer and viewer of the tattoo may be one of the

most interesting and important aspects of the whole process.

Nevertheless it is an aspect that receives curiously little attention

over and above its mention. That light treatment may be due to the

99
 fact that much of what we understand when we see a tattoo is

communicated through symbolism. (Green 2003, vii)

In Tattooed Bodies- Subjectivity, Textuality, Ethics and Pleasure,Nikki Sullivan

argues persuasively that this 'expression-reception model of communication

as the intentional expression of a sign designating the thought of an innate I,

and the subsequent reception and deciphering of this sign (truth) by the

other' (Sullivan 2001,47) is highly problematic, and I am indebted to her

analysis of this model in my suggestions here.

Essentially, the basis of Sullivan's argument with the expression-reception

model is that its simplistic reliance on what she terms 'dermal diagnosis'

which elides the constitution of the diagnostician's own subjectivity in their

deciphering of the sign and which furthermore (incorrectly) presupposes that

an immutable signified truth is even productively or receptively possible. It is

perfectly possible, of course, to get a tattoo that means nothing at all, one

which is interpreted differently by different people, or one which is highly

idiosyncratic. To illustrate this, Sullivan mentions the case of an individual

with H-A-T-E tattooed on his knuckles: under examination, he claims this

tattoo (now) signifies 'Happiness all through Eternity', its reception simply as

HATE is misguided. He has been through a journey with his tattoo, for all its

appearance as a permanent, immutable sign of subjective intention, and 'the

responses of others to his tattoos will inform the ways in which he both

understands and experiences them' (2001,20). The consequences of this

contention are marked: to the untattooed, tattoos only look like non-verbal

communication. In previous generations, they were diagnosed as clear marks

of primitivism or criminality; now, they may be read as fashion statements,

markers of group identity or post-modern cultural appropriation, but with

each passing generation they maintained the appearance of immutable

100
signification of a specific truth whilst the perception of what that truth might

actually be has changed with the times.

A Deleuzean analysis of tattooing also features in Patricia MacCormack's

essay The Great Ephemeral Tattooed Skin (MacCormack 2006) MacCormack

observes that

as a BwO, a tattooed body adds to the population of elements of

skin, intensifies different points, and resists interpretation but

also deterritorializes those planes of skin which precede it. Just as

the signifier 'woman' is not a stable term beyond its failure to

signify'man', a tattooed body is the added-onto body that fails to

signify the 'natural', 'raw' or 'unmarked' body (MacCormack

2006,64)

Her analysis of tattooed women underlines the positions I take here: "A

tattooed body resists organization by presenting another layer which must be

organized, the signification of which is volitional but neither clear nor stable"
(MacCormack 2006,64)31. In Deleuzean terms, a subject who tattoos their

body is resisting signification by playing precisely on these preconceptions

that Sullivan unmasks.

You have to keep enough of the organism for it to reform each

dawn; and you have to keep small supplies of significance and

subjectification, if only to turn them against their own systems

when the circumstances demand it, when things persons, even

situations, force you to; and you have to keep small rations of

31Mindy Fenske makes a similar argument, reading the tattoo against the Deleuzean notion of
territorialization. (Fenske 2007,29)

101
 subjectivity in sufficient quantity to enable you to respond to the
dominant reality (Deleuze and Guattari 2004d, 178)

It is not enough for the BwO to be insignificant, it must redeploy significance

to its own ends. Or, as O'Sullivan suggests in his application of the BwO to art

more generally, "art then might make use of the components of cliche in order
to resist cliche" (O'Sullivan 2006,67). In this way the modified body is

disarticulate whilst appearing articulate, an uncanny double betrayal. It is

able to appropriate commonalities of perception and turn them against

themselves, and is all the more unsettling and subversive for it.

The third of Deleuze's strata is subjectification, closely bound up in

signification but distinct from it. In the Deleuzean paradigm, where

signification is to be understood as the expression of the unconscious,

subjectification is the assignation of a conscious process which might account

for the deployment of any specific signifying sign. The signified requires a

subject and a subjectivity in order to allow its genesis - put simply, what
begins as subjective desire results in signification. Because of this, desiring-

production requires an orderly subject, whose subjectivity is clear and

bounded, to produce ordered signification. Subjectification enforces a specific

logic of behaviour (a specific subjectivity, a specific consciousness) and

interpretation, and throughout A ThousandPlateaus the impression arises that,

in relation to the BwO at least, it is the hegemonic insistence upon a dominant

logic of subjectivity which is actually at the core of our entrapment. 'How can

we unhook ourselves from the points of subjectification that secure us, nail us

down to a dominant rebellion? ', asks Deleuze. Answering his own question,

he goes on to explain that the answer lies in '[t]earing the conscious away

from the subject in order to make it a means of exploration' (2004d, 177), and

it is useful to try and unravel what exactly this might entail.

102
Artaud is quoted by Deleuze describing that the conscious

knows what is good for it and what is of no value to it: it knows

which thoughts and feelings it can receive without danger and with

profit, and which are harmful to the exercise of its freedom. Above

all, it knows just how far its own being goes, and just how far it has

not yet gone or does not have the right to go without sinking into

the unreal, the illusory, the unmade, the unprepared. (Artaud,

quoted in Deleuze and Guattari 2004d, 177)

The implication here is that if this 'knowledge' can somehow be undermined

or perverted, subjectification itself will begin to crumble. In terms of body

modification, I wish to present one specific practice which might constitute a

useful strategy in this respect, namely flesh-hook suspension. In a body-

modification context, suspension is the practice of hanging the body from

hooks pierced directly through the skin. It has its origins in the tribal rituals of

the Mandan tribe of Native Americans (see: Catlin 1976) and, whilst it has no

inherent aesthetic intention, it is relevant to the discussion at hand because it

has been appropriated and eagerly embraced in a recent Western context by

those within the body modification subculture. The only visible and material

results of suspensions are small scars left by the hooks themselves, but it is

suspension's particular capacity for transformation of consciousness which I

wish to bring to this particular discussion.

The Mandan themselves used suspension rituals as one part of a broader

corporeal devotion to their spirit God. A young brave would have splints

pierced into his chest and then be raised by ropes attached to these splints to
be hung from the ceiling of the lodge. Wailing in devotion to the Great Spirit,

103
'the sounds of which no imagination can ever reach', they would hang there

until they fainted and then, once their unconscious bodies were lowered, they

would be left untouched until such time as they came round again of their

own accord. During this ritual, Catlin says, the braves 'were here enjoying

their inestimable privilege of voluntarily entrusting their lives to the Great

Spirit' (1976,65), and indeed the very purpose of the rituals themselves was to

allow the Mandan warriors to experience and understand God in such a way

that would not be possible otherwise.

Consider these practices, then, in light of the Deleuzean model of the BwO.

Before being suspended, the brave is nailed down by his subjectification and

never truly able to understand the divine. The strata of subjectification

enforces a material limit on the brave's consciousness; the profane

consciousness is unable to know God. Once the suspensions have begun, this

material limit is split asunder by the sudden, jarring disconnection of

conscious experience and materialist subjection and as a result, the brave is

afforded countless novel 'forms of expression and regimes of signs' (Deleuze

and Guattari 2004d, 148): a subjectivity radically different from that originally

bestowed upon him.

For the Mandan, of course, these suspensions were actually part of the

dominant ideology, and I do not seek to suggest that they were subversive to

the organisational structure of Mandan society. I would suggest, however,

that in some respects all invasively transformative corporeal technologies

function in largely similar ways when it comes to broadening and

complicating the limits of conscious experience, and the clearly delineated

bounds of the Mandan's metaphysical experience in theistic terms is purely a

very vivid and easily grasped example of how somatic experience may push
forward an individual's consciousness. The practice, though torturous, was

104
rapturous and devotional in nature, and allowed each brave to seek proximity

with his God; in effect, they were using corporeal practice to mediate and

affect conscious experience.

Can body modification liberate the individual from an oppressive structure of

desire? It is deconstructive, and thus resists the strata of the organism. It is

disarticulate, and thus it resists signification and interpretation. It is

consciously dynamic, and thus it resists subjectification. It seems possible to

suggest, then, that the modified body, as a body without organs which can be

achieved through purposive intention, is indeed a route out of oppression,

resistant as it is to the principal shackles of human experience. Nevertheless,

there is a conundrum which arises from the fact that because body

modification is an elective choice, it remains mired in the structure of desire it

claims to resist. The bodies of Deleuze's masochist, schizophrenic and junkie

are without organs as a by-product of their conditions, and at the very root of

these bodies' resistive power is the very fact that they lie outside of desire in

and of themselves. We might envy them and their sloughing off of their

organs, but as soon as we direct that envy into emulative action, it becomes

desire. Whilst I suggested earlier that body modification can be purposively

used to obtain a BwO, could it not be argued that, in a capitalist system

which uses the image of the tattooed body to sell designer perfume, body

modification itself is simply another desiring-machine? Is the BwO wholly

unobtainable precisely because to seek to obtain it would involve complicity

in the desiring-production assemblage?

Is Resistance Futile?

This hopelessness at the heart of what is otherwise a hugely hopeful thesis is

frustrating, but it is one which Deleuze does seek to address. He points out

105
that all this resistance requires a modicum of caution, for you 'don't reach the

BwO, and its plane of consistency, by wildly destratifying' (2004d, 178). As

Brian Massumi explains, 'The degree of danger [in achieving a BwO]

increases apace with the degree of freedom.... All the more reason to make

the escape with the utmost sobriety' (Massumi 1992,85). Critical freedom

must always be expressed cautiously. The BwO can be botched, and he

describes three particular outcomes of the destratification process, of which

only one is truly emancipatory.

There are in fact several ways of botching the BwO: either one fails

to produce it, or one produces it more or less, but nothing is

produced on it, intensities do not pass or are blocked.... If you free

it with too violent an action, if you blow apart the strata without

taking precautions, then instead of drawing the plane you will be

killed, plunged into a black hole or even dragged towards

catastrophe. Staying stratified is not the worst that can happen; the

worst that can happen is if you throw the strata into a demented or

suicidal collapse which brings them back down on us heavier than

ever. (Deleuze and Guattari 2004d, 178)

The first outcome, produced by over-zealous destratification, is the 'empty

BwO'. This is the body emptied of organs; the body of the junkie which,

though destratified, is impotent. Whilst resisting the strata, the junkie

neglected to engage in remaking that which he had destroyed, and as such

flows and intensities are quenched by a taut, resistant surface. In effect, by

severing all links with desiring-production, the empty BwO loses all capacity

to engage with it and to undermine it; any power it might have had as a tool

of liberation is negated. As I have sought to suggest, the modified body is far

from empty - it is joyous, playful, wilfully subversive and actively

106
reconstructive. It's true to say that self-harm, self-mutilation or the random
infliction of violence on one's own body would produce an empty BwO, as

the infliction of wounds is the totality of the self-harmer's intention. But it is

something quite different to refigure corporeality after a purposive end even

if using the same methods of destruction that might otherwise result in

emptiness.

The second outcome is the opposite to the first, as it is the result of an over-

abundance of construction. This cancerous BwO, as Deleuze calls it, is so

to
eager construct dementedly that it ends up recreating the oppressive strata

it has just destroyed. It fascistically reconstructs the very same strata until

they are eventually as oppressive, if not more so, than those it originally

sought to pervert. It is admittedly difficult to refute the accusation that the

modified body is itself a cancerous BwO: body modification subculture often

skirts close to this over-abundance of construction, and it has, in some ways,

been complicit in replacing one set of strata with others which seem strikingly

similar. The typical organisation of the modified body into a distinct sub-

cultural aesthetic, for example, can often mirror the oppressive processes of

'beautiful' organisation which it was subject to before its reconfiguration.

Nevertheless, this does not preclude any individual body from undergoing

modificative procedures outside of this sub-culturally normative aesthetic,

and perhaps serves as a cautionary tale to those embarking on a modificative

project of their own. It might be necessary to use body-modification

techniques to produce a BwO resistant to body modification culture itself, but

this does not undermine modification's essential capacity as a tool for

producing a BwO.

Between these two poles of desolation and malignancy, then, lies the full

BwO:

107
 This is how it should be done: Lodge yourself on a stratum,

experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous

place on it, find the potential movements of deterritorialization,

possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions

here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by

segment, have a small plot of land at all times. It is through

meticulous relation with the strata that one succeeds in freeing lines

of flight causing conjugated flows to pass and escape and bringing

forth continuous intensities for a BwO. (2004d, 178)

The fully-fledged, fully-formed BwO is able to mimic the strata of desiring

production but use them, playfully, for its own subversive ends. This is a

crucial point, as it underlines precisely why BwOs, though functioning within

the architecture of power, embody such counter-hegemonic potential. It is

precisely because the BwO is able to take the artefacts of power systems (in

the body modification sense, for example, exchanging capital for a socially-
disruptive or formally anti-materialist dispositif such as a tattoo) that it

embodies such potential as a mode of resistance. The BwO remains within the

structural framework of desiring-production, but only so it can gleefully

redirect, scatter and pollute its flows. In this sense, whilst the acquisition of

body modifications in a Western context will always be instigated by desire

and mediated by capitalism, the results of these modifications are intensely

troubling to the structures of desire and capitalism themselves. Indeed, this

proximity to its mortal enemy is actually necessary for the modified body to

have any resistive power at all. The disruption that these technologies

engender is a function of precisely this proximity, unravelling the power of

hegemonic capitalism by turning its own modes of production against

themselves.

108
There is a polemic of revolt woven through Capitalism & Schizophrenia,and its

battle-cry is as follows:

Where psychoanalysis says "Stop, find yourself again, " we should

say instead "Let's go further still, we haven't found our BwO yet,

we haven't sufficiently dismantled ourselves. " Substitute forgetting

for anamnesis, experimentation for interpretation. Find your body

without organs. Find out how to make it. It's a question of life and
death, youth and old age, sadness and joy. It is where everything is

played out. (Deleuze and Guattari 2004d, 167)

If the modified body truly is a body without organs, imagining body

modification in Deleuzean terms is endlessly useful in understanding many

of its facets, many of which I haven't even begun to explore here. The

approach simultaneously explains why body art is often so problematic for

individuals and the power structures they inhabit, and how such interaction

might be deployed as a means of subversive liberation. The BwO philosophy

can account for much of the authoritarian responses and social displeasure

shown towards invasive practices of all kinds; it can explain why one tattoo

or one cosmetic surgery procedure never seems to be enough; it can postulate

the developmental course and aspirational goals of transhumanism; it can

account for the construction of an over-arching sub-cultural aesthetic and the

appropriation of sub-cultural practice into the mainstream language of

capitalism, it can show why such appropriations are problematic and it can

show how to resist them. It seems to offer a clarity of conception that much of

the discourse on corporeally transformative technologies lack, and it

simultaneously provides both a guide-book for navigating structural

hegemony and a manifesto for resisting it.

109
Conclusions

As Shusterman has cautioned, it is possible to take too utopic a view of the

potential for corporeal self-fashioning. "I do not want to suggest that working

through the body can provide an altogether autonomous route to private

perfection and self-creation", he explains. Nevertheless, it does provide a

small set of possibilities through which resistance may be successfully

enacted. "Of course, working on one's self through one's body is not in itself a

very serious challenge to the socio-political structures which shape the self

and the language of its description. But it could perhaps instil attitudes and
behavioural patterns that would favour and support social transformation"

(Shusterman 1992,260). A concertedly artistic approach to body art elucidates

the possibilities and potentials of heterogeneous bodily aesthetics and

encourages creativity and novelty.

Jean Baudrillard has scathingly suggested that body modification and Body
Art is a dead-end. "All these psycho-dramaturges of body-art, body-

alteration, body-modification (with biurgy and the plastic surgeons of the

genome waiting in the wings) are introverts", he states. "They set out their

own body as narcissistic territory and strive to exhaust its possibilities"

(Baudrillard 2003,62). What he fails to realise, however, is that the

possibilities are endless.

110
Chapter Four

The Art and Authorship of Tattooing

The boundaries of the contemporary tattoo production world rub against

thoseof the larger, conventionally legitimated art world

Clinton Sanders (Sanders 2008,150)

-

In this central section of the thesis, I want to build upon the affective models

of the modified body-object established in the previous two chapters and lay

out a more focussed and in-depth investigation of one particular form of body

art and its specific intersections with art more generally. From the generalised

theoretical frameworks which I have argued help make sense of the modified

body as an object in the world, I want now to move to a set of discussions

focussed on the details of one particular genre of body art in order to probe

the complexities of this nomenclature in more detail. Of all the modification

practices that are called "body art", tattooing, as a mode of production that

seems at least superficially to share a great deal of formal qualities with more

traditional artistic genres, is the one that has received the most attention in

artistic terms. And though it has rarely been more than a marginalised

footnote, amongst the various forms of body modification it has been the

most visible in art galleries, received the most attention from scholars

interested in the visual qualities of body art and proven of most utility to

practicing conceptual artists in their own work. Over the course of the three

sub-chapters that follow, with reference to a number of specific case studies I

111
will present an overview of tattooing's tessellation with fine art, the points

where this tessellation makes sense and the ways in which it fails.

Is Tattooing Art?

If the current body of work and the attention that it is receiving is

any indication, future art history textbookswill include tattooists as

part of our contemporary creative culture - Jesse Lee Denning,

curator, Invisible NYC Art Gallery and Tattoo Studio

(Denning in Waterhouse 2009,5)

Clinton R. Sanders' 1989 book Customizing the Body - The Art and Culture of

Tattooing, saw tattooing at the threshold of becoming what Sanders called "a

(partly legitimated) art form" (Sanders 2008,24). With increasing visibility in

academic scholarship, the dissolution of institutional barriers to low-brow

forms of art making such as graffiti and an increased attention amongst

tattooers and collectors towards technical skill, virtuosity and creativity,

tattooing at the end of the 1980s seemed to him poised to cross a cultural

Rubicon. "It is imminently reasonable", Sanders writes, to anticipate that

contemporary tattooing "will be at least as successful as was graffiti in

achieving the status of a minor art form and acting as a source of stylistic

innovation in established artistic genres" (Sanders 2008,162).

And yet 20 years later, this threshold seems still not to have been fully

traversed. In her foreword to Jo Waterhouse's compendium collection Art by

Tattooists, Jesse Lee Denning recognises the craft of tattooing "beginning" to

take root in the "sophisticated" world of fine art. Denning is an art history

graduate and curator (with her husband, tattooist Troy Denning) of Invisible

NYC Art Gallery and Tattoo Studio in New York, and she is passionate about

112
the art many contemporary tattooists are producing both on skin and in other

media. In her foreword and in her curatorial practice, she makes a fervent

case for the legitimacy and importance of their work, and aims to stress

tattooing's inexorable trajectory towards recognition within a hitherto

dismissive art establishment. "Increasingly", she says, "tattooists are

receiving recognition as 'fine artists', their work hanging on the walls of some

of the top galleries in the world" (Waterhouse 2009,4).

As far as Denning is concerned, tattooing as a legitimised art form is still

nascent, still emerging, still tentative. Why, two decades after Sander's

considered study of the state of contemporary tattooing, does the co-option of

tattooing into the broader art world and the recognition of tattooing as a

bona-fide form of artistic production in its own right still seem to be in its

infancy even by those intimately involved, like Denning, in the dialogue

between the tattoo and fine art worlds? Why has the initial trickle of interest

Sanders chronicled in 1989 not become a fully-fledged torrent of work? Why

are tattoos still not perceived by any art-historical scholars as art works in

their own right, and why have the incursions by tattooists into the institutions

of art not been taken seriously? The answer, I want to argue, lies in the fact

that the case that tattooists be understood as legitimate artists and that the

tattoos they produce be viewed and understood as works of art has not been

made sufficiently clearly, in the right terms and venues, nor with sufficient

depth or dexterity. Sander's book is almost unique in recent tattoo

scholarship in that it does, at least in part, attempt to examine in what terms

tattooing can legitimately be called artistic, but his case is only tentative and it

comes only in the final chapter in a work more methodologically orientated

towards a sociological and ethnographic study of Western tattoo culture in

the 1980s. Nevertheless, his work is important for any investigation of

tattooing as an art form, as rather than assume that tattooing is artistic and

113
using this assumption to inform an argument for tattooing's cultural

acceptance, it outlines the ways in which tattooing resembles more canonical

forms of artistic production and how tattooing might fit with the institutions

of the art world and the art-historical academy.

Sanders recognises a number of criteria by which genres of craft-making and

production are able to earn the nomenclature of "art", and argues that

tattooing in the West fulfils (or began to fulfil post-1970) all of them. These

criteria, which he suggests elevate crafts to the more honorific status of art,
fall into four particular categories: creative, institutional, formal and

organisational. On creative grounds, Sanders argues, crafts become arts when

makers who "work with materials - clay, precious metals, fabrics and so-forth

that are typically shaped for functional or decorative purposes ... emphasise
-
the aesthetic features of their work (especially uniqueness and beauty)"

(Sanders 2008,24). Tattooing makes this step from a craft into an art when it

involves a measure of originality, aesthetic worth and technical skill, and

when it is understood by practitioners, wearers and cultural discourse in

aesthetic rather than solely semiotic, socio-cultural or psychological terms.

On institutional grounds, tattooing crosses the craft / art divide because

(some) museums and (some) academic discussions have conferred the

definitional honorific "art" upon tattooing or representations of tattooing,

permitting tattooing entry into the institutional canon of artistic genres.

Sanders lists a handful exhibitions from the late 1980s32and I will examine a

number of institutionally-legitimised exhibitions of tattooing later in this

32It is interesting to note that most of the exhibitions he lists seem to primarily be exhibitions
displaying photographs of Japanese tattooing in the context of its relationship to Ukiyo-e
woodblock prints, including photos of full-body Japanese tattooing at the Clarence Kennedy
Gallery in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1987, an exhibition of Japanese tattooing at San
Diego's Museum of Photographic Art, and "The Art of the Japanese Tattoo" at the Peabody
Museum in Salem, MA, (Sanders 2008,217n7).

114
study. There is some practical and conceptual difficulty in institutionalising

tattoos as works of art given their medium is the living human body, which

Sanders imagines may hamper the qualification of tattooing as an art form. I

will go on to explore the ways in which a number of artists and curators have

sought to navigate and negotiate these limits.

The formal grounds are, straightforwardly, that the making of a tattoo

emulates the production of more conventional artistic methods such as

drawing, painting and sculpting and that the tattoo itself is, essentially, a

drawing on skin. As I discussed in Chapter Two, the processes of body

modification feel intuitively similar to the processes of sculpture or

ornamentation, and for a number of commentators this similarity alone is

sufficient to justify body art's claim to its artistic status. And though such a
definition cannot be a sufficient one, it is indubitable that the parallels

between tattooing and other forms of art making do greatly inform the idea

that body art is worthy of the name. The tattoo is a particularly clear example

of this proximity, and coupled with the fact that a number of high-profile

tattooists are fine art graduates (Sanders 2008,157) , it is a position that

Sanders suggests carries some convincing weight.

The organisational grounds overlap to some degree with the formal. As books

like Waterhouse's and magazines like International Tattoo Art and Skin Art

illustrate, tattooists and the culture they inhabit have coalesced around a self-

determined structure they refer to as "tattoo art". "Like groups representing

homosexuals, the mentally disordered, alcoholics and other devalued social

actors", says Sanders,

formal organizations such as the National Tattoo Association

and similar alliances are actively involved in redefining

115
 tattooing. Information directed at the general public by

tattooing organizations and tattooists who have a vested

interest in expanding the artistic reputation of tattooing

emphasizes conventionally accepted values. Promotional

materials refer to tattoo studios and tattoo art, display

exemplary work exhibiting aesthetic content and technical

skill, stress the historical and cultural roots of tattooing ... and

emphasize the academic training and conventional artistic

experience of key practitioners. (Sanders 2008,157)

If tattooists themselves take on the mantle of respectability and legitimacy, a

shift in cultural perception of their work should eventually follow.

