A PERMANENT MARK

There has been a dramatic rise in the popularity and acceptance of tattoos, particularly in Western society, over the past decade. In Australia, tattooing has shifted from a ‘fringe’ activity largely enjoyed by very specific and, in the view of many, unpalatable subcultures, to one that engages the broadest cross-section of our community. Those wanting to get ‘inked’ now ranges from youth to the elderly, bikies to doctors, students to politicians, and on a cursory glance it seems the tattoos being created are also increasing in size and complexity.

Townsville’s own ‘inked’ population is large and reflective of this trend. In fact, Townsville may be somewhat of an extreme example in its habitual tattooing. This could be due in part to the city’s large military population, an active music scene, hero-worshipping of tattooed local sporting identities, and a plethora of available tattoo parlours. Outside of these external factors exist abundant personal motivations.

Given this city-wide fascination with tattooing, it was considered extremely fitting for Townsville’s peak galleries to develop perhaps the first major exhibition in Australia to analyse the shifting attitudes towards tattooing, and encourage discussion about the resultant impact on contemporary art.

As a tattooed person myself, I have great admiration for the many talented tattooists plying their trade around the country. But this in itself raises a question – where does the ‘trade’ end, and a new tool being employed by contemporary artists begin? After all, one need not look too far back to a time when photography was not widely recognised within the arts as a legitimate art form.

Without realising until well into the development of A Permanent Mark: the impact of tattoo culture on contemporary art, my interest in this subject was likely piqued as far back as Art class in senior High School. A fellow student (and now good friend and occasional tattooist) was not an overly engaged student in the sense of academic performance, but was incredibly sharp and a prodigiously talented draftsman.

I vividly remember one Art class, during which I noticed him almost religiously rubbing his pacer lead on a table. Curious, I asked what he was doing and took a glance at the piece of paper he was working on. His work, which would become an obsession over a number of months, was a large marijuana leaf drawn over a number of pieces of notepaper he had taped together. On closer inspection, the drawing was in fact made up of hundreds of intricately detailed drawings, each measuring no more than a centimetre in width or length, and the vast majority reflective of tattoo culture and iconography. Given the incredible detail within each miniature drawing, the need to rub his pacer lead into the smallest point possible became instantly clear. This was also probably my first insight into the patient, almost compulsive nature of many tattoo artists who place enormous value on detail. de Medici’s work epitomises the importance many tattooists place on immaculate craftsmanship, as I first noted in the drawings of my Art class peer. Every millimetre of a de Medici work is meticulously detailed, and also handled with great finesse. She is an elegant observer and commentator of news and current events, and her works often deal with the delicate balance between life and death. To this end, the human skull has become a recurring motif for de Medici – fitting given it has both been used by artists as a symbol of mortality through the ages, particularly in Vanitas painting, and is ubiquitous with tattoo culture.

The work, while indicative of his undoubted talent, was not assessed by the School’s Art teachers; this was a fait accompli given the subject matter of the drawing, but still a source of disappointment for the student. To the teachers’ credit, one took the time to encourage the student, helping him engage with new digital drawing technologies and steering him towards the tattoo industry. While this was extremely commendable and has likely contributed in some way to the student becoming a successful tattooist in his adult life, was the distinction made even at that young age between ‘art’ and ‘tattoo’?

One artist who bucked this distinction and helped blaze a trail of recognition and respect for tattooists is Australian painter eX de Medici, who in 1989 was the first artist awarded a grant from the Australia Council to undertake a tattoo apprenticeship.1 Medici’s art practice has been significantly influenced by the experience. Over the years she has forged a reputation as perhaps the country’s most exquisitely talented watercolourist; a medium that, like tattooing, offers no room for error.

Though she grew up in Canberra’s punk scene, de Medici was only drawn to the tattoo industry after completing her studies in Fine Art at the Australian National University, where she became jaded with the sanitised nature of the arts industry. Commenting in 2008, de Medici revealed that, “the more I saw how conservative the art world was, the more interested I was in tattooing. A few people had said ‘oh you don’t want to do that – that is art world suicide’ and I thought ‘if you’re saying that, it must be really interesting.’ And so my contrary nature powered me on … plus I thought it was really sexy and art didn’t seem very sexy to me. There was an excitement quotient and a verboten quotient. I’d been working in decayable materials and the human is the most decayable of all things –it couldn’t be collected as an art object.”2

This final point of de Medici’s could also be a clue to the difficulty the art world feels it faces in dealing with and categorising tattoo; just as is the case with street art – how do we collect it?

