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Body of Collision

We're going to look at the conjunction of the body and art in this lecture! 

Elaine Sciolino, "Capturing the Spirit of the Tattoo." The New York Times. 8 May 2014

PARIS — Tattoos are beautiful; they are crude. They are declarations of protest, politics, beauty, religion, mourning, hatred or love. They have been used to identify, cure, honor and subjugate those who wear or are forced to wear them.

At the Musée du Quai Branly here, an ambitious new exhibition, “Tattoo” which opened Tuesday and runs through Oct. 18, 2015, grounds the tradition of tattooing in antiquity, follows its myriad expressions around the world and showcases a new generation of artists whose medium happens to be marking human skin.

Tattooing dates back more than 5,000 years. The exhibition notes that the remains of Ötzi, the Neolithic iceman found in the Alps in 1991 was covered with 57 tattoo marks. Two-thousand-year-old mummies discovered in Egypt and Syria carried tattoos of mythical monsters and animals.

The museum’s mission is to create a “dialogue of cultures” and the exhibition follows previous global cross-cultural subjects, such as the beauty of hair, the seduction of Chinese cooking and the history of jazz, and their effects on art and literature. The shows are sometimes messy and gimmicky, always creative. This time, the museum has brought together 300 historical and contemporary objects related to tattoos and tattooing, including photographs, prints, paintings, posters, sculptures, tribal masks, books, clothing, tattoo-making implements and even mummified body parts.

PhotoThe French photographer Marc Garanger’s 1960 portrait of a woman whose village was destroyed during Algeria’s war of independence. CreditMarc Garanger

“We wanted to capture the spirit of tattooing, which is part of the common heritage of most of humanity,” said the museum’s director, Stéphane Martin. “But it was just as important to showcase it as a popular artistic movement.”

To that end, Anne & Julien, (they use only their first names) the exhibition’s curators and the founders of the underground art review “Hey! Modern Art and Pop Culture,” in Paris, turned to the world’s foremost tattoo artists to create works for the show. Thirteen artists from countries ranging from Samoa to Switzerland inked their inspiration onto disembodied legs, torsos and arms crafted in silicone that were developed by a studio in the Paris suburb of Montreuil that specializes in special effects for films. They worked under the direction of Tin-Tin, France’s rock-star tattooer, whose clients include Jean-Paul Gaultier and Marc Jacobs.

The body parts are brightly-lit, suspended in space and they can be viewed from different angles. The silicone looks and feels like human flesh. The molds were taken from living models and their realistic rendering — with veined arms and wrinkled joints — gives them an eerie power. Also created for the exhibition are 19 tattoo designs painted by contemporary tattooers on body suits, hung throughout the exhibition. All were chosen by Anne & Julien and lent to the museum for this exhibition; other works and objects came from other institutions, private collections and the Quai Branly’s own collection.

Ed Hardy, America’s pioneer tattoo artist with a devoted Hollywood following, came from his home in San Francisco for the show’s opening.

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“It’s the most comprehensive exhibit on tattooing I’ve ever seen,” he said. “There are still people who recoil from tattoos and here you have its celebration — with depth and cultural richness. It blows my mind.”

The exhibition devotes considerable space to the long periods of tattoo repression and stigmatization throughout the world, including the marking of slaves in ancient Rome and of criminals in Imperial China. In the United States, tattoo artists were considered “marginal figures who preyed on drunken sailors,” Mr. Hardy said.

Today, tattoos have gone mainstream. The exhibition notes that almost 25 percent of Americans are tattooed, according to a 2012 Harris poll, and that 20 percent of the French between the ages of 25 and 34 have a tattoo, according to a 2010 Ifop poll.

Ateliers of tattoo masters from Tokyo to Paris have been transformed into chic art galleries. Even Samantha Cameron, the wife of the British prime minister, has a dolphin tattoo below her right ankle.

PhotoSailors in a tattoo lounge in Hamburg, Germany, in 1966.CreditCourtesy Herbert Hoffmann and Galerie Gebr. Lehmann Dresden/Berlin

The exhibition also shows that traditional tattooing is enjoying a revival in places like Samoa and the Philippines. In New Zealand, traditional ornamental Maori tattooing has been given the status of a national treasure, inspiring contemporary Maori tattoo artists.