Writing contemporaneously with Sanders, visual theorist John Wilton called

for "an understanding of skin art". In one of the few pieces of writing to

examine tattooing through an explicitly artistic lens, Wilton's essay Towards

an Understanding of Skin Art makes much the same case as Sanders, and in

much the same terms. "Of all the raw materials available to humanity for

transformation into art", he asserts, "the body is the most readily available".

"[Tattooing] is clearly a decorative art there is no question

...
that tattooing shares many of the criteria we assign to other

pictorial arts, yet these living works of art remain excluded

and misunderstood, artistic territory thus far untapped by the

ubiquitous Museum / Gallery apparatus of the twentieth

century" (Wilton 1991,86)

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As in Sander's case, Wilton makes his case on the formal similarities between

tattooing and conventional art forms, on its history and tradition and on the

refinements in skill and talent amongst its practitioners.

There is little to disagree with in either Wilton or Sanders' cases. I can only

agree wholeheartedly that the developments in contemporary Western

tattooing that they chronicled should have been the starting point for a final

ascent towards a legitimised artistic status. And yet, it is clear this ascent has

stalled. Sanders' work should have been the starting point for art historians

and theorists of aesthetics to fashion the claims he makes into fully-fledged

studies in art-theoretical terms. But twenty years later, there have been no art-
historical monographs on the sub-cultural canon of important and influential

tattoo artists. There have been no studies in art-theoretical terms of the

aesthetic movements in tattoo art. Exhibitions of tattoos in galleries have

received scant attention from art historians. The artistic and art-historical

establishment is yet to take the very idea of tattoos as art seriously. Art

theorists have moved little closer "towards an understanding of skin art"

than they were at the beginning of the 1990s.

The reason for this, I want to argue, is that these cases are always made too

cursorily. As discussed in Chapter Two, whilst these types of analyses make

intuitive sense, they are deceptively shallow. The comparisons Sanders and

Wilton make, whilst legitimate and sensible, are too simplistic and made too

hastily, and when problems are acknowledged, they are dodged or ignored.

Don Ed Hardy may have a fine art degree, but why is this important? A

particular museum may have hung some photos of tattoos, but why is this

interesting? Sanders' work is an important first step, but it has never been

developed by anyone wanting to try and imagine what an art world within

which tattooists were held in the same critical esteem as painters and

117
sculptors might look like; whether the terms "artist" and "art work" hold for

the inter-subjective ways in which tattoos are acquired; how the apparatus of

the gallery would have to change to accommodate the fact that tattoos exist

only on the skin of living human beings; or in what ways the particularities of

tattooing and its medium might open interesting and critically important

avenues of artistic exploration. If the case for tattooing's artistic legitimacy is

made simply on the grounds that because at first glance it resembles painting,
it will never achieve the level of understanding Wilton wants to move

towards nor the institutional support Sanders feels it deserves.

What is a tattoo artist?

Susan Hall's novel The Electric Michelangelo is heavy with a reverence for the

artistry of tattooing. References to tattoo artists as Old Masters pepper the

text, with analogies made to Blake, Bernini (Hall 2004,69) and Van Gogh (74).

Her protagonist, Cy Parks, is the eponymous Michelangelo.

Underneath that was a painted sign that said 'The Electric

Michelangelo', Freehander, Antiseptic treatment, Crude Work

Removal, No tattoos under 18 years of age'. There was a

picture of an artist's palette with a paintbrush resting on it

underneath the lettering. Cy's hair was tied back with a piece

of black ribbon, and in his left ear was a pearl, as if he were a

character from another century. This was his life now. This

was who he was. (Hall 2004,157)

And yet whilst the book celebrates the artistic talent of Cy, Hall is also more

than well aware that "there was absolutely no such thing as a blank human

canvas." (Hall 2004,263 - 264) "There were instances", she writes,

118
 when Cy's needle unwittingly delved down into a soul and

struck upon meaning, then confidential matter came up,

unstemmable as arterial blood or gushing oil, and customers

confessed the reason behind the art. He caught their stories in

a bucket in the shop or booth and mixed it with ink and used
the serum to paint translations of the very stories the tellers

were haemorrhaging on to them. [... ] The tales were

revelatory and awful and enlightening. These were not house

walls he was painting, after all, they were empathetic people,

made of flesh and bone and experience and tragedy and joy.
(Hall 2004,260)

Who, then, is the author of a tattoo? If the tattoo is body art, who is the artist?

Is it the client, who enlists the services of a tattoo artist to produce a specific

design on their skin in order to express some personal, specific intention? Or

is it the tattooist who will often produce an entirely custom design by their

own hand, based on their client's wishes? The specificities of a tattoo's

materiality, medium and mode of production/reception immediately

problematise questions of authorship (with its attendant concerns of

originality, sincerity, ownership, creativity and expression) and preclude any

simplistic or straightforward answer.

The answer most often presumed (if not explicitly stated) in many recent
discussions of the culture of tattoos and their textuality is that bearer of the

tattoo is to be regarded as providing the creative genesis of the tattoo's formal

content and symbolic function, and thus to function as the tattoo's author. In

magazine interviews, sociological studies and casual conversation, the focus

119
of interest in specific tattoos seems to turn on their bearers' desires, messages

and narratives. As Juliet Fleming has argued, the "tattoo's claim to effectively

represent the interior of the psyche is one of the things that permits its

elevation into an art form in the West" (Fleming 2000,65); by her argument, it
is the very crystallisation of notions of authorship around the specific

subjectivity of the individual upon whose skin it is displayed, and the

academic and popular presentation of the tattoo as the product of consistent

singular artistic intention, which has driven what she calls the 'tattoo

renaissance'.

The tattoo renaissance, says Fleming, relies on the emergence of custom

tattooing - tattooing drawn for the individual client and not applied from

pre-drawn flash - in the 1970s. In this mode of production, once the client's

intentions are freed from the semiotic pidgin of flash sheets, tattooing can

become an unencumbered, pure expression of internal truths. Through the

personalisation of motif, the tattoo takes on a new capacity for self-expression.

There is a rather obvious formalist defence to this. As the custom tattoo

involves far more creative and technical input from the tattoo artist, I would

argue that the conferral of the design process to the tattooist actually

constitutes a move away from simplistic semiotic presentations33. Margot

Millin's account of the same moment in history exemplifies this, exalting the

artistry, creativity and craftsmanship of the tattoo artists of the period (Millin

1997). Her account of the period focuses on first wave of female tattooists,

and acknowledges that tattooists like Ruth Marten (who both exhibited

paintings and carried out live demonstrations of tattooing at the Musee d'Art

Moderne de la Ville de Paris as part of the 10th Paris Biennale in 1977) were

33Detailed accounts of this 'Renaissance' and the professionalisation of tattooing can be found
in DeMello (2000, Ch. 3) and Rubin (1988,233-262).

120
actively working as both tattooists and fine artists, seeking to find common

ground between both areas of their practice. Marten, a fine-art graduate from

Boston, taught herself to tattoo in the early 1970s and began incorporating

motifs and stylistic tropes she had studied at art school into her tattoos. In an

era whose semiotic palette was otherwise rather limited, she was tattooing

Art Nouveau- and Art Deco-inspired pieces; reproducing Mondrians and

even aping Man Ray's Le Violin d'Ingres (1924), tattooing violin louvers onto

one client. Millin cites Marcia Tucker's 1981 paper in Artforum ("a shining

exception" (Millin 1997,68) to the intellectual and specifically art-historical

discourse around tattooing of the time and, perhaps, even since), which

argued that

Engraving on the skin requires the same draftsmanship [sic],

control and appropriateness of design that any significant

drawing on paper entails. But the art of tattooing shares other

qualities with more recent developments in contemporary art.

Tattoos... are realized on a living (changing) person, so when

the artist relinquishes the work, the product gains 'autonomy, '

remaining itself while shifting with context or situation. The

fact that increasing numbers of fine artists wish to control or

dictate the context in which their work is seen, wish to

eliminate context altogether, or wish to create their own

contexts is a problem that does not exist for the serious tattoo

artist. (Tucker 1981,46)

Tucker's article sets out a bold case for (certain) tattooists as artists,

underscoring such considerations as training, attitude and technique.

'Clearly', she says, perhaps somewhat unfairly, 'these artists' work is closer in

theory and in practice to that of artists in other media than to the endeavours

121
of their fellow tattooists' (Tucker 1981,44). Whist I disagree somewhat with

the points at which she makes the distinctions between artists and tattooers

(and would like to suggest divisions between good and bad tattooists be

made on aesthetic, creative and competency grounds rather than dividing

them into 'tattoo artists' and 'tattooers'), what her article reveals about 1970s

American tattooing is worthy of note, particularly when contrasted to

Fleming's conception of the same period.

Fleming directly positions herself against the assertions of tattoo artists that

they be taken seriously as artists in a wider sense. She does acknowledge

"refinements of conception" since the 70s, and that a growing number of

tattooists have "professional art training and some association with the wider

art world" (Fleming 2000,61), but then goes on to point out, quite correctly,

that whilst those with such formal artistic backgrounds do seek to distance

themselves from 'scratchers'', the difference is perhaps not as marked as they

might wish it to be. Her argument, in essence, is that the tattoo renaissance is

predicated on an ideological and ethical shift towards a general consensus

that the tattoo turns skin into an inscriptive surface, semiotically exteriorizing

internal desires. All tattooing functions this way, undermining the claims of

those seeking legitimacy through artistic competence.

This analysis fails because amongst all her discussions of surfaces,

exteriorities, borders and boundaries, she only ever seems to see these as

permeable in one direction: outwards. She often skirts tantalisingly close to an

acknowledgement of the presence of the tattooist's subjectivity in the

tattooing process (she does, for example, talk about the tattoo "collapsing the

34'Scratcher' is the vernacular term in the tattoo industry to disparagingly refer to a tattooist
of low skill, poor levels of training and dubious ethics (such as tattooing drunks or juveniles).
This (perceived) distinction has stood since at least the 1920s, where the term was 'jagger'
(Parry 2006,43). This rather undermines the novelty of Fleming's position.

122
boundary between subject and object" (Fleming 2000,65)), but she never

actually commits herself to acknowledging it fully, too content to fall into

over-simplistic generalisation of skin as a boundary condition between self

and world without ever really defining in detail exactly what this might

mean.

This sentiment, or one much like it, is present in much writing on tattooing. In

recent texts, writers have often sought to encapsulate tattooing within the

wider discourse of selfhood and identity politics. For example, in the

introduction to a collection called Dorothy Parker's Elbow - Tattoos on Writers,

Writers on Tattoos, a compendium of poems, stories and anecdotes about

tattoos and tattoo culture, tattoos are construed as "bold statements of

personality" (Addonizio and Dumesnil 2002, xiv). For Teresa Green, (most)

tattoos are "the outward sign of an inner transformation" (Green 2003, viii). In

the ethnographic context of Tahitian body art, "tattooing is a self

identification process" (Kuwahara 2005,5). For Paul Sweetman, tattoos,

particularly large ones, are "expressions of the self" (Sweetman 2000).

Though often expressed through the language of post-modern theory, these

types of discussions often function within precisely the same ideological,

ethical and even metaphysical frameworks as much older and much less

celebratory understandings of the tattoo as symbolic of an internal identity. If

the basic premise is that the inside is presented on the skin, there is no

divergence here at all from Adolf Loos' 1908 proclamation that "the modern

person who tattoos themselves is either a criminal or a degenerate. [... ] People

with tattoos not in prison are either latent criminals or degenerate aristocrats"
(Loos 1998,167) or the castigation of tattooed people by criminologists,

123
ethnographers and sociologists throughout the 20thCentury35, many of whom

viewed tattoos as something akin to the stigmata of the criminal man.

In these types of discussion, if the tattoo artist or artisan is mentioned at all

they are most often depicted as facilitator or enabler, bringing the recipient's

authorial intentions to the surface (or, in more critical accounts, inscribing

cultural norms, or what might be termed the authorial intentions of society at

large, onto docile bodies (Jeffreys 2000; Turner 2000)). Those etching the tattoo

into the skin are almost never painted as artists (in the modern sense) in their

own right, or with their own authorial stake in the procedure. 36

The authorial role of the tattoo artist, the individual responsible for producing

the image on the skin, is thus often rather ambiguous. Fleming mentions Don

Ed Hardy, renowned as one of the most important and influential Western

tattooists of the past half-century, and implies that whilst he asserts a certain

sense of authorial autonomy over the tattoos he produces, he is primarily

acting as "therapist" in bringing his client's "unconscious urges to the

surface" (Don Ed Hardy in Vale and Juno 1989,53). As we saw in Chapter

One, however, his own conception of his authorial role is somewhat murky:

in the interview with him in Modern Primitives from which Fleming quotes,

whilst it is the case that Hardy assigns authorial primacy to his clients, he is

also careful to stress the craft and artistry that he and his contemporaries

brought to Western tattooing from the late 1970s onwards. On one hand he

will underscore the creativity of his clients, explaining that

35For more on this particular comparison, see Sullivan (Sullivan 2001, Ch. 1)
36An exception to this is Sanders (2008), who devotes an entire chapter of his book to the
vagaries of being a tattoo artist. His overview of the working practices of the tattooist and
their relationship to their work is invaluable, though even in his study tattooists are
compared to service personnel such as janitors.

124
 the human interaction was as crucial as the artistry itself - that

trust: making people feel that you're going to do them right, to

the best of your ability, as well as essentially function as a

conduit for themselves - the art part of themselves. [... ] What

I've always been after is: they're really doing the tattoo. (Don

Ed Hardy in Vale and Juno 1989,52)

On the other hand, in the same interview, he will wax lyrical about the

visions he had at the beginning of his career of creating large custom tattoos

that his clients were too timid to wear; about his disregard for the formulaic

boundaries of copying flash sheets; about his training as a fine artist and the

relationship between his art practice and his tattooing; about tattooing as a

genuine art form. He even describes the tattoos he creates as "like

[vicariously] living in a house full of your own paintings" (Examples of some

of the most creative, less generic work Hardy was creating at the time are

included as Figure 8 and Figure 9).

In an interview with Juxtapoz magazine some 14 years after the one in Modern

Primitives, he describes his tattoo shop as "a launching pad for people [that is,

the artists he employs] doing really, really creative stuff", and underscores his

own role in the association of a number creative tattoo artists working within

an artistic paradigm (Hernandez 2003). In his own book Forever Yes, he

describes Sailor Jerry Collins as "the Cezanne of contemporary tattooing"

(Hardy 1992,6). In a recent project by tattooists Steve Boltz and Bert Krak,

Hardy's foreword describes tattoo flash (and, by extension, tattooing itself) as

"sophisticated artistry" (Boltz et al. 2007), establishing even the limited

125
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126
Figure 9 Don Ed Hardy, Monster Surfer, 1989

palette of mid-century tattoo iconography (that Hardy himself seems to decry

on occasion) as the product of creative authorship. For many contemporary

practitioners of the tattoo craft (particularly those producing large-scale

pieces on an exclusively custom basis after the mode Hardy established)

tattooing really is an art-form through which they can express their personal

styles and artistic visions. Such sentiments are exemplified by tattooer Kevin

Le Blanc in his superlative flash collection Old Ghosts,

We must wholeheartedly labor for this art, not only for the

sake of the future of tattooing, but also for our own well-being

and that of the artist within. [... ] Throughout history, tattoo

127
 artists from all over the world have shown that this is indeed

an art form that will not fade away. While we may never be

revered as the world's fine artists, we can contribute by

sustaining this medium and pushing it forward. In doing so,

we can achieve a sense of accomplishment for ourselves as

artists" (LeBlanc 2005, Introduction)

They are also revealed by the members of the California-based tattoo

collective New Skool in their work Suits Made to Fit (Lee 2002). These are by

no means isolated examples.

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Figure 10 Catalogue illustration advertising one of Percy Waters' tattoo machines, 1928.
Triangle Tattoo and Museum, Fort Bragg CA. Note "Artist" wrist tattoo.

Before Hardy's era, before the 'Renaissance', most Western tattooers would

work from pre-drawn flash designs with a limited iconographic range;

128
afterwards, many saw the possibilities for creativity, originality and artistic

audacity in the medium. Nevertheless, even before the emergence of custom

tattooing as a wide-spread practice (that is, before the so-called 'Renaissance'

of the 1970s), tattooists were proclaiming their artistic talents (Figure 10). The

notion of a Tattoo Renaissance as described by so many authors on tattooing

is thus too simplistic, too prescriptive and even somewhat naive.

For example, the earliest recorded professional tattooist in America, Martin

Hildebrandt (working from the 1840s onwards), saw his studio as an atelier,

and the pieces he produced the product of genius (DeMello 2000,49; Parry

2006,44). Albert Parry's anthropology of American tattooing, Tattoo: Secretsof

a Strange Art as Practiced among the Natives of the United States, published in
1933, describes the views of a number of artistically aspirational tattooists of

the time including one 'Electric' Elmer Getchell, who "argued that the

tattooer's art should be ranked with music, poetry and painting" (Parry 2006,

43). This generation of tattooists, like Hardy's, felt that they were taking

artistically-legitimate strides away from the limited and naive work of their

predecessors (some of whom, like Hildebrandt, themselves expressed claims

to artistic legitimacy). Tattooing had come to America in the mid-1870s, and

in the 60 years since then the practice had, to their minds, become staid and

boring. In other words, tattooists have always felt that their craft deserved

some respect as an art form, and they must take at least some of the credit for

its continual formal and ethical development over the past 150 years. To

divide American and European tattooing into pre- and post-1970 in order to

legitimise or intellectualise the tattooing is to misread the production,

reception and wearing of tattoos in the West, and to belittle and even
besmirch those pioneers, like Hildebrandt, who themselves valued tattooing

as an art form. It is certainly not the case that all tattooists in the century

between Hildebrandt and Hardy were talentless hacks mindlessly tracing

129
other people's drawings (though there were doubtless many of those); many

were deeply committed to the stylistic and technical aspects of their craft, and

took the artistry of tattooing very seriously.

With this assertion of artistry in mind, if Fleming's statement that "tattoos are

lodged on the border between inside and outside" (Fleming 2000,64) is to

make any sense, it becomes necessary to mount what amounts to a defence of

the tattoo artist. If 'body art' is indeed to be considered art (or even just

artistic), such a defence is probably long overdue. The role of the tattooer, and
the interplay between his subjectivity and that of his client, deserves

theorisation. It is not enough simply to place the tattoo artist beyond the

tattoo in deference to semiotics, as do those who read tattooing as

straightforward expressions of their wearers' personal identity.

Whilst cultural theorists are keen to pin authorship on the tattooed

individual, and whilst certain tattoo artists boldly proclaim their artistic
legitimacy, the key point here is that the work of the tattoo is always already

inter-subjective. Any attempt to tie down authorship to either the client or the

tattooer is futile; to elide the role of the hand wielding the electric paintbrush

into that of mere hired help is to forget that even the most formulaic of

tattooers, content to trace others' stock designs onto customers picking tattoos

as if they were sweaters from a mail-order catalogue, will always exhibit a

modicum of authorial intention in deciding on the thickness of the lines he is

inscribing, for example, or the particular shading they think the piece

requires. The tattoo artist must always work to make the client's desires flesh,

and the balance between tattooer and recipient may vary quite wildly

between clients who will proclaim to present their skin as a blank canvas for

the venerated artist's ink and those who will prescribe every minute detail of

130
the piece, clarifying every specific aspect of their tattoo and its production.

Authorship can never rest entirely with either party.

It strikes me that any coherent account of how modified bodies function on

both subjective and objective levels needs to be particularly aware of this

fundamentally inter-subjective nature of most body modification practices.
The balance of levels of creative input between tattooer and recipient will

vary greatly from circumstance to circumstance (as I will demonstrate with

reference to case studies later in this chapter), but rarely, if ever, is it the case

that tattoos are the sole product of a singular author. 37

What is an author?

In looking to re-examine the relationship between tattoo artists and client, I

do not seek to simply deify a different individual, or to re-confer authorship

primarily in the hands of the tattoo artist, but rather demonstrate that the

tattoo, like all texts, is "a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of

writings, none of them original, blend and clash" (Barthes 1977,146). The

notions of authorship Roland Barthes and Michael Foucault famously sought

to critique (in The Death of the Author (Barthes 1977) and What is an Author?

(Foucault 1979) respectively) emerged in the Romantic period during the

second half of the 18thcentury (Rose 1993,1), and have become pervasive. As
Andrew Bennett explains, the

Romantic theory of authorship, in which the author is

designated as autonomous, original and expressive, may be

said to account for everything that is commonly or

37One notable exception to this is the tattoo performed on oneself.

131
 conventionally taken to be implied by talk of 'the author"'

(Bennett 2005,56).

An author, in this sense, is defined by their creative genius, individualistic

powers of expression, distinction from their cultural and personal

surroundings and their personal autonomy in the production of the work. In

other words, the

distinguishing characteristic of the modern author, I propose,

is proprietorship; the author is conceived as the originator,

and therefore owner of a special kind of commodity, the work.

[... ] The author and the work. The autonomous creator and

the distinct literary object, unitary, closed, and caught in

relations of ownership" (Rose 1993,1).

As I have outlined above, both post-modem and criminological models of

tattoos as texts of the self rely on precisely these notions of singular

expression. Any theory which understands tattoos in a simplistically semiotic

sense is dependent upon what Barthes so famously calls the 'Author-God'

and the attendant misconception that a text is "a line of words releasing a

single 'theological' meaning" (Barthes 1977,146). There is not a sliver of

critical space between those post-modern critics who praise tattoos as

personally expressive texts, imbued with the narrative truths of their bearers,

and what Barthes finds so problematic in his disassembly of literary criticism.

By assigning authorship to the tattoo client as Fleming and others do

(Oksanen and Turtianinen 2005; Sweetman 2000; Velliquette et al. 2006),

tattoo theorists fall squarely into the trap that Romantic authorship sets, and

whilst all texts are of course multi-vocal, it is particularly ironic and slightly

surprising to see the tattoo, perhaps the most obviously intersubjective textual

132
form, discussed within an ethical framework that leans so heavily on 1811,

century conceptions of singularly-inspired cultural production.

Tattoos and Copyright

In Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Rose 1993), literary theorist

Mark Rose traces an intimate connection between Romantic authorship and

the introduction of copyright laws in England in the 18th Century,

emphasising the tight interconnection between concepts of individualised

production and the legal protections afforded to works in the ideology and

systems of copyright. Copyright, he says, 'is founded on the concept of the

unique individual who creates something original' (1993,2), and by way of a

brief case-study, I wish to demonstrate just how fragile the ideas of

originality, uniqueness and individuality are in the way tattoos are produced.
When copyright law, founded on singular authorship, attempts to intervene

in the subjective struggle between artist client, the complexities of this

problem come into sharp relief38.

In a recent article for the Lewis and Clark Law Review, copyright lawyer

Christopher A. Harkins takes on the legal issues arising from a novel claim

asserting copyright infringement based on a tattoo, and I want to summarise

and comment on his analysis here. His paper addresses certain questions

arising from a dispute between professional basketball player Rasheed

Wallace and Portland, Oregon-based tattoo artist Matthew Reed (Harkins

38Copyright law and notions of ownership and intellectual property vary greatly over time,
and from legal system to legal system. The case study here is not intended to illustrate the
nuances of a particular iterance of copyright law, rather it serves as a further example of the
potential for conflict if tattooing is thought of solely as a singular mode of production.
Copyright law and notions of the nature of intellectual property in the USA are presented
here to frame this broader conceptual point.

133
2006)39. In 1998, Wallace, then a player for the NBA franchise Portland

Trailblazers, commissioned a tattoo from Reed to incorporate an Egyptian

king, queen, three children and a stylised sun.