Though executed in vastly different modes, conceptual threads present in de Medici’s works are paralleled in the art practices of Wim Delvoye and Richard Dunlop. Life, death, and decay are dominant themes in the works of Flemish neo-conceptual artist Wim Delvoye, a renowned provocateur whom many Australians will be familiar with due to his giant Cloaca installation.

Delvoye’s frequent engagement with tattooing comes in the form of his own ‘Wim Delvoye Tattoo Shop’, and the extensive tattooing of pigs with consumer logos and drawings referencing Western icons such as skulls and hearts. His swine marking began in the early 1990s by working on dead pigs, which would either be skinned or stuffed, and progressed quite controversially in 1997 to the use of live pigs. Speaking with French newspaper Le Monde, Delvoye explained, “I show the world works of art that are so alive, they have to be vaccinated…It lives, it moves, it will die. Everything is real.”3

Like de Medici, painter Richard Dunlop is intrigued by collecting and its relationship to tattooing, as particularly evidenced in the work Kylie (2006). Dunlop’s fascination with the human need to see the world through some contrived sense of order is perfectly illustrated in the study of entomology. To make this link, Dunlop presents the Kylie figure as a vessel, sensuously decorated with a series of butterfly tattoos, with each specimen identified and numbered, as they would be in a museum display.

Tattoo paintings haven’t been a constant in Dunlop’s oeuvre, but they have recurred intermittently since first being developed in 1992. His interest has been variously piqued by travels to Asia, and observations of the tattooed form in Western culture.

In Asia, the intricate patterning of traditional tattoos closely resemble those found on carvings, ornaments, utensils and dress. Dunlop sees tattoos in this context as not only signifying a cultural bond between the people, but also demonstrating that there is no perceived separation between “their bodies, the land, and everything around them – they’re all bound by the same symbology.”4

In Australia, the artist noted a resemblance between the backs of tattooed men at the gym, and the shapes of vases. Through an exaggeration of form, his paintings draw parallels between the human body and any other decorated vessel. His paintings extend upon this comparison by patterning nudes with blue painted tattoos that closely resemble markings on traditional ‘China’ porcelain wares.

In the tension between surface and form, there is an interesting dialogue between Dunlop’s paintings, and the beautiful busts of ChineseAustralian artist Ah Xian. Ah Xian has an enduring interest in the human form, which began with the creation of politically scrutinised nude drawings in China in the 1980s, and shifted towards figurative sculpture in the 1990s.5

As in tattooing, Ah Xian uses the figure as a blank canvas, and from there engages with various traditional Chinese motifs and art forms. The human figure, which appears both enticing and haunting in the busts of Ah Xian, provides the artist with a comfortable point of access for viewers to consider universal notions of spirituality, and cultural and political frictions noted through his relationship with both China and Australia.

Ah Xian explains; “it’s quite natural to be interested in the nude and the body...There are many things one can do as an artist – look at the environment, look at society, at politics – there’s quite a lot of room to play in all of those fields, but the human body is absolutely inexhaustible as a subject. I have never lost interest in the figure...The reason why people are so seduced and drawn to it is not the body itself, but that place where it joins traditional decorative arts, and it is exactly there where the work has its appeal and where it actually succeeds – you pull it apart and it means nothing.”6

While artists such as Dunlop and Ah Xian utilise the human figure as an object to be ‘tattooed’ with symbology and concepts, it is not the only way in which contemporary artists are being influenced by tattooing. Others, such as Mexican artist Dr Lakra, American artists Shawn Barber, Scott Campbell, and Don Ed Hardy, and Australian Leslie Rice maintain a dual practice, making a clear definition between their work as a professional tattooist and as a contemporary artist. In each case however, the two practices remain invariably linked through representation and the use of tattoo culture iconography. Perhaps the most interesting development is those artists using tattoo techniques and technology for the creation of contemporary art with few visual links to the mainstream tattoo industry. Qin Ga, emerging from the underground Chinese art scene, uses tattooing as a powerful and concise communication tool in The miniature long march film and series of 23 photographs, deliberately breaking with conventional and expected aesthetics.