Tahiti, New Zealand’s Maori culture, Japan, China, Europe and the Americas are all represented. Images of tattooed performers at circus sideshows, prisoners and sailors are juxtaposed with full body Japanese tattoo paintings.

For the first time, a book documenting tattoos inked on prisoners in Soviet-era forced-labor camps is on public display. They used tattoos to trace their time in the camps and to describe their sentences. There are tattoos identifying membership and rank in the underworld, anti-Semitic beliefs, political allegiances and sexual preferences.

A stamp that belonged to a family in Jerusalem and dating from the 17th or 18th century was inked, applied to the skin and used as a stencil for a permanent tattoo. The tattoos were performed on Christian pilgrims, including Copts, Syrians and Armenians as a permanent mark of their visit to Jerusalem.

Large black and white photographic portraits of Algerian women during the nation’s war of independence from France show them in tribal costume, their foreheads inked in dark blue tattoos. They look into the camera — and at the French photographer — with defiance.

A 1919 photo of an Armenian woman, her shirt open, shows her face and chest tattooed. In Syria, Armenian women who had fled the Turkish genocide often were forced into prostitution and tattooed by their pimps to identify them and prevent them from escaping.

Even more unsettling is a swath of preserved human skin from Laos that dates from the 19th or 20th century. It looks like brown shoe leather and contains colorful tattoos of animals and mythical monsters. And an undated mummified hand and forearm from Peru sports a tattoo made with an iron ring.

At the exhibition preview, Anne of Anne & Julien arrived with evidence of her own tattooing on her body visible at her neckline and wrists.

Asked to describe the look and extent of her tattoos, she balked. “It’s very private,” she said. “My tattoos are not a subject for public discussion.”

A version of this article appears in print on May 9, 2014, in The International New York Times. 

Group Work:

Break up into small groups and answer these questions. Post your answers in the COMMENT box at the bottom of the page.

1. How is "The Tattooer" similar to Frankenstein. List similarities. 
2. How is "The Tattooer" different from Frankenstein. List differences.  

Discussion Questions:

1. How does Tanizaki Junichiro's treatment of the human body resemble Mary Shelley's?
1. Why is the use of human bodies disturbing? 
2. How is the tattoo like other visual art we've analyzed in this class?
3. How is the tattoo a unique art form?
4. How does Tanizaki use the tattoo?
1. literally?
2. as a symbol or metaphor?

The Tattoo in World History: 

Otzi, the Neolithic Iceman is the oldest intact member of the human race (ca 3300BC). He has 57 tattoos, demonstrating the art of inking the human body may be as old as humankind.

For the purposes of this course, tattoos are evidence of both distinct cultural and ethnic identity (i.e. group belonging) and a world in collision (i.e. international exchange).

Tattoos have been used by distinct communities to communicate specific ideas and facts within the group. For example, the Dyak people of Borneo traditionally used tattoos to commemorate headhunting expeditions. Like the body of the victim, the body of the hunter would commemorate the very symbolic and visceral act. Displayed on public and visible parts of the body, these tattoos would be read and understood by people within the community. The tradition of a warrior or hunter marking his or her body to commemorate the act of killing is a practice shared in the global community that continues to today, although the meaning and sharing of these markings varies with each culture. 

Tattoos associated with war also had meaning in cultural collision. They visually illustrated the distinction between warring people groups (they way military uniforms or sports jerseys visually indicate an individual's allegiance). Tattoos thus created group identity in (literal) collision.

Tattoos may also have a religious or spiritual purpose, visibly displaying an (often) invisible spiritual act or realm. Tattoos visually (and permanently) anchor the intangible to the physical reality. In this context, the meaning of a tattoo may extend beyond a specific community to all practitioners of a specific faith. 

Finally, tattoos also map global connections between people. For example, the art of tattooing was lost in Europe during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. However, when Europeans began circumnavigating the globe, the brought the art of tattoo home with them Tattoos became relatively common among sailors, visual confirmation of interaction with other cultures as well as distinctive to their community. The practice of tattooing spread into European society imagining cultural collisions. For example, King George V boasted wearing a Japanese-style dragon tattoo (although confirmation of this is not available).   

A glance at international tattoos.

"The Tattooer"

• How does the art of tattooing connect with the text we read today?
• How does Tanizaki illustrate cultural cohesion? How does Tanizaki illustrate a world in collision?

More Reading on Tattoos:

Abigail Tucker, "Looking at the World's Tattoos." Smithsonian Magazine.