Reed paid $450 for the tattoo, and it seems from Harkins' description that the

way in which it was commissioned, conceived and applied was not unusual,

and that the relationship between client and tattooist was entirely standard.
Standard, that is, until 2005 when Wallace, by then playing for high-flying

side Detroit Pistons and reaping the rewards of increasing fame, was featured

in an advertising campaign for sportswear giant Nike.

The adverts revolved around Wallace's tattoo. Reed, watching from home,

filed an immediate application for copyright protection on his concept

sketches for the tattoo, and proceeded to file suit against Wallace, Nike and

their advertising agency because, the complaint alleged, there had been

"copying, reproducing, distributing, or publicly displaying Reed's

copyrighted work without Reed's consent" (Harkins 2006,316). Seeking a

share in the revenue Wallace received for the advertisement, supplementary

damages and to rejoin the further use of the tattoo in advertising, Reed

needed to establish an authorial or 'ownership' stake in the work in line with

American copyright statutes. The case was dismissed pursuant to a

confidential settlement and thus there was no judgement on the matters

arising from the case, and so Harkins must be content to speculate on the

various arguments that may have been presented to court, and the various

39The specific reference for the filed dispute is Reed v. Nike, Inc., No. 05-CV-198 BR (D. Or.
Feb. 10,2005), with reference to Copyright Registration Number VA 1-265-074 and its
amendment VA 1-236-392. I am grateful to lawyer and friend Marisa Kakoulas for bringing
this article to my attention, and to our discussions on the issue arising from her forthcoming
book on tattoo law.

134
strengths and weaknesses of each. "The question then becomes", he says,
"what can be learned from this tattoo? " (2006,318)

It is Harkins' considered opinion that the lessons of the suit are threefold. The

first, he concludes, is that "at least initially, tattoos are copyrightable subject

matter owned by the author, who may obtain and enforce the copyright"

(2006,318). That is to say, essentially, that tattoos are copyrightable, and fulfil

the material criteria such that copyright law is applicable to tattooing. This is

in line with my presentation of tattoos as works of art in formal terms, and

adds weight to a model of the tattoo as an object, or work, in and of itself. The

philosophical problems begin to bubble to the surface here, though, because

all the issues of intersubjectivity and authorship discussed so far start to work

against any simplistic reading of the tattoo in relation to copyright law. The

second lesson, then, is that the modes of production in the work of the tattoo

do not sit neatly into any one model of legal authorship. Initially, Hawkins

equates tattooing with an act of publishing, with the tattooist acting as the

author of the initial sketches, and distributing the tattoo itself as a derivative

work. This way of thinking seems to have been the essence of Reed's initial

claim for infringement, and if it were judged to be the case, Reed would have

won.

Harkins then goes on to investigate possible defence rebuttals to these claims,

and the ways in which seeing that tattoo as a published copy of the 'original'

sketch are problematic. These rebuttals, unsurprisingly, all rest on the

intersubjective nature of tattooing. It might be possible to argue, for example,

that tattoos constitute works for hire in the same way as, say, much in-house

commercial design does. Works made for hire belong to the hiring party (a

staff artist at Nike's ad agency cannot, for example, claim personal ownership

of the creative works he produces under contract), and "the work made for

135
hire treats the hiring party as both the owner and author as a matter of law"

(Harkins 2006,324). The client then conceives the tattoo (or delegates the act

of conception) and commissions the tattoo artist who is simply the craftsman
through which the work is produced. Though it might be possible that the

tattoo constitutes a work for hire, and thus, in law at least, can be conceived as

the singular product of the recipient, Harkins is not persuaded due to a

number of legal technicalities. The tattooist is not an employee of the client,

negating one of the ways in which works for hire may be created, and cannot

truly be said to be producing a work-for-hire under the specific criteria for

establishing such works in statute. Nevertheless, he does accept that such an

argument might have some weight on a case by case basis, and this particular

issue of commissioning is something I want to return to later in the chapter

with analogies to Medieval modes of artistic production within patronage

systems.

Harkins' preferred legal space for the tattoo is within the doctrines

established for joint works, that is works produced by one or more individual

authors, each with their own stakes. "There was some suggestion", he says,
"that Wallace may have researched and come up with the idea for an

Egyptian-themed family design with a stylized sun in the background and

made additional changes to Reed's sketch. This arguably could make Wallace

a co-author in the work he brandishes on his upper right arm" (Harkins 2006,

326). In my experience, this account of how tattoos are commissioned and

produced precisely mirrors the way nearly all tattoos are acquired: the client

provides the genesis of the form of the tattoo to a greater or lesser degree; the

tattooist will create a stencil based on this request (either from scratch, or by

reproducing or reworking an extant sketch or flash piece) and then ask their

client for comments, often leading to subsequent revisions; the stencil is

applied to the skin at which point both parties will suggest changes; the

136
stencil is then tattooed over, producing the tattoo. There is also often a

constant conversation occurring during the tattoo process regarding choices

of colours and even, on occasion, thickness of lines. Legally speaking, co-

authors of joint works "hold undivided interests in a work, despite any

differences in each author's contribution" (Erickson v. Trinity Theatre Inc., 13

F.3d 1061,1068 (7th Cir. 1994) as cited in Harkins 2006,326), and this seems to

me to be the most sympathetic and sensible way of understanding the dual

roles involved in a tattoo's production.

There is one way of subverting this, though, and the third lesson Harkins asks

his readers to draw from Reedv. Nike is, unsurprisingly, to retain the services

of lawyers. In typically lawyerly fashion, he suggests that tattoo clients should

seek to produce written instruments to transfer copyright claims from the

tattooist, something that is entirely consistent with copyright law (though

perhaps not with common-sense notions of what an author is). His advice is

forthright:

Before getting a tattoo, anyone with a reasonable expectation

of fame should arm himself or herself with a work-made-for-

hire contract, a joint work agreement specifying the

customer's contributions and expressing intent to make the

customer a joint author, or some other written document

transferring ownership from the tattooist and the tattoo

business to the customer. [... ] The would-be celebrity should

seek legal advice or, if acting pro se, should ensure the written

instrument uses the word "copyright" and states that all

"ownership" in the tattoo and any drawing, sketch, and other

work that becomes or embodies the tattoo vests in, belongs to,

137
 and is transferred in whole to the customer. (Harkins 2006,
328)

It seems strange to think about 'ownership' of a tattoo as belonging to

anyone other than the bearer (and I shall return to this issue later in a

discussion on the sale of tattoos removed from the body after death), because

it is almost impossible to conceive that a tattoo, which is inextricably tied to

the client's body and cannot even become a tattoo without the client's body,

might 'belong', even if only in part and even if only in a legal sense, to

someone else. But the lesson of Reed in a nutshell, is that this is the very
,
specific consequence of the tattoo and its medium. The tattoo is never only

yours.

Tattooing and Patronage

Prefiguring Reedby some decades, E.H Gombrich asserted that, in the context

of 15t'-Century Florence, at least, "the work of art is the donor's" (Gombrich

1966,40). Whilst Harkins' legal analysis resists on technical terms the

figuration of tattooing in the mode of work-for-hire (with the authorial stake

remaining with the I

employer), want to draw out some of the comparisons

that can be made between the ways in which tattoos have been theorised and

the understanding of artistic production as work-for-hire in the Italian

Renaissance. Though certain scholars have begun to question Gombrich's

models of the production of visual arts in the Renaissance (and those models

upon which he rests his descriptions such as those set out by Aby Warburg's

writing from the turn of the 20th Century), there remains a dominant sense in

traditional art historical scholarship that, as Warburg has claimed, "it is one of

the cardinal facts of early Renaissance civilization in Florence that works of

138
art owed their making to the mutual understanding between patrons and

artists. They were, from the outset, the results of a negotiation between client

and executant" (Burke 2004,6-8).

At first glance, Gombrich's descriptions seem quite forthright and clear-cut.

The art is the work of the donor. Or, there "is no mention of art or artists. On

the contrary, it is Cosimo himself who is seen as the 'maker' of his buildings"

(Gombrich 1966,40).

Summarising Gombrich's position in Norm and Form, Jill Burke explains that,

for him, in and through the works Cosimo de Medici patronised "an

individual personality is seen to be somehow revealed and embodied by the

objects he [... ] paid for. [... ] The actual maker of these objects is a vessel for

the impulses poured into him by a patron and (implicitly) by the society that

shaped the patron's wishes. " (Burke 2004,7). If we compare this with a

section I quoted from The Electric Michelangelo earlier - "He caught their

stories in a bucket in the shop or booth and mixed it with ink and used the

serum to paint translations of the very stories the tellers were haemorrhaging

on to them" (Hall 2004,260) - wherein the protagonist tattoo artist works to

bring forth and make flesh his client's desires, we can see similar conceptions

of authorial primacy at work. This is the same conception of co-operative

production that underpins the postmodern theories of tattooing I discussed at

the beginning of this chapter, as it is a conception of co-operative production

which actually serves to efface any notions of cooperation. Through the

passive, supplicant maker (or tattooist), the donor's (or tattoo client's)

subjectivity is revealed, even if the donor/client did not raise a finger in the

work's production.

139
This model is contentious in contemporary Renaissance scholarship for

similar reasons to those I have outlined in relation to tattooing. However, on

closer inspection, Gombrich's position is not quite as clear-cut as it first

appears, and the production process he describes is slightly more in the

collaborative mode. Even whilst questioning Gombrich for his assignation of

authorship to the patron alone, Burke notes that in his writings the "idea of

generation, almost in a biological sense, is replicated in Filarete's dictum that

the patron is the father of the building and the architect the mother". (2004,7).

By this understanding (which is procured from Filarete and Alberti), the

patron and the artist or architect functioned together to give birth to, or

generate, the work, with a little of each of them combining to produce

something expressive, to a greater or lesser degree, of each.

The consequences of this insight are slowly emerging. Its logical consequence

is a model of artistic production in the Renaissance that understands the

subtleties and politics of patron/maker interaction, and sees their roles as

dialectic, each engaging in a conversation in pursuit of the work. Michelle

O'Malley's article Subject Matters: Contracts, Designs and the Exchange of Ideas

betweenPainters and Clients in RenaissanceItaly sets out precisely the current

consensus on the minutiae of contractual engagement between patron and

painter, and the role of each in the process of production. I shall quote it at
length. Note the clear parallels between the actions of the patron (picking the

subject matter, some basic input on matters of pictorial composition) and the

painter (researching subjects, suggesting iconography) as evidenced in

archive documentation with the ways in which custom tattoos are produced.

The patron has been seen as the party in control, and the

primary commissioning document, the contract, as a set of

instructions given by a patron to a painter. Revisionist

140
 scholarship on the issue of Renaissance painter-patron

exchanges about subject matter has argued against such

notions of control. It has set out to show that while clients

always identified the subject matter to be depicted in a

proposed work of art, painters were not passive recipients of

learned subjects handed to them by painters interested in

erudite pictures. [... ] artistic programmes were rarely devised,

[... ] painters often carried out research on commissioned

subjects themselves, and that, in any case, most patrons were

primarily interested in obtaining no more than a visually

pleasing picture. Further evidence complicates these ideas

about the transmission of pictorial information. It suggests

that not only that both parties may commonly have

contributed to deciding appearance, but also that they

sometimes collaborated and their interests encompassed basic

pictorial concerns. Clients might involve themselves in settling

fundamental details of the layout, colour, dress, and

placement of figures in a proposed work, areas traditionally

considered by scholars as the preserve of painters, and

painters might engage in identifying appropriate subsidiary

iconography and even occasionally in suggesting the type of

main figure to be depicted, aspects of a commission long

believed to be the purview of clients. " (O'Malley 2004,17-18)

Whilst Harkins is wary of presenting tattooing as commissioned work-for-

hire, within the spotlight of recent Renaissance art history it becomes a much

more compelling model. Whilst the tattoo resists both Romantic authorship

and Gombrich-esque elevation of the patron in a collaboration, it seems to fit

141
quite neatly into the types of production strategies of people like O'Malley,
Burke, and Dale Kent (Kent 2000).

In the case studies to follow, I wish to examine the genetic distribution

between tattooer and client in a variety of cases, and the way in which this

copulative interaction can work in practice. John Oppel extends the

generative metaphor in relation to Renaissance architecture, explaining

wittily that

The difference between Filarete and Alberti on this point is

that while both conceive of the relationship between patron

and architect as akin to that between husband and wife,

Alberti's pair are a good homely couple while Filarete's wife is

a shameless hussy and her 'husband' a libertine (Oppel 1987,

265-266)

and it is the vagaries of the relationship between tattooer and client in light of

this that I wish to draw out.

Tattooing as Art: The Potential for Singular Authorship

Tattooshavebecome"liberated"from theprovinceof low lifes,and

cannow beproperlypositionedasaspectsoffine art. - Margot
DeMello (DeMello 1995)

At one end of the balance-scale of a tattoo's authorial input sits the tattooist,

and at the other, the client. Some tattooists particularly relish tipping this
balance as far towards their own side as possible, reducing the client to a

surface upon which they inscribe their art. Some clients, by contrast, aim to

resist any authorial input in the process of being tattooed other than their

142
own, minimising the creative input and marginalising the role of the person

wielding the tattoo machine in order to produce a tattoo very much of their

own making. In the previous chapter, I discussed the fundamentally

intersubjective nature of tattooing, and the problems in identifying the author

of a tattoo or in ascribing singular subjectivity in any particular readings of

what tattoos might mean or signify. In this chapter I want to develop this idea

with reference to two case studies, projects which prioritise the authorial roles

of either the tattoo artist or the individuals being tattooed as much as

possible. These two projects show what is possible when the client or the
tattooist asserts their authorial primacy, but also illustrate quite vividly the

unbreakable limits the medium of tattooing imposes.

Suits Made to Fit / Full Coverage -A Case Study of the Artistry of the

Tattoo

As Clinton Sanders explains in his sociological study of tattooing as a career,

there is often a constant struggle in tattoo shops between the motivations of

the clients and those of the tattooists, and this is particularly true with

tattooists who consider themselves to be artistically competent and driven by

a desire to produce better quality, more interesting and more ambitious

tattoos (Sanders 2008, Chapter 3). Even though many tattooists are artistically

talented and keen to produce custom pieces of work, they are also bound by

the commercial realities of the tattoo industry, where so many tattoo choices

are repetitive and staid: a tattooist may be able to usher their clients in a

particular aesthetic direction and has some opportunity in the tattooing

process to interject their own ideas and opinions, but more often than not they

are constrained by the initial wishes of their client and the often rather
limiting choice of tattoo selected. As tattooists build their reputations, their

opportunities to produce custom work increases, but even the best and most

143
well-regarded tattoo artists will almost never be permitted by their clients to

use a blank piece of skin in the same way they might use a blank canvas.
Even if it is only to acquiesce to a stylistic or representational decision made

by the tattooist, the human canvas will always inevitably and intractably have

some input into the process of creating a tattoo.

Suits Made to Fit (Lee 2002) and Full Coverage(Lee 2007) are two ambitious,

interconnected collaborative art projects designed to explore these tensions.

The projects were produced by members of the loosely-assembled group of

tattoo artists calling themselves the "New Skool Kollectiv" [NS Collective],

which grew out of the shop in San Jose, California after which it is named.
The collective comprises a group of thirteen core contributors and a large

number of like-minded tattooers who are their colleagues, acquaintances and

friends. Of those thirteen that feature most prominently in the published

documentation and exhibitions of the projects, seven of the principal

members - Adrian Lee, Nate Banuelos, Ron Earhart, Paco Excel, Phil Holt,

Jason Kundell, and Matt Shamah were based at New Skool itself when the

project began, with the others - Wrath, Grime, Mike Giant, Craig Toth, Adam

Barton and Horitaka - working in shops in and around the Southern

California area. As the global tattoo community got wind of the project, a

number of others clamoured to be involved (and work by some of these was

featured in an 'Annex' show peripheral to the central body), but due to time

and logistics, the finished books and exhibitions revolved around the

immediate environs of New Skool itself.

The two projects together illustrate the very best of what contemporary

tattooing can offer in terms of vision, creativity, scope, audacity, passion and

artistry. Together they serve as documents of a fertile culture within which

tattoo artists are able to develop their own artistic visions and establish a

144
distinct way of working with their clients and colleagues to produce works

which are heterogeneous and arguably more successful in artistic terms than

the bulk of tattooing generally. The way in which New Skool work -a

methodology which prioritises the craftsmanship, creativity and artistry of

the tattooist - is particularly interesting, as are the occasions when this

priority must necessarily give way to the subjectivities of the 'collectors' (as

those receiving the tattoos are referred to in the context of the projects)40.The

work of the NS Collective pushes the sliding scale of collaboration between

the genius of the artist and the pure subjective expression of the collector

about as far towards (though never quite reaching) the authorial primacy of

the tattooist as it might be possible to reach.

Suits Made to Fit was conceived towards the end of 2001. The end results, a

111-page book published in 2002 and an accompanying exhibition at the

Works Gallery in San Jose and the Department Gallery in Osaka, Japan,

comprise a number of paintings, drawings and sketches intended as designs

(or, as Lee would call them later, "homework assignments" (Lee 2007, n. p)) for

back pieces - large, singular tattoos covering the entirety of the back from the

neckline down, often extending over the buttocks as far as the knees. Due to

the cost and commitment required to endure up to 85 hours of tattoo sessions

across the course of a number of years, the number of clients willing to receive
full back pieces is vanishingly small, even in an era such as today when

tattoos are apparently surging in popularity. As such, most tattooers rarely, if

ever, embark on conceiving, let alone tattooing work on such a large scale41.

The back piece is an enormous undertaking for both collector and tattooer

40D. Angus Vail has analysed both the meaning and the construction of the term "tattoo
collector". (Vail 1999)
4° Though Bill Salmon has suggested that heavier tattoo coverage and larger tattoos are
emblematic of the tattoo Renaissance (Salmon in Vale and Juno 1989,106), large-scale
tattooing remains rare to this day in both the population at large and amongst those who are
tattooed . (Laumann and Derick 2006)

145
when compared to the standard, small-scale fare that forms the bread and

butter of a tattooer's daily output and presents a number of specific formal,

structural and technical obstacles. (see Sanders 2008, Chapter 3).

Figure 11 Adam Barton, Untitled, 2002.

Watercolour and ink on board, 30 in. x40 in. (76.2 cm x 101.6 cm)

146
Figure 12 Craig Toth, Untitled, 2002.

Ink and colour pencil on tracing paper, 25 in. x 36 in. (63.5 cm x 91.44 cm)

147
Figure 13 Matt Shamah, Untitled, 2002.

Watercolour, ink and charcoal on board, 30 in. x40 in. (76.2 cm x 101.6 cm)

148
'II I
owol

-'

ýý

or,
ýj

1
Figure 14 Horitaka, Untitled, 2002.
Graphite and ink on butcher paper, 36 in. x 57 in. (91.44cm x 144.78cm)

149
It is the mode of production which is the most interesting facet of this phase

of the project (and perhaps of the project as a whole). By eradicating the

problems of co-authorship and of production that intersubjectivity poses for

the tattooer, a number of intriguing details emerge. As the project initially

limited itself to studies and preparatory sketches for backpieces rather than

any express intention to turn any of them into tattoos, in essence the tattooers

who contributed to this project were initially afforded a silent, imaginary,

idealised, subservient blank human canvas - something which, as Susan Hall

points out in The Electric Michelangelo, can never exist in reality (Hall 2004,
263-264). The pieces conceived for Suits disconnect the process of creating

tattoos from the subjectivities of collectors in order to produce art works in

somewhat more of the autonomous Romantic mode - something that many of

those involved simply had not often found the time or even the inclination to

do otherwise. So used to working in a way that is catalysed (if not always

strictly lead) by their clients, it seems that many tattoo artists find the idea of

working on an entirely blank canvas with no pre-suggested subject matter

difficult, something which the project outline alludes to. "As tattooers our

medium is skin", says Lee. "Holding on to creative endeavours outside of our

immediate efforts can be difficult because the task presented as tattooers is

that of effecting individuals deeply everyday [sic]" (Lee 2002,99).

Stripped of the workaday constraints of actually producing wearable or even

desirable commissions, the contributors to Suits set about producing designs

the like of which very few collectors would request off their own backs, as it

were. The designs that make up the project fall into three roughly-delineated

types. Some of the pieces remain steadfastly true to the symbolic language of

American tattooing, blowing up to monumental proportions motifs usually

applied into pieces smaller than a few inches across. Designs such as Adam

150
Barton's enormous roses (Figure 11(Lee 2002,25)) or Craig Toth's skull and

eagle (Figure 12 (Lee 2002,21)) accentuate the stylistic features of tattoos most
dominant in Western culture - large, heavy line work, solid blocks of colour,

heavy, black shading and a small and instantly recognisable symbolic lexicon

to an almost parodic extent. This has the dual effect of underscoring what
-
the fundamental building blocks (in terms of content and form) of the

Western tradition actually are and the reasons perhaps why they have

endured since the 1820s. Quite simply, these vernacular tattoos work as

tattoos; they are readable, humble, classic42.

A second subsection of Suits pays homage to the traditions of 19th century

Japanese tattooing which fed into American tattooing in the 1930s,

crystallising many of the formal elements of the contemporary tattoo. Matt

Shamah (Figure 13) and Japanese tattooer Horitaka's (Figure 14) contributions

to the volume are unmistakable references and homages to the large-scale

tattoos which emerged in Edo-period Japan, though both artists add their

own personal quirks and riffs to the general mythological themes of this

aesthetic, itself an offshoot of Ukiyo-e woodblock carving (Poysden and Bratt

2006). Like those referencing American traditions, the Japanese-style

submissions to Suits are working with and within a general set of established

genre conventions, and although this might on the one hand be said to

perhaps be symptomatic of derivativeness, or of a lack of creativity or

inventiveness, on the other it fits perfectly with the attitudes and ideologies of

these men towards the history of their craft. Reading the forewords and

textual interjections by the artists into these books (and others like them), it

rapidly becomes obvious that artistic individuality is commensurate with a

42Whilst no definitive methodologically art-historical study of the iconographic lexicon and

tradition of tattooing in America has yet been done, a number of popularly-orientated works
do collect the work of certain notable tattooists and their flash (Clerk 2009; McCabe 1997;
Schiffmacher 1996) .

151
sense of deference to the historical lineage that precedes them. Seen in this

ethical context, that their work quotes and refers to genre conventions is
hardly surprising. These tattooers, like many of their colleagues, seem to

consider themselves something approaching custodians of a particular art-

form, and are very aware of the work of those who have influenced them and

the iconographic and stylistic lexicon of the medium. Even without collectors

to specifically request them, it seems tattooists are still keen to draw the best

traditional rose they can; even without being compelled by their clients'

wishes to produce a tattoo in the traditional vocabulary, it seems tattooists

will often draw tattoos. Hardy alludes to this in Modern Primitives: "I like

tattooing because I like having a purpose ... And sometimes I feel kind of lost,

sitting down in front of paper and thinking 'Well, I could draw anything, but

what should I do" (Hardy in Vale and Juno 1989,66)?