American artist Amanda Wachob makes reference to the tattoo industry’s training techniques through the marking of oranges and fruit skins, but the true strength of the photographic series resides in the delicacy of the abstract marks. In sections, the black marks draw comparison with those of renowned printmakers such as Tate Adams and John Olsen. Wachob’s enthusiasm for the tattoo medium and its relatively untapped potential within the contemporary arts has already taken her in numerous directions; from tattooed colour field and abstract canvases, to abstract line works on hide, and photographic documentation of witty ‘disappearing’ water tattoos. The water tattoo photos in particular delicately balance the perceived notions of ‘high’ and ‘low’ art.

Emerging Townsville artist Rob Douma is another treading this path, particularly in his series of painted artificial skulls. Originally from Tasmania, Douma established the appropriately gruesomely titled warehouse studio Tsunami Death Cult in 2012,7 producing sinister paintings, sculptures and carvings that are reflective of the dark imagery synonymous with modern tattoo culture.

Self-taught, Douma gained recognition by winning the People’s Choice Award in the 2014 Glencore Percival Portrait Painting Prize. He challenges audiences to find a place for his work – be it as a fine art work or consumer designer product – by finely balancing fine craftsmanship with ‘kitsch’ iconography.

The popularisation of tattooing has also seen the practice increasingly viewed as a fashion statement or accessory. The fashion item status of tattoos is particularly evident in the works of Chinese photographer and digital artist Chen Man, who has in the past been commissioned by notable multi-national fashion companies such as Nike, Max Factor, and L’Oreal.8 Her works speak to a dangerous underground culture, but are firmly placed in the mainstream fashion industry that has seen tattoo culture become increasingly separated from this very place.

The collision of tattoo, contemporary art and fashion was demonstrated by the extreme popularity of the Ed Hardy fashion label upon its launch, and has never been more evident than Garage magazine’s 2011 project commissioning some of the world’s best-known contemporary artists to create works on ‘willing canvases’. The project was conducted for the magazine’s inaugural issue, and participating artists included Jeff Koons, John Baldessari, and Damien Hirst. Hirst’s tattoo was completed on the genitalia of a female model, and quickly became infamous (as is the artist’s want). A black and white photo of the tattoo featured on the magazine’s cover, obscured by a colour ‘peel-and-reveal’ butterfly sticker.9

Another artist engaging with the uneasy relationship between tattoo and fashion is Dr Lakra. The Mexican artist’s altered magazine pin-up girls call into question popular conceptions of ‘beauty’ by juxtaposing 1950s glamour against facial tattoos imbued with cultural traditions and significance.

The fashion industry is of course in equal parts a creative and commercial venture, and with the rise of tattoo as a personal fashion statement came the inevitable connection to advertising. This was no more evident than the ‘body billboard’ phenomenon which arose during the dot com boom of the early 2000s. With web start-ups flush with cash, many paid average citizens huge sums to tattoo their web URLs and logos on their faces, arms, legs, backs and torsos. Now ten to fifteen years on, the move brings to light the permanence of tattoo, with many of the advertisements having outlasted the companies themselves. 10

Around the same time of the dot com tattoo advertising was a confrontational tattoo performance by Spanish public performance artist and provocateur Santiago Sierra. The performance, entitled 160cm Line Tattooed on 4 People (2000) was just one work in the artist’s divisive Line series.11 As in the tattooed advertisements, Sierra’s performance queried the value people place on the sovereignty of their own bodies.

In describing the tattoo performance, Sierra stated, “Four prostitutes addicted to heroin were hired for the price of a shot of heroin to give their consent to be tattooed. Normally they charge

2,000-3,000 pesetas, between $15-$17 for fellatio, while the price of a shot of heroin is around 12,000 pesetas, about $67.”12 Sierra’s work has often been viewed as exploitative or predatory, preying on vulnerable sections of society to test psychological, emotional and physical boundaries; causing discomfort and distress to perhaps elicit similar feelings in comparably privileged audiences. Despite Sierra’s engagement with – or exploitation of – the underprivileged, tattooing has generally moved beyond the fringes of society in which it had traditionally resided.

