Tattoo Culture: Art of the Body

Last month, I was lucky to have visited the Arkansas Art Center with my mother to see their exhibition, Tattoo Witness:  Photographs by Mark Perrott.  With countless black and white portraits of “tatted” individuals, this exhibit encapsulates twenty-five years of tattoo culture from shops and studios across the nation. 

Perott captured images of tattoo artists and customers alike, documenting the artistry of the tattoos and the stories of the people who wear them.  He is immortalizing an ephemeral art that otherwise would only last a single generation.  Each portrait captures a moment in the subject’s life, as they proudly display the markings that set them apart from the rest of the world. 

Throughout the gallery, there are images of men and women; old and young; business and casual; clean and dirty; black and white and everything in between.  The exhibit challenges the viewer to question their preconceived notions of who gets tattoos and why.  Is a tattoo a scar that mars your body for the rest of your life, or is it an expression of your deepest passions and desires?  Is it a mark of childhood or a statement on trials you have overcome?  Does it show that you are a part of an elite club, or is it simply a way to display your love for artistic expression?  Is it a means to remembering an important moment or a lost friend?  Is it a symbol of infinite love?  Is it a call for attention or a means of blending in? 

In many ways, he illustrates the connection between the public and private nature of tattoos.   What a person does with their body is most often a personal choice.  By permanently decorating your body, you are making a choice to alter your appearance for personal reasons, of which could be any number of things.  Many times we are making a statement about ourselves or the world, about our feelings, our likes and dislikes or our place in the life we are living.  These personal reflections, no matter how conscious, are almost always factored into our decision to make a permanent change to our appearance.  That being said, in many ways, creating an outward alteration by means of tattoo expression is a very public presentation of our most private feelings.  It simultaneously shows the world who you are while becoming a part of your story.

Importantly, this exhibit brings people of various backgrounds and histories together with a common bond of artistic expression through a practice that has been around for thousands of years.

Incidentally, around the same time that I was exposed to Perrott’s photographs, I also came across an article about a Siberian ‘princess’ whose body was found preserved in permafrost, keeping her 2500 year old tattoos intact and easily observable.  ‘Princess Ukok’ is highly decorated with images of mythological creatures and intricate drawings that most likely exemplified age and status within her people. 

Like the tattoos that adorn our bodies today, her tattoos seem to be as aesthetic as they are practical.  The designs were placed carefully for viewing purposes, drawing on the presentation and public aspect of tattoo custom.  The body was, and is, another medium for artistic, personal, and societal expression and have amazingly stood the test of time.

Our cultures are constantly changing and evolving, often blending with those of others around us.  These two incredible examples of body art as a means of expression and symbol, each representing a vastly different civilization, really show that no matter how much people think we change over generations, we still employ many of the same practices that have defined us for thousands of years.  

Thoughts on a visit to see Thomas Houseago

“What’s your first impression of these sculptures?” my professor asks our group as we stand in the vast Hauser & Wirth gallery littered with Thomas Houseago’s latest exhibition, I’ll be your sister. 

“Monumental” was my first thought and consequently my uttered response.  Looking around the space you could not help but be slightly overwhelmed by these larger-than-life-size plaster and bronze sculptures. 

“Are you sure monumental?” the prof. questioned.  Silence.  I wasn’t sure if this was my first test or if it was simply a probe for the class to look at the sculptures again.  “This may be too soon in the course, but do you guys know of a maquette?” 

Monumental was right to describe these works but in a different way than I had realized before the professor’s remarks.  The works were large, yes, and somewhat overbearing, but they did not feel right.  Each had the appearance of a not quite finished model, a maquette, for a sculpture that was to be made in its likeness.  With this notion in mind, the scale, not to be confused with size, of the pieces presented a new interaction for the artist.  As Robert Smithson so eloquently stated, “Size determines an object, but scale determines art.”  Rather than the pieces feeling larger, the viewer felt smaller, as though having been shrunk down in the artist’s studio.  Connecting with the semblance of a maquette, each piece seemed to evoke the early stages of a sculpture’s life.  Each, if not eight to twelve feet tall, would appear to be an example of what a piece would look like if left in the planning stages in the artist’s studio with disjointed limbs, contorted poses, and unpolished exteriors.

Using mostly cast bronze, iron rebar, and plaster, the pieces seemed to evoke a structural integrity that remains a strong theme in modern erected works.  The central work in the exhibit, Striding Figure (Ghost), 2012, was predominantly made of bronze rebar bent and molded into a visceral, de Kooning-esque figure that loomed over the viewer has he strode forward, one foot placed in front of the other.  A contrapposto posture and rigid stance recalling the portraits of the Egyptian pharaohs commanded the audience’s attention, but as he leaned slightly forward over his stride, the viewer felt vulnerable as well as awestruck.  These attributes, however, were complemented by the viewer’s ability to look directly into the inner mechanics of the piece.  The rebar formed a sort of skeletal structure that gave the piece its shape.  Structural honesty seemed to be of utmost importance for the relationship between the piece and its audience. 

Like the central figure, the surrounding bronze and plaster constructions held a similar pattern of connecting the viewer with the art’s inner construction.  Each plaster cast, which incidentally was laced with impressions from the artist’s hands as he pressed and molded the plaster into the desired shape, called for the audience’s participation to see it to its core.  Breaks appeared in the sides of each work leaving various sized gaps for viewing the bronze configuration of holds in the inner workings of the piece.  Many of the gaps were large enough to be noticed but small enough that the viewer was forced to take it upon him- or herself to find the best angle to view the skeletal material. 

In the adjacent gallery space of the Hauser & Wirth lot, Houseago’s Special Brew continued this sculptural experience of structural honesty and connection with the naissance of sculptural practice.  This collection housed a few more figurative giants, each employing the same call for a deeper look at its inner care and each having disturbingly uncharacteristic nuances that made the viewer question whether it was ready to be seen.  Among these were a protruded head, a contorted arm, a mask-like face, an unsound and misshapen pedestal, and wooden blocks used for support as though they were found on a studio floor and shoved in open gaps to hold the piece together. 

Large panels leaned up against the stark white walls of the main room, each covered with primitive carvings and erections of what appeared mostly to be sculptural examples of sketches of body parts.  Two showed piled tube-like slices reminiscent of the tubes of clay used in the earliest training of sculpture making in visual arts courses.  Each panel evoked the drawing practices of artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, but, at the same time, had a grotesque quality that one would find in a post war image like Leon Golub’s Napalm Head or Pablo Picasso’s Guernica. 

These pieces tied into the theme of presenting the traditionally early stages of artistic production, as artists often use drawing as practice, study, and precursor to their “finished” works.  Additionally the panels draw on the notion of scale.  These eight and nine foot panels seem like they should be fixed into something, whether a book or a building, but whatever this thing may be, it’s scale is unfathomable and, like the figures of the first room, overwhelming. 

Visceral, regressive, and arguably primitive though these sculptures are, they create a need for the viewer to connect with them, to question them, and, most importantly, to understand what they are made of and where they came from.  It is almost like seeing the entire process of the sculpture’s creation sitting in one sedentary piece, while the piece is still very much alive in its interaction with the world around it.