This sense of history and tradition is common in the narratives of tattoo

artists. Tattooist Cliff Raven has said "I think of myself as a craftsman trying

to be an artist" (cited in Tucker 1981,43). I do not want to belabour this

distinction between art and what might more properly be called

'craftsmanship' here, but briefly I want to add that though these tattooers

(most tattooers, and most collectors) are content in some respects to pay

continual homage to their craft, this does not necessarily undermine any

claims they might have to creativity, authorship or legitimacy. Sanders

divides artistic tattooing from "craft" tattooing by dividing the art of custom

tattoos on the one hand, from the craft of reproducing "flash" designs on the

other, even though "it may exhibit the same or superior technical skill"

(Sanders 2008,86), but this is too discrete. Don Ed Hardy spends a great deal

of his interview in Modern Primitives discussing questions of novelty versus

tradition, and though he is so passionate about advancing the visual lexicon

of his chosen medium, even he accepts that producing "conventional" tattoos

152
is an important part of what it means artistically and ethically to be a tattoo

artist: "In doing that you give yourself up to a sort of lineage", he explains to
Andrea Juno. "There's something great about surrendering part of your ego

to a "greater" tradition or stream of expression" (Hardy in Vale and Juno

1989,67). More broadly, as Harold Osborne explains, were 'uniqueness' or

breaks from convention to be established as the principal distinction through

which one could delineate art from craft in general, there would need to be a

great deal of re-thinking to be done on the canonical works of art history.

Whilst Osborne does accept that it might be possible to establish rough

criteria allowing such a distinction to be made,

it is important that the distinctions be not exaggerated in such

a way as to lose sight of the basic affinities between art and

craftsmanship. It is especially deplorable if those sectors of

craftsmanship whose products find their way into museums

as 'decorative art' are dismissed as no more than an inferior or

second-grade category of fine art. They have their own

aesthetic status and their own wealth of aesthetic appeal

deriving not least from their deeply rooted integration in

human and social activity. (Osborne 1977,147)

153
Figure 15 Adrian Lee, Redrum, 2002

Acrylic on canvas nailed to wood, housepaint and blood. 35 in. x 49 in. (88.9 cm x 124.46
cm)

154
Figure 16 Adrian Lee, Action Reaction, 2002.

36 in. x 60 in. (91.44 cm x 152.4 cm)

Acrylic and enamel on canvas,

155
Figure 17 Adrian Lee, Untitled, 2002.

Acrylic Canvas, 30 in. x 40 in. (76.2 cm x 101.6 cm)

on

156
Nevertheless, the most successful pieces in Suits, to my mind, are those which

break the formal and conceptual boundaries of the tattoo aesthetic. Adrian

Lee's designs, for example, look wholly unlike any conventional tattoos. The

back pieces he conceives here are almost painterly, and are innovative and

exciting. His principally figurative designs do not look like tattoos, and though

he frames his drawings with sketched outlines of a human body, the designs

often refuse to be constrained by them (Figure 15). The images seem to come

alive and dance across, behind and within the skin: at times, Lee uses the
imposed shape of a torso as a keyhole beyond which a scene is played out,

much of it out of view (Figure 16); in other pieces, the designs leap and burst

out from and beyond the bodies on which they are supposed to sit (Figure
17). These are tattoos which can exist only in his imagination and tattoos

which no client could ever request; these are drawings which set onto paper a

tattooist's unrealisable ambitions and which encapsulate the problems the

tattooist must face in his daily artistic pursuits. The real body has limits to its

space and its desires.

Suits Made to Fit stands as both an overview of and monument to the stylistic

traditions which saturate contemporary tattooing and the formal sense that

tattooers are keen to establish their artistic credentials, but in establishing

distance between the conceptions and the tattoos they are sadly never

destined to become, something is lacking. "It is important to state", the

collective point out, "that these pieces are not intended to represent

completed works of art. [... ] Until it is in the skin a tattoo image is nothing

more than a design" (Lee 2002,99).

From this tentative statement, a second stage of the project emerged. The

introduction to Full Coverage,the book which followed from Suits, explains

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that its predecessor should be looked upon precisely as an exercise of sorts

rather than a complete testament to the potential of the custom tattoo.

Representing full back tattoo designs in various static

mediums, the [Suits] project was essentially an extended

homework assignment that allowed those involved the

opportunity to explore more thoroughly, both structurally and

conceptually, the majestic concept of the back piece. As there

was no pressure to actually apply any of the imagery onto a

living canvas, each contributor was unchained from the

normal design process associated with tattoos. Looking back,

most of the material produced was just as intended: a series of

creative studies, albeit largely untattooable. No matter, as the

intent of the undertaking was to loosen the struggle faced

when approaching the overwhelming task of singular large-

scale tattooing (a task which should never be taken lightly). "

(Lee 2007,3)

As the logical next step after Suits, Full Coverage aimed to turn these

preparatory sketches into tattoos, and to re-incorporate the backpieces first

conceived in Suits by finding collectors who were willing to commit to getting

enormous pieces of work. The project eventually produced thirty-three

backpieces between eight tattooers over the course two years and the space of

four tattoo shops.

158
Figure 18 Adrian Lee, Tattoo on Yuya Nishimura, c. 2006.

(photograph by Max Dolberg, NSK)

159
Each tattoo artist involved in the second stage of the project sought out clients

who were willing and able to commit to a large-scale tattoo, even to the point

of pushing people who had come to them for smaller pieces into getting

something an order of magnitude larger. Though it seems to have varied from

collector to collector and from tattooer to tattooer, the tattoos in Full Coverage

project were predicated on initial requests by the collectors involved (though

no doubt gently coerced by the artists). The backpieces produced all differ

from the individual contributions to Suits, and though many of them share

stylistic qualities with the drawings, the subject matter was usually driven by
the collector's own particular desires, interests and intentions (Compare

Adrian Lee's Redrum drawing in Figure 15 with the final tattoo on Yuya

Nishimura in Figure 18).

In some instances, the choice of language used in describing the tattoos belies

this drive. One of Ron Earhart's clients explains in an interview for the DVD

documentary which accompanies the book that "I came to Ron and told him

my idea; he had this big grin on his face". Ron Earhart's tattoos are not

figurative. He works in a style known as "bio-mechanical" which, influenced

by the drawings of H. R. Geiger, produces abstract tattoos which work in

concert with the body's musculature and forms, aiming to make the body

look alien and transformed (Figure 19 and Figure 20). They are not flat

drawings on skin, but trompe l'oeil designs which produce the effect that the

body's surface has been holistically altered, overcome and overgrown by

some strange organic carapace. But even in this abstract aesthetic, an aesthetic

which is Earhart's signature style, what follows in the client's discussion is a

first person plural: "We spent about 3 hrs drawing on my stomach and chest

with sharpie marker", he said, "and after one look in the mirror I told him to

stick it on me". (DVD accompanying Lee 2007).

160
Figure 19 Ron Earhart, Untitled, 2002

Pastel on board and foam core with aerosol, 30 in. x 40 in. (76.2 cm x 101.6 cm)

161
Figure 20 Ron Earhart, Tattoo on Patrick Odle, c. 2006.

(photograph by Max Dolberg, NSK)

162
Paco Excel claims during the documentary that "The client's not the artist. We

are". But even as he asserts his status as an artist, the limits in which he must

work are exposed. "So they've got to give us a foundation to build on, and
then we build off that". What happens in the move from the concepts in Suits

to the full coverage tattoos is a manifestation of the truism about there being

no blank human canvas - there simply can never be a tattoo that is produced
in the Romantic mode of singular production. Though these artists are

allowed by their clients to work within their own particular styles, and sought

out precisely because the clients want a piece from a particular tattooist, the

subject matter is, in the first instance, dictated by the collector. Tattoos are

always already intersubjective; always already collaborative in some sense. A

living canvas imposes an unimpeachable limit on the singular subjectivity of

the tattoo artist, especially as it retains the ultimate right of veto over any final

design. A human being can always get up and walk out of the studio.

In contrast though, it is clear that these tattoos are not expressive of, or

symbolic of, subjective truths emanating from the collectors in any

straightforward way. Whilst the collector must work for the tattoo, and has

some input in its conceptual germination, there is so much of the tattooist's

individuality in these pieces that any model that fails to account for their role

will be incomplete.

Tattooist as Technician - Lee Wagstaff and the analogy of printmaking

Until this point, the artwork was wearing shirt and trousers, so only

the star pattern on his shavenheadwas showing.- Christopher

Hirst (Hirst 2000)

163
2000's Royal College of Art's Printmaking MA degree show featured the work

of Lee Wagstaff, a 30-year old British student. Unlike the work of his

contemporaries on the printmaking course, Wagstaff's work was not

comprised of prints on paper or textile. Instead, Wagstaff's final degree show

featured him exhibiting his near-naked body covered head-to-foot in

geometric tattoos. As RCA rector Christopher Frayling explained at the time,

he "is a printmaking student who has turned himself into a print" (Smith

2000).

Figure looks dower over it self-portrait

21 Lee, Wtrgstrrlf showing his tattooed torso in the
RCA's end of i/ear show, 2000

(photograph by Mark Chilvers, The Independent)

In his review of the RCA show, journalist Christopher Hirst described

Wagstaff as "a limited edition", and was treated to a private view of

Wagstaff's 'body of work', a series of interconnected tattoos covering most of

his body and inspired, in part, by his mixed Indian and Catholic parentage.

"Stripping down to a loin- cloth, Mr Wagstaff revealed a profusion of startling

designs", Hirst explained.

164
 Latitudinal bands of swastikas run from waist to ankle on his

left leg. Motifs on his right leg include diagonal stars and

stripes and a chequerboard. His back is dominated by linked

circles somewhat akin to that big molecular construction in

Brussels, but pride of place is given to the aforementioned

bleeding heart. If you think about it, the maternally inspired

scarlet ticker is an elaborate version of the "MUM" often seen

in less ambitious tattoos. The reaction of the artist's mother

was the same as most other mums. "She hates my tattoos.

She's always asking if I'm going to get them removed by laser

treatment, but I think it's a bit late for that. " (Hirst 2000)

The choice of geometric subject matter for the tattoos themselves, the limited

colour palette and the heavy use of black ink to give the tessellating shapes

form and presence would not have been remarkable had Wagstaff used

paper, but his decision to submit his body for examination in this way was

certainly unprecedented.

His photographs have been sold to major museums and high-profile

collectors (David Bowie is a fan), and the actual content of the tattoos would

provide fertile ground for analysis by print historians or those interested in

cross-cultural and intercultural uses of symbology and symbol. Nevertheless,

it is clearly the questions raised by the choice of medium which are of

immediate interest to those encountering Wagstaff's work for the first time.

By turning his body into an art object, Wagstaff illustrates a number of the

points I have made in the thesis thus far, and though there is no need to dwell

on them in any particular detail here, they bear pointing out in brief. Most

obviously, his work makes an elementary case for the artistic categorisation of

165
the tattoo on formal grounds - as Dewey argued, there is a technical analogy

to be made between tattooing and other forms of mark-making, between the

production of marks on paper and the production of marks on skin. His use

of tattooing in what formally seems quite an uncontroversial way provoked

some level consternation and confusion, with one critic accusing him of

cynically courting outrage and scandal in order to make a name for himself
(Wyatt 2000). Moreover, it is crucial to note that, unlike Orlan, Wagstaff

considers his own body an art work: there is no need for an explicitly

performative context and his body art is carried with him beyond the gallery

space, already and always available as an art object.

But Wagstaff's work is fascinating as much for what it hides in its production

than what it reveals in its objectivity. For the purposes of the present

discussion, the most interesting aspect of Wagstaff's work is the inversion of

the balance of authorial roles seen in the similarly large-scale projects

produced by Adrian Lee and his colleagues. Though in the Full Coverage

project Paco Excel had asserted that "the client's not the artist", in Wagstaff's

case this is certainly not true: the recipient of the tattoos in this context sets

out the aesthetic, is responsible for their semiotic content and exercises precise

control over their final form of the finished works. As his tattoos were

submitted as work for his degree show, a venue intended to showcase

evidence of a candidate's singular artistic talent, facility and graft over the

period of study, the tattooist's role in the production of the tattoos was

necessarily reduced to one of mechanical reproduction.

166
Figure 22 Lee Wagstaff, Baptism, 2000

C-type photograph, 74 1/2in. x 60 in. (188.6 cm x 152.4 cm)

167
Figure 23 Lee Wagstaff, Legion, 2000

C-type photograph, 61 3,/ain. x 75 1/4in. (156.86 cm x 192.41 cm)

The press-release for his 2001 show "Debut", which featured photographs of

his tattooed body (Figure 22 and Figure 23) and a life-size screenprint of a

of his body made using his own blood43, makes Wagstaff's view
picture

explicit that he is the authorial artist of his own body.

The artist has used the medium of tattoo to transform his body

into a work of "living art"; a celebration of form and geometry

using the fundamental concept of mark making combined with

the creative possibilities of the human body. Wagstaff has

become both form and content as well as subject and object. 44

43This work, 'Shroud', is now held by the V&A (Accession number E. 1203-2000)
4+From the show's press release (via
http: //www. leewagstaff. com/gallery/gallery_debut_pressrelease. htm)

168
Though most tattoos will to some extent collapse the distinctions between

subject and object and between form and content, by making this collapse an

explicit feature of work's expressed aim, Wagstaff's perspective on the

relationship between his tattoos and the tattooist who ultimately facilitated

them emerges. But where does this leave Wagstaff's tattooist? Conceptually,

Wagstaff's work diametrically inverses the client/tattooer relationship seen in

the New Skool projects; his approach aims to maximise his authorial role and

minimise that of the tattooist who transferred his designs on his skin. In what

seems to be the textbook case for the types of analyses of tattoos as subjective

markers Juliet Fleming makes, this approach allows the tattooist's subjectivity
to be abandoned or ignored. Wagstaff's tattooist does not and indeed cannot

take any credit for the tattoos; reduced instead to a technician or functionary,

tasked only with transferring designs to a specified medium, carrying out the

instructions given to him by the artist in the same way as silk-screen

operators, or digital print and reprographics technicians have to in more

conventional printmaking works. Geraint Smith's review of the show in The

Evening Standard does mention the tattooist's role in the work, but only

hastily, mentioning that Wagstaff's work was completed "with the help of

tattooist Barry Hogarth"45. (Smith 2000).

45The use of the word "help" is telling. It is a word printer Irwin Hollander has used to
describe how he saw his role as a printmaker at a time when highly and overtly collaborative
printmaking was emerging in America in the 1950s and 60s. Hollander was involved in
groups of printers working out of institutions and ateliers which strove to produce prints of
the highest possible artistic and technical quality, and to bring European methods to
American artists. "The fact that I am not producing my own art, from my own imagery",
Hollander is quoted as saying, "means that when I have an artist in the shop, I live through
that artist. I'm obligated to the medium and I want him to do the best he can for the medium,
and to help him the best I can" (Antreasian 1980,184-185). Antreasian says that Hollander
talked of "helping" the artists whose works he printed with "altruistic selflessness" - but if it
is so selfless, it is a selflessness borne out of a long and precise period of education and
training towards the position of "master printer", a vocation requiring skills and talents
above and beyond those of a simple technician.

169
How best to acknowledge and theorise the role of the printer in printmaking

has been a vexed issue in the history of the medium. Donald Saff, in the

editorial introduction to a special issue of Art Forum dedicated to precisely

these questions, notes that by 1980, the importance of those manipulating the

machinery to produce prints exert a degree of individual agency in the

printmaking process, and that their choices, abilities and personal, particular

sensibilities will affect the look and the fundamental nature of the finished

objects.

With the emergence of a kind of renaissance in printmaking,

the word collaboration has gained global prominence as a

term referring to a myriad of relationships between the artist

and those around him who in some way contribute something

to the finished product. While the words collaboration and

collaborator do not have precise definitions in contemporary

usage, they do indicate a growing importance being attached

to individuals other than the artist who, in the end, signs the

print. (Saff 1980)

Though the balance of inputs from the artist and the printer ebbs and flows

from case to case depending on the personalities, technologies and intentions

involved, artists have been turning over the responsibility for reproduction of

their works to specialist artisans since print-making was invented. Garo Z.

Antreasian makes a number of qualitative judgements on various

configurations of inputs from artist and printer, and concludes that the most

artistically successful prints are those which are produced by talented printers

under close instruction by interesting artists. The greater the distance the

artist has from the finished work, he suggests, the less successful the final

prints will be. "This distancing of the artist further and further from direct

170
involvement in the work", he says, "ultimately desensitizes him to the

inherent aesthetic of printed art: the outcome of his image becomes little more

than the expression of the printer's own taste and skill, or worse, an outright

facsimile of work the artist normally does in other mediums. The proliferation

of such work today is alarming in its magnitude" (Antreasian 1980,187).

Wagstaff's particular choice of printmaking technique is difficult to read in

these qualitative terms. Wagstaff is as far from the physical act of carrying out

a tattoo as a contemporary painter would be from a lithograph print whose

plates he had never handled. But we cannot accuse him of being distant from

the work produced, or desensitized to it - after all, he must undergo not an

inconsiderable amount of pain and shed his own blood in order for the print

to exist, and will be present every single second that the 'printing process' is

underway. And Hogarth's role is just as difficult to describe: as the tattooist,

he is under strict direction from Wagstaff to transfer his designs onto skin, but

he is not a machine46 He will of course be making decisions similar to that of

.
a lithograph printer, choosing the most appropriate machine, ink and colour-

separation for the job at hand, but will also be minutely affecting the final

tattoo at a level of detail many degrees greater than a print-machine operator

could hope to achieve. He is more like a comics inker than a printer (Inge
2001), tasked with tracing another artist's designs but possessed of the ability,

acuity and opportunity to inject some of his own personality and artistic

talent. The tattooist wields the tattoo machine like a paintbrush, building

every line stroke by stroke, and every block of colour pass by pass; his own

stylistic quirks will affect the finished tattoos in innumerable ways. Each line

produced will vary in thickness depending on whether the tattooist chooses

to etch it into the skin with a single pass with a larger grouping of needles, or

46An Austrian electrician called Niki Passath did design and build a tattooing robot, which he
exhibited at trade fairs in 2002. The idea did not prove popular (Vickers 2002).

171
with several passes with a smaller grouping. As the tattooist changes the

current being sent to his machine by pressing on a foot-pedal, the ink will be

injected faster or slower, potentially altering the final tattoo in an infinite

number of ways. The same design will look different if tattooed by different

tattooists, and even when under direct instruction to work to a set design, a

tattooist will interject authorial decisions based on his training and his own

artistic sensibilities.

The way in which Wagstaff works is closer to printmaking than it is to any

other more conventional art forms, but tattooing is not printmaking. Wagstaff
has said himself that his work "explored the relationship between

printmaking and tattooing" (Wagstaff 2000,14) rather than claiming that the

two are the same, and much of what is powerful and interesting about is

work is precisely the ambiguity in where the medium sits within the

institutional context in which it was first exhibited.

Conclusions

The ultimate point of these examples is that any analogy made between

tattooing and other forms of artistic production will only ever be

approximate, simply because tattooing is so fundamentally unlike other ways

of making art objects. Sometimes, tattooing feels superficially like

printmaking. Sometimes, it feels like fresco painting. In some respects, the

skin of a tattooed person is like a canvas; in others, it most clearly is not.

Sometimes, the artistic dominance lies almost entirely in the person who will

wear the tattoo; sometimes, the tattooist's vision will prevail. Sometimes the

tattooist is the artist, sometimes the client is, and sometimes they both are.

Getting a tattoo is always inherently more collaborative than the most basic

172
litho-print, but it is also always less authorially singular than a Romantic
landscape painting.

Ultimately, of course, all forms of art making are in some sense collaborative,

but in terms of tattooing this collaboration is always overt. In that respect, it

seems difficult to justify readings of an individual's tattoos or tattooing in

general which are predicated on an assumed authorial voice. The tattoo sits

suspended between the artistic primacy of the tattooist and the client, never

able to fully reach either pole. When the tattooist attempts to remove the

shackles of commercial body modification, objectify the bodies they work on

and work to produce their own artistic visions on skin, they butt hard against
the subjectivity of their clients. When the client attempts to direct his tattooist

to carry out his exact instructions, they hit the same limit of subjective input

from the opposite direction, finding that a tattoo machine in the hands of a

tattooist is impossible to completely mechanise and reduce to the status or

function of a printing machine. Because the tattoo rests on the skin of a living,

breathing and embodied subject, it resists discrete categorisation.

173
Chapter Five
Tattoos in the Gallery

I am the canvas.Already I begin to feel like a canvas.

- Drioli, from Roald Dahl's'Skin' (Dahl 2000,11)

Body art, as the previous chapters have demonstrated, shares a number of key

characteristics with more conventional methods of art making in the manner

of its production. Moreover, body art may also be said to exhibit a number of

the objective properties of conventional artworks, even as it resists in a

number of obvious ways the status of object and any subsequent

institutionalisation. Tattoos sit antagonisingly between the static and

permanent form of a painting and the brief, temporally-specific performance

piece; ethically problematic and technically difficult to hang on a gallery wall

but more durable than a performative happening. Like paintings, they are art

objects, but like performance pieces, they deny objectivity in a number of

ways and are impossible to accession into a permanent collection in their

original, immediate form.

The tattoos discussed in the previous chapter were intended to stand on their

own, literally, as pieces of art and as art objects in the world. They were not

exhibited as contextualised performances, and there was no sense that they

would exist, or even could exist, as discrete art objects in their own right.
How could they, after all? The large tattoo projects undertaken by Lee

174
Wagstaff and by Adrian Lee were both intended and presented as living

works of art; body art to be worn and displayed not in galleries, per se
(though the works were initially 'exhibited' to a curious public) but on a

quotidian basis, beyond any delineated institutional context. Nevertheless, it

is interesting to consider how the institutions of the art world and the art

market might make space for body art, and what problems are generated by

the specificities of an art form which is simultaneously objective and

inextricable from the subjective collector who wears it.

Roald Dahl's 1954 short story Skin recounts the mysterious tale of a frail,

haggard old man named Drioli. Set in Paris in 1946, Dahl's narrative describes

how Drioli, a tattoo artist who has fallen on hard times, was wandering the

streets of Paris, cold and hungry. As he hobbled past the brightly-lit windows

of Paris, brimming with finery, one particular window display caught his

attention, and momentarily distracted him from the aching hunger in his

stomach. The window belonged to a picture gallery, and it proudly displayed

a single canvas -a landscape. Something about the painting intrigued Drioli,

and as he looked closer he noticed the plaque affixed to the frame. It read
'CHAIM SOUTINE'.Suddenly, a flood of memories beset him: he was reminded

of when he had known Chaim Soutine as a boy, and of a day, long before, in

1913, when Soutine had been painting a portrait of his (Drioli's) wife, Josie.

Drioli had made a great deal of money from tattooing that day, and had
bought a great deal of wine to celebrate.

Whist Soutine continued to work on the portrait, Drioli shared the wine

amongst the three of them, until they were quite drunk. In a moment of
drunken inspiration, Drioli, awe-struck by the quality of the young Russian's

work, suddenly exclaimed

175
 I would like to have a picture, a lovely picture [... ] a
-
picture that I can have with me always... for ever...

wherever I go... whatever happens... but always with me...

a picture by you. (Dahl 2000,7)

Soutine initially suggested that he paint a piece onto the tattooist's skin,
intending to test whether Drioli's avowed love for his paintings would

endure the desire to bathe. Though Drioli was keen, his wife was

understandably less so, and the group decided that, as they were after all in a
tattoo studio, Soutine should make his marks on Drioli's skin permanent. As

he began to sketch out his design -a portrait of Josie brushing her hair - the

strangeness of the process began to dawn on the by now equal parts

inebriated and invigorated painter. How would he produce this piece? How

would it differ from his customary process of easel painting? Could he

request his living canvas sit up upon his tripod?

After some hours of frantic and feverish work, the piece was completed. First,

Soutine had sketched his design onto Drioli's back, and then, under his

canvas' tutelage, proceeded to turn the rough, painted lines into a precise,

permanent tattoo:

It was a startling sight. The whole of his back, from the top of

his shoulders to the base of his spine, was a blaze of colour

-
gold and green and blue and black and scarlet. The tattoo

was applied so heavily it looked almost like an impasto. The

boy had followed as closely as possible the original brush

strokes, filling them in solid, and it was marvellous the way

he had made use of the spine and the protrusion of the

shoulder blades so that they become part of the composition.