This is evident in the work of Holly Grech. Her elegant portraits reference the popularly held belief that hand, face, and neck tattoos were formerly taboo in monarchist nations as any such marking of these body parts was considered defacement of the Crown. While some tattooists still resist or refuse to do tattoos on people’s hands, necks or face for various reasons, there exists no formal or legal judgement to preclude such activity.

With the popularisation and acceptance of tattoo, however, comes a natural degree of resistance, and some individuals and subcultures now push against the art form’s ‘watering down’. While many media commentators and certainly professional tattooists denounce the practice of ‘backyard’ tattooing (and with cause given the associated health risks), it is in these very settings that some artists have been inspired and begun the process of learning and perfecting their discipline.

A somewhat unlikely advocate for (safe) backyard tattooing is found in professional tattooist and artist Leslie Rice, who sees great value in the unrestricted creativity and enjoyment associated with groups of friends learning through experimentation with the medium.13 Perhaps a more likely source of support for home tattoos is found in the Townsville-based RUN Collective, a group of like-minded street artists and creative types with a deep commitment to DIY-culture and a healthy distaste for the establishment.

The RUN Collective are an adaptable group of artists, regularly mixing elements of their formal art training with self- or peer-taught techniques and practices across mediums as diverse as aerosol, stencil, screen printing, photography, digital art, zines, oil and acrylic paintings, drawing, sculpture, film, and installation.

Experimentation is key to the group’s collective practice – celebrations of creativity amongst friends resulting in wildly varied bodies of work – and this experimentation has in recent years extended to tattooing.

The underground, DIY ‘reclaiming’ of the tattoo medium by the RUN Collective also draws parallels between the tattoo industry and activity in Australia’s street art landscape. General society’s adoption of tattooing is akin to the popularisation and art world ‘legitimisation’ of street art experienced in the past two decades, which some artists in the field believe detrimental to its purity of expression.

Regan Tamanui – likely the nation’s most (in)famous stencil artist operating under the moniker HAHA – is another street artist to have engaged with tattooing, both on his skin, and in some of his portraits. One of his own tattoos is of Ned Kelly, a symbol inseparable from the artist’s stencil practice.

Tamanui explains that, despite his Maori and Samoan heritage, “none of my tattoos are linked to my culture. I’ve got a lot of street art...all the tattoos I’ve got are like a journey; images I like with a story behind it. The Ned Kelly story is one that I like and identify with, I feel an affinity with the concept of bushrangers, particularly being a street artist. The whole idea of street art is doing stuff illegally that people like...I believe that street art is like the 21st century bushranger if done illegally.”14

While Tamanui’s tattoos are not traditional Maori or Samoan tattoos, it is in his stencil art that he draws on this heritage. Particularly in Tamanui’s early works, he has depicted figures with traditional Maori tattoos, Tā moko. Cultural identity expressed through body markings is also a point of interest for artists such as Tama tk Favell, Fiona Pardington, and New Zealand photographer and digital media artist Lisa Reihana. Reihana’s depictions of modern Maori culture “revise negative notions about the past, and provide positive imagery for present generations.”15

With mainstream society’s adoption of tattoo, including those steeped in cultural traditions, questions abound about the impact of this re-appropriation and re-interpretation. For instance, does the adoption of Tā moko by non-Maoris damage or diminish the culture it so powerfully asserts?

An equally powerful tattoo – a large figure from William Blake’s The Red Dragon – features in The lines are drawn, an etching by acclaimed Townsville printmaker Ron McBurnie. The artist uses the tattoo as a visual clue, a storytelling device in a tale of a man on the cusp of moving from one world to another.16

McBurnie is not only a skilled storyteller, but also a keen observer of people. With more tattooed people to observe than ever before, it was inevitable that one would be the focal point of a humorous etching from McBurnie’s Suburban Etchings series. The work He tattooed the names of each of his ten wives onto his right arm from A to Z from my toes to my head, a collaborative portfolio McBurnie produced with Juli Haas,17 jokingly deals with the permanence of tattoos and the regret stemming from an ill-considered design.

Other keen observers of people and their projection of identity through tattoos include photographers David Griggs, and Townsvillebased Holly Grech. Grech’s works investigate unique tattoo designs that represent personally defining moments or lifestyles. Her photographs are gripping contemporary portraits, examining the private lives of real people expressed through their body art. Simultaneously, the works prompt consideration of the unfettered access we provide strangers to our private lives through tattoos, and by extension the conscious choices we make about the image we wish to portray of ourselves to the outside world. Further, the works ponder issues of ownership of one’s own body, and society’s insistence on having input as to what can and can’t be done with this property.