176
 What is more, he had somehow managed to achieve even
-
with this slow process -a certain spontaneity. The portrait

was quite alive; it contained much of that twisted, tortured

quality so characteristic of Soutine's other work. It was not a

good likeness. It was a mood rather than a likeness, the

model's face vague and tipsy, the background swirling

around her head in a mass of dark-green curling strokes.

(Dahl 2000,12-13)

All these memories flooded back to Drioli as he stood before the window,

and, gripped by impulse, he entered the gallery. His dishevelled appearance

caused considerable distress amongst the well-heeled clientele, and he was

asked to leave, politely at first but then with some considerable force. A

ruckus ensued as Drioli refused to leave, and amongst the confrontation he

stripped to the waist to show off his 'painting', a fine and rare example of
Soutine's early work. Suddenly, the mood changed, with the taunts and

mockery of the gallery attendees turning to become an energetic bidding war,

with offers of sums of money being made that were upwards of FF20,000.
These collectors wanted to buy Soutine's extraordinary painting, Drioli's

extraordinary tattoo, even though it was, essentially, an inextricable part of a

living human being.

The crowd in the gallery Dahl imagines come to realise this almost

immediately. Though there was talk of surgeons, skin grafts and even suicide,

the essential problem remained - how could one buy a tattoo? In what way

could one purchase a painting indelibly made on living skin? The gallery

owner's solution was pragmatic. He offered Drioli, broke and desperate, a life

of unimaginable luxury. He was, he said, the owner of a smart hotel in

Cannes called the Bristol, and he wished to engage Drioli's services to

177
entertain his guests, walking around the hotel in a bathing costume exhibiting

the fine art he had. Hungry, Drioli acquiesces.

The story concludes on a macabre ambiguity:

It wasn't more than a few weeks later that a picture by

Soutine, nicely framed and heavily varnished, turned up for

sale in Buenos Aires. That - and the fact that there is no hotel
in Cannes called Bristol - causes one to wonder a little, and

to pray for the old man's health, and to hope fervently that

wherever he may be at this moment, there is a plump

attractive girl to manicure the nails of his fingers, and a maid

to bring him his breakfast in bed in the mornings. (Dahl

2000,21)

Dahl's story relies on a number of the material truths about the nature of

tattooing already mentioned in detail. Whilst the Suits Made to Fit project and

Lee Wagstaff's work celebrate tattooing as a legitimate artistic medium in its

own right, what Dahl's story does is the opposite, drawing upon the
deification of the artist and the sanctity and both financial and ethical value of

an original work of art in order to present the tattoo as artistically legitimate

only when 'nicely framed and heavily varnished'. Having Drioli wander a

Mediterranean villa in his trunks is not enough to sate the rapacious greed of

the gallerist, who would stop at nothing to acquire a particularly rare piece by

a famous artist".

47Dahl could have invented the artist character from whole cloth, but he gives him the name
of a real painter. As such the story becomes somewhat of a gruesome, satirical caricature of
the art market more than a story about tattoos per se, but the key factors upon which his story

178
Chaim Soutine

In late 2004, curator Richard Adamson attempted to bring this seedy work of

fiction to life. In a show called Chaim Soutine, Adamson and his curatorial

collaborators Another Roadside Attraction took Dahl's story as a blueprint,

contacting 31 artists and asking them to produce preparatory drawings which

would be "exhibited" as tattoos on the skin of willing volunteers (Ashley

2005)48.Adamson invited a number of well-regarded artists to the project,

including David Shrigley, Gavin Turk and Wim Delvoye49, with each

producing drawings and designs in their own particular styles, and enjoined
the services of Barry Hogarth (the tattooist who had worked with Lee
Wagstaff) to produce the tattoos. The recipients were recruited via

advertisements in tattoo and art magazines with the promise of free tattoos,

relies (and those which are so sharply critiqued by the narrative sequence) - authorship,
authenticity, scarcity, the author-god - are all ones which the practice of tattooing render
viscerally visible. Certain tattooists have been able to develop reputations as great tattoo
artists, (almost) none have had their tattoos recognised as great pieces of art, or as great artists
simply on the basis of the work they produce on skin. Names of famous tattooers (Sailor
Jerry, Don Ed Hardy, Spider Webb, Leo Zulueta, George Burchett, Amund Dietzel... ) trip as
quickly off the tongue of tattoo cognoscenti as names of the Old Masters do from scholars of
the Renaissance, but not one has made any real in-road into the history of art. Some have
infiltrated galleries with conceptual works or works in more traditional media, but not one of
these individuals has made any real impact as artists in the Romantic sense on the strength of
the tattoos they produced. By transposing a well-known, well-collected painter like Soutine
into the medium of tattooing, Dahl ensures that his story is comprehensible - after all, who
could imagine a famous tattoo artist, one whose work is worthy of the type of awe which the
gallery crowd displays towards Drioli's backpiece. One feels that without Soutine's name, the
narrative coherence of the story would fall away.
48The project was never fully completed. The curators were unable to find volunteers to wear
several of the pieces commissioned.
49 The artists who collaborated in Chaim Soutine were: Edwina Ashton, Sally Barker, Joe Biel,
Isha Bohling, Alex Bunn, David Burrows, Jason Coburn, Wim Delvoye, Mary Departieu, Jack
Duplock, Swetlana Heger, Doug Fishbone, Mathew Hale, Peter Harris, Scott King, Adam
McEwen, Kim Merrington, Ian Monroe, Victor Mount, Bruno Musterberg, Richard Owen,
Janette Parris, Lisa Prior, The Royal Art Lodge, David Shrigley, John Strutton, Mark Titchner,
Gavin Turk, Markus Vater, Julie Verhoeven and Johannes Wohnseifer. I am indebted to Barry
Hogarth for allowing me to access his personal archive of documents pertaining to the
project.

179
and were allowed to choose a piece from the designs available on a first-

come-first served basis (Ashley 2005; Liptrot 2005). In a curatorial gesture, the

exhibition was held, for one night only, on December ist 2004, gathering the
"works" together at the Barbican in London (though the artist's preparatory

drawings were on display at Hogarth's studio, `Happy Sailor' in Hackney, for

a number of weeks afterwards (Burnett 2004)).

The works produced for the show varied considerably in style, content and

tone. As if to echo the problems Adrian Lee had when producing his

backpieces, some, such as David Burrows' Never Nervous Muscular Efficiency

(Figure 24) and Richard Owen's three untitled designs (e.g Figure 25 and

Figure 26), appropriate traditional and conventional tattoo imagery - hearts,

horseshoes, banners. Some are illustrative, others figurative. Many are wry

and humourous - Peter Harris designed a backpiece called Tattoo Number 4

(Figure 27, Figure 28, Figure 29), which is a representation of an official

bureaucratic form, an enormous singe-line rectangle with the text "Please use

space provided for any additional information"; Victor Mount's contribution

Just Say No to Body Art parodied his own painting Just Say No to Art. A few

were conceptual - Gavin Turk's submission was simply his own signature
(Figure 30), in a nod to Pierro Manzoni's Living Sculpture (Scultura vivente)

performance (1961), in which Manzoni affixed his signature to a number of

individuals in order to recognise them as "works of art" (Celant 1998,32).

180
Figure 24 David Burrows, Never Nervous Muscular Efficiency, 2004

(Photograph courtesy of Barry Hogarth)

181
Figure 25 Richard Owen, preparatory design for Untitled, 2004

Figure 26 Richard Owen, Untitled (left) and preparatory design (right), 2004.

182
 1 t4 i.. E<< s-

Figure 27 Peter Harris, preparatory design for Tattoo No. 4,2004

use we Pfowlded Ibt my addWm>rt.

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,

Figure 28 Peter Harris, detail from Tattoo No. 4,2004.

(photograph courtesy of Barry Hogarth)

11
183
Figure 29 Peter Harris, Tattoo No. 4,2004

(photograph courtesy of Barry Hogarth)

184
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All,
it. 04

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Figure 30 Gavin Turk, preparatory sketch for Untitled, 2004.

There was, of course, no merciless killing that night. The tattoos were not cut

from the bodies of those who bear them. No money changed hands, no

varnish was applied, no trips to Cannes were offered. Implicitly assuming

that the steps taken by the collectors Dahl imagined were entirely fantastic, as

Adamson explained in the show's press release the ironic conflict between

a piece of art by an artist like Turner-prize nominee Mark Titchner

owning

but being unable to sell or even truly exhibit it was at the core of the show's

subversive and anti-institutional message. "What is interesting about the

tattoo as a means of displaying art by those generally working in more

mediums", he said, "is the temporary nature of the work. It

conventional

adheres to the art world's emphasis of the one off original but while being

indelible, exists only as long as it's owner. It is also a portable artwork, which

185
cannot be displayed in the usual venues, nor sold on, but is intrinsically

priceless". "

Adamson's show brings tattooing into something resembling, or at least

parodying a conventional institutional context, and by doing so further

exposes the objective characteristics of body art. Firstly, the tattoos were not

performative. Some tattoos were carried out at the Barbican event, but this

was demonstrational and illustrative rather than performative in the way Lea
Vergine or Amelia Jones would use the term. The manner in which the tattoo

was applied, and the circumstances of its application were broadly irrelevant

to the project, where the artistic content of the works is in their status as

marks on a surface. Even Gavin Turk's contribution, though aping a canonical

piece of performance art, exists as a permanent surface mark in a way which

Manzoni's work never could have.

Furthermore, tattooing unique works by artists who are not themselves

tattooists further emphasises that the tattoo can function and be read as an

aesthetic object, and not simply as an expression of the subjective intention of

its wearer. By adding another layer of authorship to the process of creating a

tattoo, the tattoo-object and the tattooed body as an object are further

distanced from the types of readings Nikki Sullivan has criticised, which

assume that "tattoos are a form of non-verbal communication that can often
be deciphered" (Sullivan 2001,17).

50Press release for the Chaim Soutine show at Happy Sailor Tattoo, 17 Hackney Rd, London,
2ndDecember 2004 -12th January 2005. See also Burnett (2004).

186
Tattoos and Narrative Selfhood

What I want to extrapolate from these observations is that the objectivity

exposed by Chaim Soutine is not only a feature of tattoos produced in such a

specifically "artistic context". Adamson's curation asks its audience to

consider the tattoo as an art object, but the point of the show is that the

potential for objective readings is inherent in how tattoos are produced. These

types of readings, however, are almost universally ignored. Two recent

studies (Oksanen and Turtianinen 2005; Velliquette et al. 2006) are

paradigmatic of this problem. Both locate tattooing within the broader

discourse of narrative identity construction, and both unashamedly follow

from a trajectory of research and discussion which firmly categorises the act

of being tattooed, particularly in a (post)modern context, as a fundamentally

narrative one (see e.g Sweetman 2000). Both neglect any possibility for the

types of nuanced readings which the works I've been discussing suggest are

not only possible but essential in analyses of tattooing, and both refuse

aesthetic or affective readings of tattoos in favour of readings which are solely

analytic or semiotic.

The first of these studies, Anne M. Velliquette, Jeff B. Murray and Deborah J.

Evers' sociological paper Inscribing the Personal Myth: The Role of Tattoos in

Identification, is explicit in establishing its premise:

A personal myth is a story that brings together a wide range of

experiences into a purposeful and convincing whole. It is a

patterned integration of our remembered past, perceived

present and anticipated future. From this perspective, each of

us attempts to create a heroic story, a compelling aesthetic

statement. This personal myth or story is our identity and it is

187
 a sacred, dynamic and continuous project. The body, and the

way that it is adorned, is part of one's identity project;

individuals use an ensemble of products and brands as sign-

systems to embody their personal myths (2006,37)

With reference to a series of interviews they conducted, the authors argue that

the individual "consumption" of tattoos formalises personal narratives, and

conclude that their interviewees were "organizing their storytelling around

decidedly modern themes". "Identity", they assert, "is an ongoing negotiation

between the individual who chooses to narrate particular scenes and the

culture within which the individual lives" (2006,67-68). Velliquette et al.

posit a particularly clear and unproblematic relationship between the act of

tattooing and the production of myth: in this understanding, tattoos serve as

expressions of pivotal changes in personal narratives which both mark and

come to signify "life transitions" or "turning points" (positive or negative) in

narrative sequences.

The second article, Atte Oksanen and Jussi Turtianinen's A Life Told in Ink:

Tattoo Narratives and the Problem of the Self in Late Modern Society,is also keen to

unequivocally state the bounds of its terminology:

The key concept used in this article is tattoo narrative, which

refers to the way that tattooed subjects plot their life through
their tattoos. Tattoos function as points of reference or maps

that enable life stories to be told. It is shown here that tattoos

are used by subjects in order to control their lives when faced

with the chaos of late modern society. A tattoo engraved into

the skin represents a link to a personal life history, as well as

an opportunity for subjective security. (2005,112)

188
Oksanen and Turtianinen's basic argument is that tattoos are considered

expressions of some internal truths, and that the permanent expression of

these truths allow selfhood to coalesce around a bright, clear narrative.

Images, colours and symbols reflect transitions and provide

the structure for life history. They function as reminders for

their bearer's history and they serve as lived memories

remaining in the surface of the body. (Oksanen and

Turtianinen 2005,121)

Their analyses of the stories of tattooed subjects in Tattoo magazine rely on

reading tattoos as mementos, trinkets or souvenirs of some kind of

chronological tourism. As Atkinson explains (2003,189), the format of the

pieces in tattoo magazines are often conducive to only this type of hyper-

Narrative, as the questions the interviewers pose can only elicit narrative

responses ("What does your tattoo mean?", for example, or "What was going

on in your life when you got that tattoo? "). When this is combined with the

analytical presumption of what Nikki Sullivan (after Gerald Grumet) has

termed 'dermal diagnosis', namely the beliefs that "human flesh has proven

itself a suitable canvas on which to portray psychologically relevant themes",

the types of conclusions that Oksanen and Turtianinen reach are all but
inevitable. They describe one tattooed woman as having "a permanent diary

that no-one can take away" (2005,113). They state unequivocally that

"[e]xperiences and life events are seen in the skin, but also tattooed pictures

seem to tell the stories of their carriers" (2005,114).

Through close reading of interviews with tattooed subjects in the popular

magazine Tattoo (the self-proclaimed best selling tattoo publication in the

189
world), Oksanen and Turtianinen surmise that contemporary tattooing is a

subjectively useful act, permitting some sense of permanent and unshifting

subjectivity against the transient impermanence of postmodernity and the

threat it poses to the stability of selfhood. In their thesis, tattooing holds some

kind of ethical potency - tattoos function to legitimise or even enable rites of

passage; reify fantasies; memorialise, commemorate and formalise narrative

events; fortify and purify subjectivity and re-incorporate socially

disembodied modes of being. "[T]attoo narratives", they claim, "are

construed as powerful existential experiences, where life events are

integrated into a narrative form via the body" (Oksanen and Turtianinen

2005).

I can certainly agree with at least some of the positions these papers establish,

I
and am sympathetic to the generally positive light in which they place the

role of tattooing in identity construction. The problem with both them,

though, is that in seeking to address the role of tattooing in the construction

of personal narratives, both seem to be begging the question, particularly in

their axiomatic presumption that body art in general and tattooing in

particular speak to a direct and singular subjective narrativre. This is

unsurprising; after all, the conceptual trope of selfhood as a narrative

construction is particularly pervasive, and, as Michael Atkinson has

observed, "[tattoo enthusiasts] often deem (or find) it necessary to justify

their choice of corporeal practices narratively" (Atkinson 2003,189). Through

reference to tattoo magazines (the empirical substructure of Oksanen and

Turtianinen's paper), television shows such as Miami Ink, tattoo community

websites and the like, tattooed individuals learn to justify their choices in

terms of narrative significance because that is what seems to be expected of

them by others, even if the initial impetus behind their decision to get

tattooed is far less obvious, deliberate or considered. Indeed, Atkinson cites a

190
tattoo artist called Butch who berates the constant, and he claims artificial,

justification of tattoo choices through recourse to convoluted and contrived

storytelling. "I've heard it all before", he groans, "and I don't care". (2003,
189)

Tattoos as Discrete Art Objects

Thus it came to pass, that theformer sort accumulated wealth, and

the latter sort finally had nothing to sell except their own skins -

Karl Marx, Capital

The inability to separatethe tattoo objectfrom its owner in order to

display or resell it and the physical trauma involved in the

production activity violate important conventions in the

institutional art world - Clinton R. Sanders (Sanders 2008,158)

Dahl's scenario is, of course, meant to be one of nightmares; an absurd,

macabre fairytale. Nevertheless, it is, in some respects, a tale not entirely of

fantasy and fiction.

In May 2008, TheArt Newspaperreported on the case of another real-life Drioli.

Controversial Belgian artist Wim Delvoye, perhaps most widely known for

his installation Cloaca(2000), which features a machine that 'digests' food into

faeces, had been tattooing pigs in China (Delvoye 1999; Delvoye et al. 2001).

Turning his attention to humans, he produced (in collaboration with tattooist

Matt Powers) a large back-piece on the skin of a Swiss collector called Tim

Steiner, and began 'exhibiting' him across Europe, much in the same vein as

the Happy Sailor-led project (for which he had also provided a drawing). The

work is called, simply, 'Tim'.

191
Figure 31 Wim Delvoye, Tim, 2007

(Installation at de Pury & Luxemboug, Zurich. Photograph by Anatole Serexhe)

Following a first public showing in the de Pury & Luxembourg Gallery in

Zurich, Delvoye subsequently sold the piece to a German collector who, we

are told, "intends to auction it (or him) at a place and time to be determined"

('Delvoye's fine body of work' 2008,2). The intention is that the collector takes

full rights to the tattoo, and may exhibit Tim (as a mobile exhibition) while he

192
is alive or the removed, taxidermied tattoo on its own once Tim has died.

Other Delvoye tattoos had previously been offered for sale to the Pompidou

Centre in Paris and Christie's and Sotheby's auction houses in London51,

though these institutions are said to have rejected the offer for "legal reasons".

Delvoye has taken what seem to be the somewhat inalienable qualities of the

tattoo as "living art" one step beyond the stage which the participants in the

Chaim Soutine exhibition, as he successfully managed to sell what his

predecessors had presented as un-marketable.

Juliet Fleming explains that "the bottom line that presents itself to Marx and,

he imagines, to even the most irresponsible theorists of capitalism, is the

human skin - the commodity which no-one, even the person who owns it, has

the right to trade" And yet: "In actuality, the tattooed skin can be bought and

sold - but not without raising profound questions concerning human and

property rights". (Fleming 2000,271 fn. 30). Alluding to the plot of Roald

Dahl's Skin, Fleming asserts that because the tattoo can be neither practically

nor ethically be sold, its material properties configure it as a challenge to

classical economic theory, existing, as it must, as simultaneously inalienable

and mobile. A tattoo costs money to produce, but has no value as it cannot be

exchanged. It is, literally, priceless. Fleming suggests that this tension might

contribute to the "intellectual distress for which the tattoo stands as a figure"
(Fleming 2000,66). Whilst I agree to some degree with Fleming's analysis of

the threat tattooing poses to capitalist consumer culture and the ethical

conundrums the sale of skin presupposes, on examination it turns out that

tattoos aren't necessarily so inextricable or so immune to commodification as

material objects as they might first appear.

51The full account of this tattoo is narrated by its bearer, Ben Lewis, in Prospect magazine
(Lewis 2005)

193
Tattoos in the Wellcome Collection

In the summer of 1929, Captain Peter Johnston-Saint, travelling artefact

collector for Henry Wellcome's famous collection, embarked upon an

acquisition trip to Paris. Tasked by Wellcome with purchasing items of

interest and importance, Captain Saint records in his diary entry for Thursday

6thJune that

In the morning, I went to see the old osterologist regarding the

preserved head, tattooed skins and other items which he has.

He had not troubled to look them all out, so I am no further in

this affair. He has promised however to do so by next week,

I I
when said would come in and see him again and, if he has

everything ready so that the material can be seen, I would try

and arrange terms with him for purchase. (Johnston-Saint

1929b, 4) 52

Naturally, Captain Johnston-Saint did return to the osterologist's address the

following week as arranged, finding the curious, morbid bounty bundled up

for sale. His diary entry for Saturday June 15th1929 records the days' events:

I then went to La Valette in the Rue Ecole de Medicine. This is

the man who had the collection of over 300 tattooed human

skins. These skins date from the first quarter of the last

century down to the present time. Many of them are very

curious and extremely interesting and consist of skins of

sailors, soldiers, murders and criminals of all nationalities. He

52 Wellcome Collection Accession nos. WA/Hmm/RP/Jst/A/5 (Manuscript);

WA/Hmm/RP/Jst/B/4 (Typed Reports)

194
 has also the very unique mummified head of an Arab,

mummified in such a manner as to preserve the features in a

most lifelike condition. He says that this was a special process

of his own and unique in mummification. There was also a

galvanised human brain, the only examples of its kind in the

world, prepared in the laboratories of the Musee Dupuytren in

Paris. And lastly, a very interesting picture of a dissecting

room by Dr. Paul Renonard, 1906. In accordance with

instructions I bought all of these for the best possible terms

viz. £80 for the lot. La Valette told me that the skins are

unique, that no more could be got under any circumstances,

and that each skin had taken him a long time and cost him a

certain amount to cure and prepare for his permanent

collection. (Johnston-Saint 1929a; 1929b, 19-20)53

53Henry Wellcome's annotation to the report reads, tersely, "These of great interest for certain
section".

195
Figure 32 A tattoo on a piece of human skin showing a male bust and a flower stem
Late 19th Century. Wellcome Images, London. Museum No A68

196
 "+1

Figure 33 A tattoo on a piece of human skin showing a nude female called Flora

Late 19th Century. Wellcome Images, London. Museum No A727

197
 03
..,.x...,.....

Figure 34 A tattoo on a piece of human skin showing a flower and some initials

Late 19th Century. Wellcome Images, London. Museum No A703

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_

-ýsý

Figure 35 A tattoo on a piece of human skin showng a Greek style bust of an Emperor and
some writing
Late 19th Century. Wellcome Images, London Museum No A583

198
These 300 skins were neatly and painstakingly entered into the acquisitions
log-14,which records a brief description of each specimen (and/or occasionally

a rough sketch when the subject-matter defied concise written summary),

their size and the price paid for each. The section of the log is headed, simply

and manner-of-factly, "Human Skin, Tattooed", with the note "Pur Capt St.

June 1929 of La Valette, Rue Ecole de Medicine Paris" squeezed into the left-

hand margin. Some are astonishingly large - Specimen 525, for example, is

recorded as spanning 181/2"x 131/2- and others much smaller; they range in

price seemingly according to size and intricacy from a handsome £10/-55to

just £1/-56. The skins bear a range of iconographic content that would be

familiar to any tattooist even today - daggers, card suits, moons, naked

women, flowers, lions. Many feature the text of names ('Flora'( Figure 33),

'A. T' (Figure 34)) or slogans ('L'amour fait souffrir' (Figure 35)); others record

dates of sentimental importance.

The Musee Dupuytren is a museum of medical and anatomical curiosities,

established in 1832 as the Museum of Medical Pathology of the University of

Paris. It seems likely that Monsieur La Valette worked either in or near the

museum itself, given Captain Johnston-Saint's notes on the preparation of the

head and the address recorded as the location of the meeting. Rue de L'Ecole

de Medicine was the heart of Parisian medical life at the end of the 19th

century, and was the address for the Musee Dupuytren and, of course, the

University of Paris' medical school. Whilst Captain Johnston-Saint mentions

that these tattoos were removed from the dead (one hopes! ) bodies of sailors,

soldiers and criminals, there is no information in his records as to exactly how

M. La Valette came to acquire the skins in the first instance. The motivations

54Wellcome Collection Accession no. WA/Hmm/CM/Not/1 - Items 524 - 822 in Acquisition

Log 1-1362,1929-1935
55£10/-in 1929 was worth somewhere in the region of £400 today.
The final specimen catalogued, number 822, is described as "Not clear enough to decipher".
-%

199
for collecting these objects remain to be researched and should not be

presumed". Nevertheless, it was somewhat common practice at the end of

the 19th Century for the bodies of criminals and others to be used in

anatomical dissections, and as Michael Sappol explains, "an executed person's

body might be mined for anatomical 'curiosities' [... ]; an anatomist then

assumed the role of collector and exhibitor -a stance that combined

proprietary ownership and cultural authority" (Sappol 2002,91)58. The

curiosity was, according to Sappol, at once didactic and spectacular, with

remains being used for research, for discussing with colleagues and, often, for

public or private display.

These skins are still physically held by the Wellcome Collection, and housed

in the archives of the Science Museum at Blythe House5960.Two of them are

on display in the permanent collection of the Wellcome Museum. Though

they were collected in the course of the professional practice of anatomy,

these exempla of mummified plunder have now been legitimised as objects of

display (or, as Sappol would have it, of curiosity), presented as objects for

57The murky provenance of these tattoos are rendered into a fanciful short story by Hari
Kunzru in The Phantom Museum (Hawkins and Olsen 2003). Kunzru's fictive account
imagines some of the tattoos as belonging to a young, passionate murderess: "Afterwards my
body was the property of the state. At the post-mortem examination they cut away the
square of skin over my heart and preserved it, as a demonstration of my criminal nature. It
was kept with many others, and that is how it was bought by the collector, one of many
anonymous squares of skin, with on it a little picture of a man". (Hawkins and Olsen 2003.
71).
58And M. Lavallette was certainly a collector. Whilst his methods of procurement were
downright nefarious (when paintings are stolen from their now-deceased owners it is usually
called "looting"), he does represent an embodiment of the missing link in my attempts to
draw formal comparisons between tattoos and other forms of art, that of the buyer.
59The specimens have been said, with a rhetorical flourish, to have been "kept in air-tight
plastic lunch boxes" (Arnold and Olsen 2003,342). See Forment and Brilot 2004 for some
brief discussions of their symbolic content.
60Similar tattoo specimens are to be found in collections around the world (in the archives of
the Gordon Museum at Guy's Hospital (Fend 2009), for example, and in medical museums in
Berlin and Vienna).

200
consideration in a museum. Due to their disconnection from their previously

problematic status as art in living skin, their fundamentally artistic nature is

put into sharper relief than may have been the case when they were still borne

by their original owners, and by taking on the formal qualities of a painting o

display, the distinctions between tattoos in general and tattoo art that some

have sought to emphasise (through appeals to virtuosity, craftsmanship or

formalised art training (see Tucker 1981,44)) vanish for the most part.

Although the pieces in the La Valette collection are somewhat crude in purely

visual or spectacular terms, they do 'work' as discrete visual objects. In fact, in

rendering them as discrete art objects in their own right, and by inserting both

distance and time between them and the subjectivities they would once have

been understood to express, the questions of symbolic, psychological truth

these tattoos would have prompted are elided into more recognisably art

historical questions of artistic intentionality"

Tattoos as Art Objects in early 20thCentury America

La Vallette's skins retain some of their humanity through the museological

context of the Wellcome, a collection of medical ephemera, and it is certain

that Henry Wellcome did not seek to purchase these items because of their

beauty or artistic virtuosity. It is not too hard to imagine, though, how

anthropological or pathological curiosity may be further subsumed under an

appreciation of tattooed skins simply as works of decorative art, or of visual

spectacle. At roughly the same time that Captain Johnston-Saint was in Paris,

across the Atlantic Ocean a few American collectors were also setting about

acquiring preserved tattooed skins. As Parry explains,

61Questions which they deserved to have prompted all along, of course.

201
 Harry V. Lawson was, up until the recent darkness of the

depression, one of the swankiest of the masters. He kept a

three-bedroom establishment, consisting of a reception room,

an operating room, and a rest-room. In his desk-top there was

a display of bulky medical volumes. On the walls, framed in

neat wood and glass, were samples of tattooed human skin,

taken from corpses. This never failed to bring Harry publicity

from the Los Angeles newspapers, and he loved it. [... ] Harry

Lawson would never divulge his technique of securing the

skin (perhaps it was no more sinister than taking the smaller

designs off live bodies through surgery). (Parry 2006,49)

It seems appropriate to term Lawson, like La Vallette, a collector. Lawson was

a Los Angeles-based tattoo artist of some renown (Parry records that his

clientele included medical doctors, lawyers, high-ranking politicians,

businessmen, bankers and aristocrats), and seems also to have fancied himself

as a connoisseur of well-executed tattoos, displaying them in his office much

as any of his well-heeled clients might have done with their collections of

paintings. As Dahl himself imagines in Skin, these tattoos are indeed 'nicely
framed and heavily varnished' (Dahl 2000,21).

On the East coast, this reduction of the tattoo to unilateral art object was even

starker. Parry describes

that in New York the supply of human skin is cornered by a

certain gentleman of leisure who collects the samples for a

hobby, as one would collect cigar-labels or old Americana. He

knows a first-rate tattoo when he sees one, approaches the

bearer, and signs an agreement with him in re skin-delivery

202
 [sic] after the man's death. This gentleman also manipulates a

dissecting room monopoly. He is without doubt the only

living human with a constant corner in epithelia. (Parry 2006,

49)

Unlike the anatomical spoils of the Wellcome collection, these tattoos are

procured with the full consent of their owners and purchased solely for their

visual, and not pathological, appeal. Whilst this collector's suppliers might be
literally selling their skins, do such transactions really represent the final

victories of the horror of capitalism over the poor and desperate Marx

envisaged? Or is there something more mundane at work - simply, the

common marketisation of art works?

Firstly, of course, such transactions seem to settle the copyright and

ownership dilemmas described earlier in this chapter. Even if in some

convoluted legal sense ownership or propriety is shared between the tattoo

artist and the recipient, the New York collector's transaction is (and must

necessarily be) only with the bearer of the tattoo. Whilst authorship (and

ownership of intellectual property rights) may be collaborative, the material

fact of the tattoo is that, whatever the process of its production, the physical

object belongs to the bearer, much in the same way as material ownership

transfers from a painter to his customer once it is sold. What these types of

transaction highlight is that, absent some metaphysical objection to the trade

in skin, certain individuals are able to render their tattoos as commercialisable

art objects much like any other. There is a certain banality to this mode of

exchange, given it lacks the implied horror and side-steps the more pragmatic

ethical concerns other methods of selling tattoos imply.

203
Dr. Fukushi's Skin Museum

Impermanence is a crucial characteristic to tattooing as an art

form. Works in other mediums composed of, or on inanimate

substances can be passed down to future generations for their

appreciation and enlightenment. The tattoo is a private, selfish

contract between the artist and client that is ultimately for the

edification and empowerment of the wearer alone during his

or her lifetime.

The world's single notable exception to this face is the

collection of tattooed skins at the Medical Pathology Museum

of Tokyo University. (Hardy 1988a, 74)

The mid-1920s seem to have been a high-water-mark in the conversion of

tattoos into tradable artefacts. In 1926, Dr Masaichi Fukushi, a professor of

medicine and pathology at Nippon Medical University, developed a love and

admiration for the large, intricate body suit tattoos favoured amongst certain

sections of Japanese society at the time. He had been looking for similarities

between the way the skin holds tattoo ink and the way melanocytic nevi

(moles) develop, and in the course of his studies invented a method for

preserving skins that kept all the details of their tattoos intact. From this

work, he became a notable expert on the history and iconography of Japanese

tattoos, and established a museum of preserved skins at Tokyo University.

204
 0 or
Own%V

e 40-

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Figure 36 Japanese woman being tottoocd Tor Tokyo Univcr"si! it research project, 1956

Photograph, (20.8cm x 25.9cm) National Media Museum, Bradford. Inventory number

1983-523613050_1 (Photograph from the Keystone collection). The catalogue entry for this
photograph records that "Japanese girls sell their skins for £1000 to university to provide
for their families".

Though of course not the 'single notable exception', as we have already seen,

Dr. Fukushi's collection is still remarkable. He was keen to preserve what he

saw as great art works beyond their otherwise inevitable decay after death,

and did so by recognising and preserving their inherent aesthetic qualities.

Like the New York collector mentioned above, all the 105 skins in Dr.

Fukushi's museum were acquired with the full co-operation of the tattooees.

In fact, Dr. Fukushi, in the best tradition of art collectors, actually contributed

financially to the completion of these enormous body-suits on the condition

that they be bequeathed to him when they died (Figure 36).

205
Though Dr. Fukushi died in 1956, his collection has been maintained and

expanded by his son, Katsunari, also a pathologist. Katsunari obviously

shares his father's aesthetic sensibilities: according to Mark Poysden and

Marco Bratt, he has "devised a method to backlight the preserved skins,

creating an effect similar to stained glass, emphasising the colours, shading

and needle patterns" (Poysden and Bratt 2006,159). Hardy quotes him on his

collection policy "Numbers are not important; I have limited this collection
-
only to tattoo masterpieces which cover the entire body, to hand them down

to posterity. [... ] This is nothing less than a peerless living art" (Hardy 1988a,

77-78)62.

In contexts such as these, the medium (that is, the skin) is almost (if not

entirely) subordinate to the aesthetic qualities of the pictures upon it. It

becomes much easier to see tattoo art in purely aesthetic terms when stripped

from the living body in such an ethically-transparent manner.

62See also Quigley 1998,248-249.

206
Figure 37 Dr Fukushi

(photograph by Don Ed Hardy)

207
Figure 38 Tattoo from Dr. Fukushi's collection

(photograph by Don Ed Hardy)

Figure 39 Skin of leg showing dragon and gambler's playing card designs

(photograph by Don Ed Hardy)

208
Art or Artefact?

So unrivalled was he in his position that a highly finished face

of a chief from the hands of this artist is as greatly prized in

New Zealand as a head from the hands of Sir Thomas

Lawrence is amongst us. (Robley 1896,100)

There is something transformative about the tattoo. Whilst there is perhaps

something uncomfortably morbid about imagining un-adorned human skins

hanging from office walls, like some gruesome hunting trophies, once they

become tattooed, these same skins are allowed (even if not totally) to

transcend their ideological baggage. This has (as Fleming points out), the

potential to be rather morally disturbing. The conferral of a status of art

object onto human remains can be problematic, especially if such status is

used as moral or even legal justification for otherwise ethically dubious

behaviour.

Museums around the world, including the Wellcome, have collected

numerous 'objects' or 'artefacts' that might less euphemistically and more

properly be called 'body parts'. Among these classes of acquisitions, the most

recently contentious has been 'toi moko', the preserved, tattooed heads of

New Zealand Maori warriors (Figure 40). These intricately-tattooed heads

played an important role in the ritual life of the Maori, being preserved after
death to be exhibited by friends and family on important occasions or to be

displayed as spoils of combat or saved to be returned when eventual peace is

made (Hole 2007,6). From the mid-19th to the early 20th century, these heads

were acquired (through trade or through theft and grave-robbing) by

European collectors, and it has been estimated that somewhere in the region

209
 ýY
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Figure 40 Toi Moko

(photograph by San Fransisco Tattoo Museum)

of 200 heads remain in the hands of international museums. Since 1998, a

number have been repatriated.

210
Though these objects have now politically re-assumed their status as human

remains, it is perhaps interesting to re-affirm that because of their tattoos,

these heads were prized as desirable artistic objects even beyond their interest

as objects of anthropological curiosity. For example, Brian Hole explains that

one motivation for the desirability of toi moko "was artistic. Collector Horatio
Robley for example specialized in preserved tattooed heads and became a

major 19th century authority on Maori tattooing, which he described as 'a

remarkable work of art'" (Hole 2007,7). In Robley's 1896 book on Maori

tattooing, he explains that "the operators in moko were generally professional

artists who worked for hire, and their different degrees of excellence were as

well known as that of painters among the moderns". He cites the diary of Mr.

Earle, the draughtsman on Darwin's ship H. M. S Beagle, who explains that

"A neighbour of mine very lately killed a chief who had been tattooed by

Aranghie, and appreciating the artist's work so highly, he skinned the chief-

tain's thighs, and covered his cartouch-box with it", and, with some sense of

incredulity, that "it was most gratifying to behold the respect these savages

pay to the fine arts" (Robley 1896,99-100).

During the colonial period, these heads became so valuable as objects of trade

that, as Hole describes, that chieftains would often force their slaves to be

tattooed so that they could be decapitated and sold (Hole 2007,9; Robley

1896,169)63. These poor men were commodified as carrier media for a

particularly valuable art-form. Like Lawson's framed skins, the addition of

tattoos shifts the status of the body from artefact to(wards) art work. Note the

jarring disconnect in Andrew Hubbard's vivid description of the toi moko,

beginning in justified horror but ending in awe-filled wonder:

63 Despite being one of the principal traders of toi moko, it is noteworthy that Robley
apparently found the trade itself rather hard to stomach, finding the traffic "gruesome" and
"sordid". See Robley (1896, Ch. 12). "Many a poor slave suffered a horrible fate - mokoed
only to be murdered for his head" (170).

211
 Nowadays even the idea of a preserved head might seem

repulsive; the photos of them have a peculiar aura of horror.

Traded heads were typically cut off below the jawline, the

brains and eyes removed and the eyelids sewn together, the

lips cut off and the teeth exposed. They were dried in the sun

and over fires. The result was a hollow head which a hand

could fit into, a kind of grisly human puppet. And yet the

moko is often an artistic masterpiece. (Hubbard 2008)

Whilst the re-categorisation of human remains as art works was certainly not

the only factor at play in the colonial ethic which rendered such plunder

acceptable, it most certainly did play a role in that process. The only thing

these examples really demonstrate, though, is that tattoos can and have been

traded. The question that remains as to whether they should be traded.

Following the provisions for de-accession of human remains put into UK law

by the Human Tissue Act in 2004 (in particular Section 47), a number of

British museums which held collections of human remains began to repatriate

items from their collections. In Scotland, several institutions including the

Kelvingrove Art Gallery in Glasgow, have already repatriated toi moko heads

from their collections following requests from the Maori Party in New

Zealand and an increasing distaste for what are now seen as the ethically

unsupportable acts of the colonial era ('Ethics, not law, prompts hand-over of

artefacts' 2008). In France, however, cultural minister Christine Albanel

interjected into the proposed repatriation of heads from the Museum of

Natural History in Rouen, claiming that the toi moko were essentially art

objects and thus part of France's cultural heritage, and not subject to France's

212
bioethics laws as they should otherwise have been. (Chrisafis 2007; Hubbard

2008).

Mme Albanel is wrong, of course; hers is a false dichotomy. The toi moko are

not art objects or human remains, but both simultaneously. It is certainly the

case that sufficient ethical arguments can be made such that the heads be

returned if that is what their ancestors request. But do the ethical issues in this

case really arise from the simple fact that human remains are on display in

museums or that they take on the appellation 'art'? Without recourse to a

specific metaphysics that appeals for the sanctity of the body, there can be

little ethical objection to the voluntary donation of skins to Dr. Fukushi's

collection, for example, or to the capital exchange that took place in New York

between the connoisseur and the living bearers of the pieces he wished to

purchase. The ethical disquiet that the toi moko raise is fundamentally linked

to the politics and attitudes of colonial Europe rather than their material

qualities as human remains, as Marx' presuppositions assume.

The same is true of plausible objections to La Vallette's skins. Whilst there

has not been similar outcry directed at the Wellcome's collection of criminal

tattoos and no-one has called for M. La Vallette's tattooed skins to be afforded

proper burials nor accused the Wellcome Collection of violating the dignity of

whoever these tattooed skins were formally part of64,one can imagine ethical

objections being raised regarding the methods and politics of their separation

from their original owners. The prisoners and soldiers likely did not realise

the anatomical curiosity their tattoos would engender after death, and almost

64I am reminded, however, of the considerable hue and cry that surrounds Günther von
Hagens and his plastinated BodyWorlds exhibition. Perhaps these dilemmas are only at the
forefront of people's minds when the artefacts themselves bear some verisimilitude to living,
breathing human beings?

213
certainly were given no chance to consent to their dissection. This is where the
disquiet should rest, not in the sale of skin in and of itself65.

As Ruth Richardson noticed, "Wellcome's curios exist, substituting in strange

and unaccountable ways for perishable things which they to some extent

embody: care, human effort, ingenuity, capacity, creativity, skill, industry,

thought, pain, grief, sadness, physicality, infirmity, deprivation, vanity, even

cruelty; and yet, too, resilience, love, faith, kindness, concern, joy and hope. "
(Richardson 2003,342) When we distinguish tattoos (or, indeed, other forms

of body alteration) with the nomenclature of art, and even if we commodify

them as such, affording them material value as art objects in the market, there

is no inherent ethical dilemma. The problems occur, as with all modes of

artistic production and marketisation, if they are produced, acquired or

traded in coercive circumstances. Whilst Fleming is certainly correct that the

sale of tattoos has the capacity to be ethically uncomfortable, as the cases I've
described above illustrate, this does not necessarily need automatically to be

the case. Once the body is become art (or the site of art), it assumes a new set

of potentialities; it is able to function as, be perceived as and even be bought

and sold in much the same way as all other objects upon which we confer the

status of art.

65The official advice issued to museums by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport in
light of the Human Tissue Act 2004 demarcates a distinct ethical framework which would
include toi moko and similar artefacts in the class of items to be repatriated, but exclude
Wellcome's tattoo collection. "Where claims [for deacession from interested parties] are
made", the advice explains, "it would be expected, but not essential, for the claimant group to
show that human remains and their treatment have a cultural, religious or spiritual
significance to their community". ('Guidance for the Care of Human Remains in Museums'
2005,27).

214
Conclusions

The case studies presented in this chapter foreground both the objective

qualities of the tattoo, and the case for the tattoo artist to be understood as an

artist in a more conventional sense. Though unavoidably macabre, the

presentation of tattoos as objets d'art, as self-sufficient images detached from

the bodies they once adorned, distils many of the arguments made thus far.

Much writing on tattooing and on body-art more generally mires itself in

discussions of narrative and meaning, and in doing so both neglects the

aesthetic features of body art and makes unwarranted assumptions about its

production and reception. Whilst they are still worn on living, expressive
bodies, it becomes difficult to view the tattoo as anything other than a direct

form of communication made by its bearer. But in isolating the tattoo as a

discrete object and presenting it in an explicitly artistic context, it becomes

clearer that art historians have unjustifiably ignored an entire class of

practicing visual artists and overlooked perhaps centuries or more of art

works produced in this particular medium.

Chaim Soutine did not tattoo anyone, of course. What Dahl's fictive account

demonstrates, though, is that tattooists are, at least in theory, capable of

producing works of beauty, interest and affective power. As I explained in the

Introduction, this is a methodological point, intended to illustrate that a class

for art-historical analysis have long been overlooked, and I
of objects ripe
have deliberately avoided for the sake of space and clarity to avoid doing

much of this analysis here. The arguments this chapter make are necessarily

prior to making more traditional forms of visual analysis I feel are

for body art. I hope that from this basic
appropriate methodological position,
however, it will become
possible to take body art seriously as a mode of

215
artistic production. Will the works Gavin Turk and Mark Titchner produced

for Chaim Soutine feature in any eventual monograph of these artists' oeuvres?

Will the skins Dr. Fukushi exhibits be subjected to the same types of

investigation afforded to similar images produced as woodblock prints on

paper? Only time will tell.

216
Chapter Six
Tattooing in Conceptual Art

From this moment on, tattooing is free of the burden of the past
- Spider Webb (Webb 2002)

If tattooing is an art-form, where might we find its avant-garde? Over the

course of the thesis so far, I have concentrated on exploring the analogies

often made between bodies and surfaces; tattoos and paintings; tattooists and

printmakers. Even the works discussed which have played with the specific

of tattooing for their impact, novelty and interest

properties - works such as
Delvoye's Tim or the Chaim Soutine exhibition - have still relied on these

analogies, using the tattoo's supposed inextricability to probe the limits of the

gallery system or to provoke questions regarding the value, permanence,

ownership and exchange of art objects in general. In Chapter Four, I

explained how tattooists are seen by their peers and by the tattoo community

to gain status through their virtuosity and technical skill (Vail 1999); how the

tattoo "Renaissance" of the 1970s has been read by Sanders and others as

being fuelled the increasing number of fine art graduates entering the

profession (Sanders 2008); and how the term "tattoo artist" is applied

honorifically to those producing custom and large-scale tattoos. In this

respect, many of the forays made by tattooists and their chosen medium into

the artistic sphere might be said to be somewhat conservative: these are, after

all, more often than not simply images (re-)produced onto flat planes. Though

as I have discussed at length there are inherent complexities behind the

simple comparison of tattooing and other forms of art-making, the fact

remains that tattoos have acquired the title of "body art" in popular

217
consciousness because to a substantial degree they resemble painting,

drawing and carving.

Nevertheless, several artists have broken this mould by using tattooing in

conceptual works, producing art which uses tattooing in ways which are

neither primarily representational nor decorative, abstracting the tattoo such

that its affective qualities carry the works' primary force. Works which use

tattoos in this way demonstrate that the artistic value of tattooing is not

necessarily constrained by the tattooist's ability to produce exquisitely

executed, visually sumptuous, technically adept tattoos. In the right hands,

the very properties of the medium become part of a conceptual arsenal.

There are several case studies I could have chosen: Designer Marti Guixe,

who imagines functional tattoos, measurement markers or public transport

maps being tattooed onto someone's hand (Guixe 2002, n. p). Douglas Gordon,

who has produced several photographic works which prominently feature

tattoos (Three Inches Black, 1997; Tattoo (for Reflection), 1997). Marina

Vainshtein, a Jewish woman who, at the age of 22, covered herself in tattoos

depicting imagery of the Holocaust. Her tattoos, as Dora Apel states, are "her

own testimonial to the event, a re-enactment of memory at a secondary

remove performed by a surrogate witness in whom trauma has also been

induced" and "physically inscribe herself into a history for which she was

born too late" (Apel 2002,182). Performance artist Mary Coble, whose work

Note to Self (2005) involved the inscription of the names of over 300 victims of

homophobic hate-crimes into her skin with an ink-less tattoo machine (Ross

2006). Or Qin Ga, a Chinese artist who documented his colleagues' progress

as they walked the route of the Red Army's Long March using a tattoo on his

back. Ga's tattoo, he explains, enacts "a relationship between the individual

body and the collective body" (Jie and Tung 2005, n. p). In each of these

218
examples, tattooing is used for a deliberately artistic purpose which relies on

something beyond its figurative qualities, and the tattoos are interesting and

valuable for reasons which transcend their straightforwardly aesthetic appeal.

But in each, representation and figuration continue to dominate the works,

and as such they are unable to adequately demonstrate in detail the points I

wish to develop here.

In the section to follow, I present the work of two artists - one a practicing

tattooist, one not - in whose respective work the tattoo functions artistically

not through its aesthetic features, but as a carrier of conceptual content. Each

piece relies on certain of the perceived features of the tattoo which have

proved so contentious - its permanence, the pain inherent in its application,

its anti-social resonance, its inextricability from the body, its inability to stand

as a discrete object - and deploys tattooing to ends semiotic and diagnostic

analyses of the tattoo would not obviously permit. Their work further

undermines the facility to read body art in (purely) semiotic or diagnostic

terms, and, moreover, underscores the critical and affective potential of

tattooing. Furthermore, by abstracting the properties of tattooing and

removing symbolic, decorative or narrative content, their work illustrates that

a broader set of analytical tools is available for cultural critics in their analyses

of modified bodies more generally.