Broader acceptance of tattooing and visible tattoos in Western society has undoubtedly prompted an increased engagement by contemporary artists with the medium. The rapid advancements in tattoo technology have provided artists new horizons, while many trained tattooists are using the industry as a pathway to a contemporary arts practice.

Contemporary artists, as they have always been, are society’s commentators – its moral compass of sorts. By using tattoo as a visual device, artists have also been afforded the opportunity to take a fresh approach to their explorations of societal issues as broad as body image, personal identity, cultural belonging and appropriation, fringe cultures, mortality, permanence/impermanence and many others.

A Permanent Mark: the impact of tattoo culture on contemporary art draws together a number of these notable works to encapsulate how far and in what ways tattoo has permeated into the contemporary art sphere. Further, it queries how the contemporary art world now views a medium that is experiencing a masspopularisation.

Finally, the exhibition encourages viewers to pontificate as to how the intersect between the two industries, contemporary art and tattooing, will continue to evolve. In what ways will our contemporary artists utilise the medium in the future, and will the two fields continue to blur more closely together?

Eric Nash CURATOR, GALLERY SERVICES

Notes

1 ‘Sullivan+Strumpf: Artists’, eX de Medici <www.sullivanstrumpf.com/artists/de-medici-ex/>, viewed August 2014

2 Paul Flynn, ‘eX de Medici: Cover Story’. Artist Profile, Issue 5, 2008

3 ‘Belgium’, Wim Delvoye: Tattooing Pigs or the Art of Provocation <www.theculturetrip.com/europe/belgium/articles/wim-delvoyetattooing-pigs-or-the-art-of-provocation/>, viewed August 2014

4 Discussion between Richard Dunlop and exhibition Curator, Eric Nash, 9 August 2014

5 Suhanya Raffel and Lynne Seear, ‘Human human’. Ah Xian, Queensland Art Gallery, 2003, pp. 9

6 Rhana Devenport, with Linda Jaivin, ‘Dualism and solitary journeys: An interview with Ah Xian’. Ah Xian, Queensland Art Gallery, 2003, pp. 22

7 ‘Tsunami Death Cult’, About Me <www.tsunamideathcult.com/about-me/>, viewed August 2014

8 ‘Hai Gallery’, Biography: Chen Man < www.haigallery.com/biography-chen-man/?lang=en>, viewed August 2014

9 ‘GARAGE Magazine’, GARAGE Magazine No.1 Fall/Winter 2011 - Damien Hirst Cover <www.garagemagazine.bigcartel.com/product/fallwinter-2011>, viewed August 2014

10 ‘Daily Mail Australia’, Past their sell by dates: Meet the people branded for life with tattoos advertising websites that no longer exist <www.dailymail. co.uk/news/article-2209233/The-body-billboard-The-people-dotcomtattoos-advertising-websites-longer-exist.html>, viewed August 2014

11 ‘TATE’, Performance: Santiago Sierra < www.tate.org.uk/contextcomment/video/performance-santiago-sierra>, viewed August 2014

12 ‘Santiago Sierra’, 160cm Line Tattooed on 4 People < www.santiago-sierra.com/200014_1024.php>, viewed August 2014

13 Discussion between Leslie Rice and exhibition Curator, Eric Nash, 8 August 2014

14 Discussion between Regan Tamanui and exhibition Curator, Eric Nash, 10 August 2014

15 Lisa Reihana, email to exhibition Curator, Eric Nash, 7 August 2014

16 ‘Ron McBurnie’, Romantic Prints Page 1 <www.ronmcburnie.com/html/romantic.html>, viewed August 2014

17 ‘Ron McBurnie’, A-Z From my toes to my head <www.ronmcburnie.com/html/suburban-a-z.html>, viewed August 2014

Image: eX de Medici

Australia b.1959

The theory of everything 2005

Watercolour and metallic pigment on Arches paper

114.3 x 176.3 cm

Acc. 2005.244

Purchased 2005

Collection: Queensland Art Gallery

Image courtesy: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art © eX de Medici

109 x 114 cm