219
Spider Webbob

During the year 1976 while being interviewed by a writer from

Gallery magazineI was askedwhat the limitations of tattooing as an

art form were. I respondedto the question by answering, "The size of

the human body".

My answer began to disturb me; that one person could be a

limitation. Therefore, I decided to break out of the limitation I

believedI was trappedin. (Webb 1977, Preface.)

"I'm an artist, " Spider says. "Peoplecometo me and say 'Put a rose

on my tit or write Mom on my shoulder,' and I do it becauseI need

to make a living. But that's just commercial work. I want free flesh

to work on. I want bodiesto use as a canvas.(Marco Vassi in Webb

1977, n. p)

Spider Webb (born Joseph P. O'Sullivan), a tattoo artist from New York with a

Master of Fine Arts degree and a keen eye for mischief67, operated a studio in

Mount Vernon, NY, just beyond the jurisdiction of the ordinance that

prohibited tattooing in New York City itself, but close enough to ensure a

66Surprisingly, despite Webb's relative notoriety as both a tattooist and a writer on tattoo
matters, no art theorist or even writer on tattoos has discussed these conceptual works in any
detail. His name crops up from time to time in the indexes of books on tattooing (Atkinson
2003; DeMello 2000; Trachtenberg 1997) and other social histories (Hall 1984; Quon 1992), but
almost always only fleetingly. Though he is universally praised by those who do mention
him, there is no nuanced engagement with his more exciting and interesting projects.
67 Webb's collaborator Marco Vassi reminisces that Webb addressed a group of college
students at some point during the mid-1970s. "I gave a talk to a college crowd and asked how
many wanted free tattoos and about a hundred kids stood up", Vassi reports Webb as saying.
"Then I told them I would tattoo their noses green for free and - would you believe it - not
one volunteered! ". (Marco Vassi in Webb, 1977, np).

220
steady stream of customers. In 1976, thirteen years after tattooing had been

made illegal in the city, he produced what was almost certainly the first ever

performance piece to use tattooing as its medium, mixing equal parts political

satire, activist manifesto and artistic jab at the social and artistic institutions of
1970s New York. In defiance of Section 1706(4) of the New York Health Code,

Webb set up an impromptu tattoo studio on the steps of MoMA and

proceeded to tattoo a female tattoo artist called Shadow, irritating local police

offers (many of whom, he remarked, were tattooed themselves) but delighting

an assembled throng of journalists and reporters (Figure 41 and Figure 42).

Webb staged the stunt knowing he would be arrested, planning to challenge

any eventual prosecution by claiming that tattooing was an artistic practice,

and that banning it was an infringement of his constitutional rights to free

speech as conferred by the First Amendment.

Working literally in the shadow of a monolith of canonical modern art, in

seeking to present tattooing knocking at the heavy gates of the institutional

authority of the Museum of Modern Art and to invoke parallels between his

medium and the avant-garde painters and sculptors MoMA exhibited, Webb

was doing two novel and interesting things. Firstly, he was probably the first

tattooer to take the claims for artistic legitimacy that tattoo artists had been

making since Martin Hildebrandt and direct them into a more focussed,

politicised pursuit of artistic recognition. Secondly, by seeking to overturn a

health ordinance on the basis of its interference with artistic endeavour, he

was presenting tattooing as legitimately artistic by criteria of formal practice

and not just aesthetic appeal". Webb saw the presentation of tattooists as

artists and of tattooing as an art practice as key to his political program to seek

68Even 30 years later, he is perhaps still one of the few who has explicitly argued the case for
tattooing as art on these grounds, rather than by judgement of artisanal proficiency.

221
Figure 41 11w media bust staged in front of the Museum of Modern Art to challenge the legal
prohibition o(iattooing in Nein York City, 1976

(photograph by Harvey Zucker)

222
Figure 42 77uemedia bust staged in front of the Museum of Modern Art to challenge the legal
prohibition offaltooing in New York City, 1976

(photographs by Harvey Zucker)

223
its re-legalisation - much in contrast to the descriptions made by

commentators such as Juliet Fleming cited earlier which understand the mid-
70s as a moment where tattooing becomes artistically legitimised because of

the semiotic and visual function of the tattoo as representative personal object

for its bearer.

As a performative piece, this work obviously differs from most of those I have

discussed over the course of the thesis; it is a fusion of Body Art as Amelia

Jones would understand the term and body art in the more quotidian sense.

In fact, the form of the final tattoo itself is irrelevant: in the MoMA

performance and similar subsequent performance pieces, says Webb, "the act

of tattooing and its circumstances are considered the piece, and the tattoo
itself is relatively unimportant" (Webb 2002,179). Nevertheless, his work is

relevant here because he is approaching the same issue from a different angle,

emphasising the objective status of the tattoo by highlighting its means of

production. In his work, the tattoo becomes simply the product of the art of

tattooing; an object produced by an artist much like any other.

Webb was arrested and, as planned, sought to fight his conviction by alleging

that the ordinance banning tattooing as unconstitutional. Though his

subsequent challenge to overturn the prohibition in the courts was a failure

(and though the Lawyers for Artists spurned his request for representation,

stating that "tattooing is not an art" (Webb 2002,71)), the 'media bust' did

serve to highlight that tattooing as a practice (and not just tattoos as art

objects) might be seen to share a great deal with more conventional modes of

artistic production.

224
Webb appealed the judge's decision, but was unsuccessful. In the opinion of

the Supreme Court of New York, "[w]hether tattooing be an art form, as

suggested by the defendant, or a 'barbaric survival, often associated with a

morbid or abnormal personality, ' as suggested by four Justices of the

Appellate Division [... ], we do not deem it speech or even symbolic speech"69

- that is to say, in the considered opinion of the appeal judges, tattooing was

not an art form, and even if it was, such a categorisation would be insufficient

render health-based prohibitions unconstitutional. It is interesting and

perhaps not a little amusing to note the dichotomy established in this ruling.

Tattooing is either art or it is barbaric. By delineating the criteria for judging

not just artistic merit but the very definition of what is to be considered art as

diametric to barbarism, morbidity and abnormality, Judges Dudley, Hughes

and Tierney may have inadvertently grouped Webb's tattoo art with a great

deal of the collections held at MoMA rather than, as was surely their intent, to

dismiss tattooing out of hand. After all, a huge tranche of the contemporary

art collected by the museum had at some point or other been levelled with

similar accusations, and indeed the museum had never shied away from

collecting and exhibiting pieces which were replete with the 'barbaric', the

morbid and the abnormal. In 1984, for example, just six years after Webb's

appeal was denied, MoMA staged its Primitivism in 201" Century Art

exhibition, setting out to display non-Western artisanal objects and to

"[honor] the modernist artists who, subverting their received traditions,

forged a bond between intelligences otherwise divided" (in Rubin 1984, x).

The exhibition showed a range of work including a number of then

contemporary artists such as Nancy Graves whose pieces were unashamedly

intersecting with notions of barbarism and morbidity. The catalogue features

69The People of the Stateof New York v. JosephP. O'Sullivan, Supreme Court of New York,
Appellate Term, First Department. June 16,1978 (96 Misc. 2d 52; 409 N.Y.S.2d 332; 1978N.Y.
Misc. LEXIS2547).

225
co-director Kirk Varnedoe extolling the virtues and the influence of so-called
'primitive' art on the modernist project, and whilst the work Webb was

illegally producing was not self-consciously in the same ideological mode as

those gathered inside the museum, one can not help but notice the parallels

between the expressed intention of MoMA's curators in their presentations

inside the building and the socio-political message of Webb's tattoo bust

carrying on just beyond its walls. "On the one hand", Varnedoe exclaims,

"the power of art to surpass its cultural confines; on the other the ability of a

culture to see beyond and revolutionize, its established art" (in Rubin 1984, x).

Webb repeated the performance in 1981, this time in front of the Metropolitan

Museum of Art, but to little effect. Despite Webb and his collaborator Annie

Sprinkle basically daring the police to arrest them, unlike at the first iteration

no law enforcement arrived. Even though, as Sprinkle explains "we even

called them from the pay-phone inside the building, pretending to be

outraged citizens witnessing a crime" (Sprinkle 1998,70), they couldn't even

get themselves arrested.

Even though the desire of the authorities to crack down on tattooing in New

York had waned, tattooing in New York City would not be made legal again

until 1997; Webb's actions had failed in their intention to overturn the tattoo

ban. Nevertheless, the MoMA action was to be the beginning of Webb's use of

his tattoo machine in an ever more esoteric manner. From 1976 onwards,

Webb's tattoo practice became acutely (self-)aware of the location of tattooing

within the wider pantheon of art. At the same time as Ruth Marten was

introducing Art Nouveau influences into her tattooing further up the East

coast in Boston, Webb was signing models with Picasso's signature (Figure
43) and producing homages to Lichtenstein, Pollock, Botticelli and Whistler

(Webb 2002). Not content, though, to simply pay lip-service to the artistic

226
canon, Webb was pushing his own frontiers in his desire to bring the spirit of

avant-gardism into tattooing.

e4

'a ti..,., ºaw.

Figure 43 "A succc ssýicl (orb*crid".

(photograph by Spider Webb Studios)

The next step towards this goal was a simple undermining of tattoo

convention. Webb often sought attempt to challenge typical placements,

orientations or styles, though not all his clients were compliant to his even the

most conservative of his forays beyond the standard visual grammar of

tattooing. Describing one customer in particular, Webb recalls that she

"wanted the line to go perpendicular to that, from pubic hair to waist. I

suggested that we try a different angle, and when I sketched my idea she

actually became angry with me, calling my proposal 'weird, ' and using some

of the same terms that critics hurled at the Impressionists after that first

227
fateful exhibition in Paris" (Webb 2002,182). And yet whilst these tentative

steps represented a move away from the stylistic convention that had (and

still does) contain the practice of tattooing, they were still constrained within

somewhat of a representational bubble, with merit assigned on the basis of

craftsmanship rather than ambition. Despite the conceptual complexities

involved in framing the tattoo as symbolic or signifying discussed previously,

the implicit intention (even if not the result) of getting a tattoo often functions

within these presuppositions -- the desire to get a tattoo usually takes place in
the context of producing a meaningful, specific piece. His next opus, then,

sought to disconnect the act of tattooing from the desire for significance,

attempting to create a meaningless tattoo (or, at least, an arbitrary tattoo

disconnected as much as possible from any signifying intent the bearer might

have).

Webb sought to produce pieces as (or more) conceptually interesting as they

were aesthetically pleasing. By the 1970s other artistic disciplines had long

since abandoned aesthetic appeal or proficiency as the sole criteria of artistic

merit, and he felt that tattooing should seek to progress in the same direction.

And so, as the whim took him, he would call the speaking clock. He then

asked whoever happened to be with him at the time - friend, acquaintance or

client - whether they would consent to having that set of figures tattooed on

them, on a body part of their choosing. 10:53, read one. 7:18, another (Figure

44). After he had done this ten times, he felt satisfied, having created what he

saw as a discrete piece of performance art. Rather immodestly calling this

project 'seminal' (though I agree that it probably was), Webb explains that

these "people carry the time markers wherever they go, carry the marking of

an arbitrary point in time. Its significance is to illustrate the meaninglessness

of time when it is conceived of numbers in a void, which is our usual cultural

understanding of it" (Webb 2002,183).

228
Figure 44 1'Iºutu, ''ra/ths Ii"nººº hie tattoo tiºººr-Iririr (ry Spider Webb, 1976

(photograph by Spider Webb Studios)

Though it is indubitable and unavoidable that the bearers of these tattoos and

those who look upon them will ascribe meaning and significance to the

numbers indelibly etched into their flesh, this ascription of meaning is

markedly distinct from the common process of choosing a tattoo and its

subsequent reading or interpretation. Any intentionality and the authorial

stake must rest I.alnmostj entirely with Webb as the artist of the intercorporeal

project as a whole rather than with the subject upon whose skin the tattoo was

produced. A simple and somewhat simplistic point perhaps - it is possible to

have a tattoo done on one's body which one has no prior desire for, nor

subjective stake in but one which is rather at odds with criminological and
-

229
identity-lead models of the tattooed body and one which Webb was the first

to self-consciously use to a directed, formally artistic end.

X-100

There are 1000 X's walking around the planet

All are mine

All mark a spot

All will die (Webb 1977, Preface)

As Webb himself realised, though, the conceptual insight of the time-code

piece was not simply limited to its arbitrariness, or its comment on the

relationship between bodies and the time they move through. Beyond the

simple fissure from direct intentionality the piece represented, Webb noticed

that "the ten people were connected as parts of a whole". Here was a tattoo

that spanned more than one body; "And seeing that, I had the insight which

pointed up the single greatest limitation facing the tattoo artist: the very body

of the person being tattooed" (Webb 2002,183). Whilst he had tattooed

families or friends with matching or complementary tattoos70, and

understood that the tattooing has historically been used in a number of tribal

contexts precisely becauseit enfleshed connections between individuals,

the concept of consciously extending a tattoo to cover a

number of bodies as a formal aesthetic statement had never

been articulated before. It was a qualitative leap akin to
Brancusi's and Calder's in sculpture, where the piece first
was

70Over the past few years (to 2008), British tattooist Thomas Hooper (based at a studio called
New York Adorned in New York) has tattooed identical twins Caleb and Jordan Kilby with
an identical set of large-scale tattoos. The effect is striking.

230
 removed from its pedestal and then made to move. (Webb

2002,185)

BLOOD PRINT

10EI

from

)
X Number Jq

(human blood
- type A- on blotter paper)

Figure 45 Spider Webb, Blood Print fr om X Number 204,1977

Human blood (type A) on blotter paper. Collection of M. Lodder.

The work that arose from this brainwave was called X-1000, and must be

considered Webb's magnum opus. For this piece, Webb took the basic

concept of the tattoo time piece" - the submission of those bodies around him

to the status of carrier medium for a small, arbitrary mark - and pushed it to

its limits, creating a permanent, material art work. The tattoos of the moments

71"The tattoo-time piece" is the informal title Webb himself gives the piece in Pushing Ink.

231
in time might be said to be more akin to the documentary and other

ephemera produced in the course of performance works (photographs, say),

but for X-1000 the defined product was to be the tattoo itself (though a blotted

blood-print was taken of each X, see e.g. Figure 45). From the outset, X-1000

was designed to become "this the largest tattoo ever done at any point in
history" (Webb 1977, Preface), as it could potentially span thousands of miles

at any one time. Nine-hundred and ninety-nine of his friends, colleagues and

clients would be tattooed with a simple, small black X, with the thousandth
body being tattooed with a large X made up of one thousand smaller ones. A

single tattoo spanning one thousand bodies separated by time and space,

impossible to describe in terms of unilateral symbolism, a single tattoo united

by the artistic vision of the tattooist.

The completion of the project, the thousandth X, was performed in January

197772.The recipient, a friend of Webb's called Don Vido, played his role as

submissive canvas well, sitting silently and obediently in a smoke-filled loft

belonging to infamous photographer and photo-journalist Charles Gatewood,

whilst Webb meticulously applied the two thousand tiny lines that would

form the grand, final X. "He was a nice piece of skin. Period. " (Charles

Gatewood in Webb 1977) The tattoo took three hours to complete, during

which time the six people present - Webb, his assistant Shadow, Gatewood,

writer Marco Vassi, his friend Lynn and Don Vido himself shared in the
-

simultaneous absurdity and profundity with copious amounts of wine, beer73,

dope and sexual tension (Don, it is reported, was sexually aroused during the

72Tattooing, as already mentioned, was still illegal in New York at this time. Gatewood
admits in the book produced for the project that the contrived illegality of the event (they
could, after all, have tattooed Vido at Webb's studio), confounded by the even more illegal
pot the participants and onlookers smoked, was "for shock value and a titillating press
release". (Gatewood in Webb (1977, np)).
73Perhaps it is mere coincidence that in Dahl's story, Soutine and his canvas, Drioli, were
similarly drunk.

232
tattoo procedure); meditating on life, art and death and the contributions this

sordid little ritual had to each of these most vast of subjects.

Figure 46 Spider Webb, X-1000,1977

(photograph by Charles Gatewood)

The piece, like the time codes, is not technically sophisticated. From the

documentary photographs, the final X looks somewhat shoddily applied, as

might he expected given the Bacchanalian circumstances in which it was

applied. It is not neat, or even symmetrical. The finished piece would not

impress as a visually impressive tattoo in its own right. It would not win

233
awards at tattoo conventions or be selected to hang from the walls of Dr
Fukushi's museum. But it is important. I see that night in 1977 as the precise

moment at which tattooing in the West was able to take the final leap from a

craft (albeit a subversive, politically-problematic and visually spectacular

one) to an art in terms the art establishment could understand, if not entirely

accept. As I have already argued, of course, I hold that tattooing inherently

shares sufficient formal similarities with more common forms of artistic

production to validate claims for artistic legitimacy, but what this projects

underlines most clearly is that it can also, in the right hands, be used in the

pursuit of lofty conceptual goals.

Tattoos, so the aphorism goes, last as long as you do and a few months more.

X-1000 is a work with a very finite life span; it will decay and almost surely

already has decayed74. It is a meditation, in some respects, on the notion of

permanence; a comment on the fact that tattoos, as much as they are

considered permanent marks, are only as permanent as the volatile organic

material that carries them. It also ridicules the idea of individual signification

and renders visible the psychological observations of those like Paul Schilder,

who understood that a body is a never a body alone, and that there is "from

the beginning connecting links between all body-images". Our bodies are

connected to, influenced by, informing and influencing all other bodies we

encounter. "This interplay", says Schilder, "may be an interplay of parts or of

wholes" (Schilder 1950,235), and Webb's conscious rendering of a multitude

of bodies as a single unencumbered surface achieves is a rather dramatic

illustration of this fact. It also will never, I suspect, ever be visible all at once,

playing with notions of space as well as time.

74 One is immediately reminded of conceptual similarities with other works that face
inevitable delay during their existence - Damien Hirst's decaying pig's head installation, A
Thousand Years (1990) (see Bartram (2005)), for example, or the Land Art movement of the
1960s.(Bartram 2005)

234
On this piece,Webb himself commented that the

canvas was not a single body, but a thousand bodies spread

out in time and space. Eventually, some would be dead while

others were still alive, and, finally, there would come a day

when then entire piece would be dead, distributed into the

earth and seas and air. (Webb 2002,185-6)

Those carrying the Xs around with them are simultaneously part of a living,

dying art-work, collectors and owners of the same (Webb charged each

participant 1 per X) and have had some tiny stake in the work's production,

by firstly consenting to provide their skins and secondly in choosing the

location of their X, affecting the aesthetic result of the tattoo conceived as a

whole. It would be almost impossible to account for these primitive, basic

marks in the types of ways the previously mentioned theorists imagine.

Selling Skin - Santiago Sierra

One vertical line. A foot long. Crude as a stroke of greasepaint.

Tattooed on the back of a Mexico City man who had been

approached at random and paid $50 to serve as a canvas.

Captured in a photo documenting the 1998 event, the mark,

drawn by a hired tattooist, runs a foot long down the man's

fleshy back. It might not seem like enough to launch an

international art career, but for 37-year-old Santiago Sierra,

that line represented a sort of Rubicon. - Marc Spiegler (2003)

235
In the previous chapter, I talked briefly about tattoos and transactions, and

the circumstances in which tattoos might as objects be exchanged for money.

Whilst I am firmly of the opinion that there is no inherent or fundamental

ethical issue at play with the exchange of cash for skin, as it were, it would be

churlish and naive to assert that such issues never arise. As in the case of the

acquisition of the toi moko, for example, the mechanics of each trade and the

conditions of the exchange are what must be taken issue with, rather than

expressing simple, blunt and emotional disgust at the exchange of skin for

cash in and of itself. Recent work by Spanish artist Santiago Sierra helps

engage with some of these problems.

Figure 47 Santiago Sierra, Person I'll ill lu l/itot, 0cm I im' I aIIooe'li ort Illc i, 1998

Mexico City, Mexico.

236
In May 1998, Sierra roamed the streets of Mexico City in search of an

participant to play a part in a piece he had devised: Person Paid to Have 30cnn

Lint, Tat food oii Tliciu (Figure 47(Sierra et al. 2004,134)). On finding someone

who did not have any tattoos and lacked any pre-existent desire to get one, he

would offer them $50 if they consented to being permanently, tattooed with a

line running the length of their back. Sierra would go on repeat this artistic

experiment on numerous further occasions, including in December 1999 with

a work entitled 250ciii Line Tattooed oii Six Paid People (Figure 48), in which six

unemployed young men from Old Havana were hired for 30 dollars if they

agreed to be tattooed (Sierra et al. 2004,116), and, most controversially a year

later in December 2000 for a piece called 160c»i Line Tattooed oii Four People

(Figure 49).

ý ýý `ý f
1

Figure 48 Santiago Sierra, ?:illrin l III(, I IIto( I'll urr Six IIII it I People, INNN.

Havana, Cuba.

237
Figure 49 Santiago Sierra, 160cin Line Tattooed on Four People, 2000.

Salamanca, Spain.

For 10(kni Lilie, a monograph on Sierra explains,

Four prostitutes addicted to heroin were hired for the price of

a shot of heroin to give their consent to being tattooed.

Normally they charge 2000 or 3000 pesetas, between 15 and 17

dollars, for fellatio, while the price of a shot of heroin is

around 12,000 pesetas, about 67 dollars. (Sierra et al. 2004,94)

In a recent article on Seirra, Heidi Kellett groups her discussions of his tattoo-

based works unier the heading "Physical Disfigurement" (Kellett 2007,42),

and as Marc Spiegler summarises, "detractors rail that this work permanently

disfigured its subjects" (Spiegler 2003). But to think of these works onl\' in

terms of beauty, to focus on their aesthetic qualities, or to read them simply as

the act of a barbaric and reckless artist inflicting hideous disfigurements on

238
the poor and desperate is to miss much of what is interesting about what

Sierra is doing. As I have discussed at some length, the tattoo stands,

culturally, for a number of things, principal of which is an expression of

personal subjective truth. By short-circuiting this sense of personal expression

in the most base of ways - by inscribing a crude line, nothing more - Sierra's

work uses the tattoo to make the economic subjugation of personal will and
the objectification of the body of the poor and needy starkly visible.

These tattoos are easily hidden under everyday clothing. They are not in

"disfiguring" by any sense of the word which does not see the tattooing as

fundamentally disfiguring. As Sierra himself explains "The tattoo is not the

problem. The problem is the existence of social conditions that allow me to

make this work. You could make this tattooed line a kilometer long, using

thousands and thousands of willing people". (Spiegler 2003). Focussing on

the visual impact of the tattooed line and its relation to beauty norms is to

miss all that is interesting and powerful about what role the tattoo plays in

Sierra's work in the first place. At the core of these works' affective and

critical potential is that though they feature tattoos (or, more precisely, acts of

tattooing), the performances are not about tattooing per se. Rather, Sierra is

seeking to investigate (as he would on numerous occasions in subsequent

pieces) the economic, financial and social conditions and inequalities which

render such exchanges possible, a common theme in Sierra's work75 It is not

simply that those receiving the tattoos Sierra suggests are simply victims of

power, but that they willingly engage in hard and humiliating bodily labour

in exchange for derisorily small sums of money (or drugs). The question is

75Other works by Sierra, for example, include 3 Cubesof 100cm One Each Side Moved 700cm
(2002), in which he paid Albanian refugees, to move cement cubes from one side of the
performance space to the other; and Object Measuring 600 x 57 x 52cm Constructed to be Held
Horizontally to a Wall (2001), where two political exiles were paid 20 CHF per hour to support
the weight of a heavy wooden beam on their shoulders for hours at a time.

239
one of the economic value of labour (or flesh) under the conditions capitalism
has created in developing economies such as Mexico. What is at play in 30cm

and the other tattoo-based works is not that the tattoo is disfiguring,

embarrassing or morally compromising, but simply that someone is willing

to abrogate a part of their personal autonomy in return for what is, in the end,

a rather derisory sum of money. In other words, it is not about the substance

of the mark, but about the delegation of one's personal will in the service of

economic necessity.

These works succeed in making their polemical political point because

tattooing is an intersubjective medium (as discussed in Chapter Four). The

level of need which has numbed the agency of those who volunteer for

Sierra's project is expressed through those simple marks, because we know

that tattooing requires collaboration and consent.

"To become trade goods... "

The work is disturbing. It skirts with fundamental ethical principles of respect

and deliberately seeks to undermine the dignity of some of the most

vulnerable people on the planet. And so what is the difference between 30cm

Line and, say, Dr. Fukushi's pre-payment to facilitate the tattooing of skins he

would acquire after the subject dies? Why does Fukushi's gesture seem like

the act of a kindly patron, whereas Sierra's seem to thrive on being

disinterested and exploitative?

Were Sierra to have produced decorative tattoos, or offered his canvases a

stake in the design, then he would have risked diluting the blunt message of
his work. Eckhard Schneider has argued that Sierra "persuades people, in a

provocative manner, to be treated as consumer goods", and "what is

240
significant [in the work] is not so much the act of tattooing but the fact that a
human being is willing to become trade goods for the sake of an art product".

(Schneider in Sierra et al. 2004,27). I disagree with the contention that there is

something in the participant's actions that indicates a willingness to become

goods for art; they are willing to become goods for money, and for those

forming its inscriptive surface, the artistic component of this project is, I

would wager, entirely unimportant. It is the intersection of economic forces

into the will of the subject, and the ease at which agency may be overridden

by capital gain, which is what Sierra is trying to demonstrate.

The broader relevance of Sierra's work for the study of body art lies in the

insistence it makes for the ethical importance of agency and self-

determination. The unwanted but desperately acquired tattoos that result

from Sierra's performances demonstrate many of the same issues of

authorship at play in the works I discussed in Chapter Four, advising caution

to those who would give up too much of their authorial stake and providing a

stark example of how body art is not always revelatory or emancipatory. His

work illustrates that those who would visit Dr. Beriet should not do so simply

on the wishes of their partners, for example, and warns against turning one's
body entirely over to the service of another.

Tattoos as Advertising - GoldenPalace. com

Having a tattoo is normally a personalchoice.But when you do it

under 'remunerated' conditions, this gesture becomes

something that

seemsawful, degrading - Mark Spiegler (Spiegler2003)

241
In February 2005,36 year-old Canadian professional body-piercer Brent

Moffatt76 posted an auction to eBay.com headed "Forehead Tattoo NOT-

TEMPORARY! Famous Body Piercer. Guinness world record holder -1 year

duration" [sic]".

Moffatt offered the highest bidder, subject to a hidden reserve, "a permanent

billboard for a minimum of one year", agreeing to tattoo his forehead with

virtually anything the winner desired. By the auction's close it had attracted
25 bids; the winner, Golden Palace Casino paid $10,100.00 for the right to

emblazon their website URL in heavy block-black letters above his eyes.
Although by the time Moffatt had posted his auction there had been

something of a craze developing on Ebay and in advertising more generally

for permanently tattooed advertisements (Dickerson 2005), Moffatt was the

first to sell his face in this way8. Moffatt was already somewhat notorious in

body-modification circles even before this particular stunt for his egotistical

self-mythologising (he regularly chased accredited world records for body

modification stunts such as most piercings in a single sitting, for example

('His friends just call him 'Pokey" 2003; "Human pincushion' makes record

attempt for charity' 2005)), and this auction prompted Shannon Larratt, writer

and, at the time, owner of the largest body modification site on the Internet,

to openly plead with him to reconsider "making a deal with the devil"

(Larratt 2005). GoldenPalace. com, the devil in question, is an internet casino

which has built its reputation not on the services it offers its players, but

76Moffatt is (or, at least, was) something of a minor celebrity in body-modification circles. He

has at various times held the world-record for the most body-piercing jewellery inserted in a
single sitting.
27 Ebay. com auction 5952593222 ('GoldenPalace. com To Be First Permanent Forehead Ad
Tattoo '2005)
7eAmerican student Andrew Fischer auctioned off his forehead for a temporary one month
before Moffatt's auction went live ('Student Ad to Use his Head' 2005). The winning bidder, a
pharmaceutical company called SnoreStop, paid Fischer $37,375 to wear their slogan for a
month. (Machelf 2006)

242
 instead on its willingness to buy, and then exploit for publicity purposes, the

weirdest and most ridiculous items to find themselves for sale online. 79

Figure 50 Publicity mock-up of Brent Moffatt's advertising tattoo, prior to the procedure
taking place.
(image from GoldenPalace Casino)

On June 30,2005, perhaps inspired by Moffatt's case (which had received

more than a little coverage in tabloid newspapers, magazines and news

shows in Canada, the USA and beyond), Karolyne Smith from Bountiful,

Utah, also secured $10,000 from Golden Palace for the same tattoo,

GOLDENPALACE. COM in arching block-capitals in the centre of her

forehead80. Unlike Moffatt, who had some notoriety, who was already heavily

79At time of writing, its holdings include a VW that used to belong to Pope Benedict and a
toasted cheese sandwich featuring the a Turin-Shroud-esque likeness of Jesus Christ and,
disturbingly, Star Trek actor William Shatner's kidney stone.
80 Smith was later given an extra $5,000 by GoldenPalace, presumably intended as a
philanthropic gesture.

243
tattooed and who worked in the body-modification industry where unusual

appearances are more readily tolerated than they might be elsewhere, Smith

was a conventionally pretty 30-year old single mother with no other tattoos.
In response to the most immediate question posed to her by reporters -

simply, "Why? " - she explained that her young son's education had recently

suffered following the death of his aunt a mere two months previously, and

that she wanted to use the money to pay for him to attend a private school.

"For all the sacrifices everyone makes, this is a small one", her local

newspaper quoted her as saying. "It's a small sacrifice to build a better future

for my son". (Falk 2005) She was the first woman in the world to have her

forehead tattooed with an advertisement (Falk 2005; Haines 2005), and

whereas coverage of Moffatt's auction had largely been bemused and

gawping, Smith's auction drew more directly critical press. Internet

technology news site The Register called Smith's sale "the literally

unacceptable face of capitalism" (Haines 2005), branding her "daft", branding

Golden Palace "vultures" and painting her as a simple-minded victim of a

cruel, tactless and tasteless corporation. The Guardian would later call the

auction "ludicrous" (Whitehead 2007).

244
e.
,

i`
\, `
ý

. ý`ý / /ý

-V

Figure 51 Karolyne Smith's advertising tattoo, 2005

(photograph by Keith Johnson, Desert Morning News)

The common reaction to these tattoos is overwhelmingly negative. These two

sales are obviously shocking - that's why GoldenPalace. com paid for them,

after all - and whilst GoldenPalace's marketing director calls them "fun",

"creative", "innovative" and "entertaining" (GoldenPalace. com 2005), these

two auctions are more easily criticised than admired, whether you ascribe

blame to the company for shelling out thousands of dollars to buy people's

bodies or to the two individuals who might justifiably be called rash, foolish

or, in some readings, victims for feeling the need to auction off their faces in

the first place.

The types of criticisms these actions provoke can be broadly divided into

three categories. The first, which I more or less dismiss out of hand, are

245
criticisms on the grounds of beauty or disfigurement. By tattooing their

foreheads, Moffatt and perhaps Smith especially, have rendered themselves

ugly or unsightly. Whilst this may indeed be true in reference to normative

contemporary beauty, to sympathise with this position is to align oneself with

a particularly problematic notion of socially-acceptable beauty and to fall into

a trap whereby a critique of the commercial facial tattoos becomes an

argument in favour of homogenous and prescriptive personal aesthetics - not

an argument I would support, and one which runs counter to the arguments

which have made up this thesis.

The second form of criticism is that these decisions will result only in regret;

that Moffatt and Smith have made impulsive decisions which, while

moderately lucrative in the short term, would adversely affect their lives over

the long term. Smith, for example, has certainly impeded her employability,

and may well have tattooed her way out of more than $10,000 of future

earnings in return for a smaller sums81.Others may suggest that Moffatt and
Smith might in time regret their choices, and must expect to face a lifetime of

ridicule and mockery. Objections on these grounds stand firmer, in my

opinion, but they fail for similar reasons as that already mentioned - to be

comfortable to criticise Moffatt and Smith for the economic or interpersonal

consequences of their actions is to tacitly support, in some respects, the same

monolithic homogeneity of appearance which would give rise to any negative

reactions to their socially-unacceptable faces. Again, it is trivially true that

Moffatt and Smith will suffer and did suffer at least mockery and derision,

but this mockery is an artefact of social norms; reason, perhaps, to criticise the

norms themselves, but not a reason to denigrate those who dare violate them.

81In many respects, Moffatt and Smith's temporal myopia to their potential future losses in
the light of their present gains is not unusual. Experimental psychologists have demonstrated
that people will tend to irrationally over-value immediate rewards and under-estimate future
losses, particularly when large sums of money are involved. (Loewenstein and Thaler 1989)

246
The third is a critique on axiomatic moral grounds, which argue that to sell

the body, to render the body a commercial product, is to commit is a greatly

immoral action. In this formulation, it is possible to view GoldenPalace. com

as unethically preying on the inalienable flesh of vulnerable individuals for

naked profit, or to accuse Moffatt or Smith of prostituting themselves; selling

something of their very selves to the highest bidder. The body, it might be

claimed, is something precious, special, beyond commercialisation, and it is

distasteful and even profoundly wrong to put it to the service of an online

casino. To take this position is to put the body onto a pedestal, to dignify it

with an aura of inviolable magnificence and to confer upon it a status that

might be called "sacred". Such arguments are unsustainable as they overlook

the fact that all bodies in late capitalist societies are employed in one way or

another in the service of economic profit; that the idea that the body is a

sacred object requires some philosophically difficult premises and an

elevation of moral normativity over personal agency; and that to argue that

the exchange of the body for cash is a priori ethically problematic is not

necessarily a position to which even those making this type of critique would

necessarily subscribe.

Whilst I cannot find myself agreeing with any of the most obvious arguments

against selling one's face on Ebay, I still find it problematic. Reconciling this

instinctive reaction with my broader ethical sense that individual agency

should stand at the forefront of any analysis of the use and abuse of one's

own body, no matter how outrageous or controversial, is complicated, and

has caused me considerable consternation. Similar criticisms, after all -

criticisms of impulsiveness, or cultural coercion or of bald-faced idiocy - are

often levelled at tattooing more generally, not to mention at other non-

normative bodily practices. I have always been willing to defend any sanely-

247
performed somatic activity on the grounds that in issues of one's own body,

personal liberty should more-or-less always trump arbitrary and homogenous

cultural and moral norms. Why do I, someone who advocates pluralistic

personal aesthetics and the primacy of individual agency in decisions

regarding one's body, still find these auctions two steps too far?

There is much Sierra's work can teach us about our instinctive reactions to

these GoldenPalace tattoos. Sierra's tattoo works are affective and interesting

because they're shocking in the same way the forehead tattoos are - the things

other people will do for money can prove astonishing. But by abstracting the

process into a purposive political art action, Sierra's work is able to illustrate

precisely why we should be concerned about the GoldenPalace tattoos: not

for reasons of disfigurement or the reactions they may provoke, but instead

because of the conditions of economic exchange which render them necessary

in the first place - one doubts especially that Karolyn Smith would have

tattooed her forehead otherwise. From this perspective, it becomes clear that a

coherent and logical response to the GoldenPalace tattoos can be founded in

opposition to and concern about the systematic conditions which produced

them, without recourse to ideologically self-defeating arguments about

aesthetics or normativity or even the moral status of the body. What is at

stake here is the short-circuiting of will and intention by the capricious flows

of late capitalism.

We can compare these auctions with the actions of the clients at New Skool

discussed in Chapter Four or the volunteers who formed the surfaces for the

Chaim Soutine exhibition. In those instances, the individuals delegated almost

all the control over the final tattoo to the tattoo artists involved, but they had

pre-approval of the subject matter and a reasonable expectation of the merit of

the tattoos to be produced. The GoldenPalace cases, like those whom Sierra

248
worked on, gave up their authorial stakes one step prior to the participants in
Suits Made to Fit. In agreeing to have anything at all tattooed in exchange for

payment, they ceded virtually all control over the final aesthetic of their own
bodies and turned themselves into billboards rather than canvases.

Conclusions

A case for the artistic status of body art must not limit itself simply to

suggesting that tattooists are like painters and plastic surgeons are like

sculptors. Rather, if such a case is to be credible, it must present the potential

of body art to work as a fully-featured mode of artistic production, useful for

artistic ends beyond the creation of bodies which are beautiful or decorative

or visually-sumptuous or even aesthetically innovative.

Webb and Sierra demonstrate that the art of body art need not be restricted to

simple analogies with easel painting, and that the use of body art technologies

need not be restricted to artistic ends which rely only on the reproduction of

the types of works that are possible on more conventional surfaces. Their

performances demonstrate that the practice of tattooing is at once rich with

unexplored possibilities and fraught with hidden dangers, able to be put to

novel and subversive ends but also ripe for exploitation and abuse. They also

reveal the utility of thinking of body art in artistic terms: the abstractions
Sierra and Webb's work make of some of tattooing's fundamental

characteristics prove useful in trying to understand modified bodies in the

world.

Webb concludes his description of his X-1000project with statement that is at

once self-congratulatory and humbly hopeful. "Tattooing, rising from the

249
ashes like the legendary phoenix, is now ready to take its place as both a fully

recognized fine art and as the most universal folk art of the global village"
(Webb 2002,186). He understood that tattooing as a medium affords an artist

so many possibilities unavailable to the painter or sculptor, and though it may

not yet have truly taken that place, it certainly should.

250
Conclusion
Body Modification as Artistic Practice
I hope that tattooing in the next century matures to becomea real art form. It's still
being born. We got into it at a time where it changedmore radically than it hadfor
thousandsof years, as long as peoplehave beenjabbing eachother I... ] I'd like to see
peoplejust settle in and dedicate their time to their own styles and come up with a
bunch of new stuff
- Michael Malone (Hardy 1991)

Spider Webb tells the tale of a customer of his which, even if apocryphal,

summarises much of the force of my arguments. Lord Balkin, Webb tells us,

was walking through New York's Central Park for a summer's afternoon

stroll. Balkin cut a large, imposing figure, tall, burly, sporting an enormous
bushy beard and, crucially, covered in tattoos. Even his face was tattooed,

with orange flames licking his hairline and a large inverted pentagram inked

directly onto his forehead, its bottom-most point grazing the top of his nose.

A stranger approached him and, Webb says, "broke out into a huge smile,

rushed over, went down on both knees and kissed Balkin's hand". The

stranger was Salvador Dali, the kiss "his mute and eloquent gesture of

appreciation for the tattoo art which Balkin embodied" (Webb 2002,186).

Though technologies which permanently or semi-permanently alter the

appearance of the human body have been called "body arts" for almost a

century, and though those who practice and undergo these procedures have
long thought of themselves as participants in artistic production, the

guardians of artistic canonicity have been more-or-less indifferent to their

claims to artistic status. "Body art" is a label to which no-one had ever really

251
given much thought, and, as such, it is a label which never had much more

meaning that a simple analogy.

Figure 52 Lord Balkin, c. 1979

(photograph by Spider Webb Studios)

252
And yet with Balkin, here is a body which has been forged towards a

purposive, artistic end, the product of many hours of skilled labour and
invention. Here is body of such affective power that its aesthetic generates

awe and delight and confusion, even when on an afternoon stroll. Here is a
body received as a work of art even though it is beyond any specific artistic

context. The modified body stands as an art object in the world, visually

astonishing and endlessly fascinating, powerful enough to stop passers by in

their tracks and leave them still with wonder. The images tattooed on Balkin's

skin are not of particular novelty in and of themselves; were they to be

reproduced on canvas and hung in a gallery they would not attract much
interest, let alone provoke spontaneous genuflection. In applying them to the

skin, though, they become surprising, exciting, disruptive.

I have cited numerous body art practitioners who have wholeheartedly

expressed a shared wish to be taken seriously by the fine art establishment,

but too often their expressions were made only assertively. For over thirty

years, tattooists in particular have felt as if they were standing just on the

cusp of a fully-fledged induction into the world of serious artistic study and

appreciation, but they had only rarely ever made their case any more firmly

than simply comparing themselves to painters. Tattooist after tattooist has

expressed their feeling that this bright future was imminent, that finally the

rest of the world was coming to realise what they and their colleagues and

customers had known for decades: body art can be creative, innovative,

exciting and lavish, performed with technical virtuosity and sharply

intelligent insight. But none had ever taken the time to truly present their art

works, nor explain with any clarity how the human body might be

accommodated into the apparatus of the art world. None had really clarified

their own relationship with the works they produced on others. None

253
elucidated by what means such accommodation might actually take place,

given what appear at first glance to be insurmountable obstacles to

institutionalising body art objects.

This thesis is therefore a first step in establishing that the various body arts

disciplines are worth of serious art historical study. Claiming that body art is

artistic promotes several immediate questions which must be acknowledged

if not necessarily resolved before a more detailed set of analyses can be

undertaken. Does it make sense to think of the body in the world in artistic
terms? If the body can be understood as art, who is the artist? Can body art be

said to produce art objects? And, perhaps more importantly, why should we

think about tattooing and similar practices as artistic? Of what utility is such

an approach? What critical value does an art-historical methodology add to

thinking about body modification practices? And what can the insights such a

methodology reveal, or add to our understandings of bodies more generally?

Only once these issues have been addressed can any further, more

straightforward art-historical study proceed.

And proceed it should. The various forms of body art are each interesting in

their own right, and present their own hidden canons of important works and

their own pantheons of influential artists as yet without wider acclaim. I have

focussed on tattooing in my illustrative case-studies because it is the body art

with which I am most intimately acquainted, and because I can certainly

imagine traditional art-historical scholarship finding interest in some of the

tattoo artists who are most influential subculturally (the names Don Ed

Hardy, Horyoshi III, Paul Booth, Fillip Leu sit on the tip of many tattoo

aficionado's tongue). But I am sure there are surgeons whose rhinoplasties

evoke hushed reverence amongst those who are acquainted with such

254
procedures, and I certainly intend for the arguments I have made here to be
extensible to much if not all quotidian body art practice.

It is important to note that the arguments this thesis makes, whilst generally

positive, should not be taken as simplistically utopian. Body art as a

categorical label need not be honorific or deferential, and body art need not be

good art. Body art has always suffered from the same types of whims,
fashions and blandness of taste that afflicts all other forms of artistic

production, and the novel and the exciting have always been marginalised by
the conventional and the staid. Moreover, as Sierra and the GoldenPalace

tattoos demonstrate, body art can be used in ways which are disturbingly

unethical. The case I have made for the artistic status of body art allows and

indeed encourages assessing certain processes and certain outcomes

negatively. Unlike conceptions of tattoos which see them as navigational

anchors for a turbulent selfhood, for example, an art-theoretical approach

does not presuppose any particular act is fundamentally positive or
laudatory. Such an approach may not be entirely meritocratic, in that works

judged to be bad may prove as interesting and therefore may become as or

more visible than more praiseworthy examples, but nevertheless I am

confident that even bringing the more egregious examples of ethically,

aesthetically or technically bad tattoos under art-theoretical scrutiny would be

fascinating.

As I suggested in the Introduction, my work here has been principally to lay

out the inadequacies in many of the more conventional ways of thinking

about the modified body, and to make the initial arguments for treating the

modified body as an art object. Having dealt with these most basic questions,
it becomes easier to see in what art theorists might find of interest in this

255
hitherto under-evaluated set of art forms. A fully-developed argument for
body art prefigures three particular approaches that might follow from it,

providing the methodological groundwork for further study on three

different fronts. The first is categorical, the second analytic, the third

pragmatic. The categorical approach can expand upon the basic case for body

art as art and develop critical, theoretical and even biographical studies of key
individuals, works, movements, styles or moments in a specific body art

medium. With body art established as a recognised art form, monographs

and catalogues raisonnes should follow, presenting key pieces, tracing

stylistic developments and using body art objects to inform our collective

understanding of our histories in the same way other artistic genres already
do. The actual artistic content of body art and the insights its artistic qualities

may provide has been all but buried under discussions of its psychological or

anthropological status.

The second branch of further study enabled by this work is an analytic re-

evaluation of body arts. As I have discussed, much of the philosophical and

theoretical work done on contemporary Western body modification relies on

assumptions which are incompatible with the notion of body art as artistic,

particularly notions of singular authorship and straightforward narrative

expression. And yet understanding body art as art frees critical space for

analysing incidences of body modification which deny or completely invert

characteristics which many theorists claim are fundamental. Tattoos, as I have

demonstrated, are not necessarily inextricable from their wearers; need not be

anchors of individual subjectivity; are not necessarily narrative; are not

entirely resistant to being bought, sold and displayed as discrete art objects.
When the modified body is considered as an object and not simply the

documentation of a set of prior subjective circumstances, these errors

becomes starkly apparent.

256
Reassessing these technologies (or specific instances of their use) as artistic

may aid in establishing a more coherent, more fully-developed and

ultimately more useful set of tools with which they can be understood. As in

the case of the GoldenPalace forehead tattoos, abstracting problematic

examples of body modification and analysing them as art objects can often

provide a valuable perspective on an otherwise intractable issue. One

immediate example is in the case of plastic surgery. It is problematic, for

example, to criticise plastic surgery as inherently wrong as such criticism

relies on either reducing surgery patients to victims and dupes, incapable of

expressing their own agency, or on an ethical perspective which arbitrarily

the value of the natural. Considering plastic surgery as an art form,
prioritises
however, avoids automatically dismissing the practice as inherently ethically

dangerous whilst also refraining from treating it completely uncritically. If

is an art-form, then it can logically be criticised for being put

plastic surgery
to dull or normative or homogeneous ends. If plastic surgery is ethically

uncomfortable, its discomfort must surely lie in the aesthetic ends to which it

is put rather than in the practice itself.

Pragmatically, the more detailed categorical and analytic discussions of the

art of body art are, the more diverse and more engaging body art practice

should become. Thinking seriously about body modification as an art practice

and revealing its possibilities and pitfalls should lead to better, more

interesting, more creative, more heterogeneous and more politically-engaged

body art. As Shusterman has argued, purposive aesthetic attention and

creative self-fashioning is potentially of enormous value, and if carried out

with an informed and considered perspective on what is possible, that value

can be maximised. As body art becomes more pervasive and more visible in

our society, and as this visibility carries with it the attendant risk of creating a

257
new normativity, a new set of fashions and trends enacted on the bodies of

citizens, the urgency for such a considered pragmatism becomes more

evident.

Body art is already understood and practiced in artistic terms by a vast

number of people, so we might logically ask to what extent seeking wider

acceptance for body art practices on these terms is necessary or desirable.

Clinton Sanders has suggested that such scrutiny brings with it attendant

risks. "What is lost", he asks rhetorically, "when a deviant cultural activity is

co-opted by agents of the institutional art world and gains - at least to some
degree - artistic legitimacy? " (Sanders 2008). Might some of the very aspects

of tattooing which make it such a potent artistic and affective medium be

neutered by a cooption into establishment culture? I would argue not, given

that even once the artistic value of tattooing is acknowledged, its peculiar

characteristics will always afford it the power to work in ways which are far

more immediate and far more visceral than other modes of artistic

production. Its affective register might shift away from provoking outrage or
horror or disgust or ridicule towards awe or beauty or visual pleasure, but it

can never cease to be capable of being immediate, disruptive and

confrontational.

258
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