Debate: On Tattoos and Art…

7th Mar 2010

A stain on the skin…

‘Every girl has a story.’ The worst tat­too I have ever seen, etched down the arm of a dis­tanced school friend, punc­tu­ated by a cli­mac­tic sym­bol, which looked more like the result of a busted ink cartridge.

This made me think, should all art tell a story? Unfor­tu­nately the only story that my friends tat­too made appar­ent was one of des­per­ate rebel­lion and pathetic conformity.

Defin­ing art has been a con­tentious issue and has plagued lit­er­ary essays for cen­turies. For the pur­pose of this argu­ment I will define Art as a sta­tic aes­thet­i­cally pleas­ing object, which should mean some­thing to somebody.

Most tat­toos are empty ges­tures of self-assertion. The Chi­nese sym­bols, baron trees, speck­led stars, hearts, birds of lib­erty amount to noth­ing more than a mark of youth, much like a birth­mark. Worse still are those who argue the intrin­sic sen­ti­men­tal­ity of their cho­sen tat­toos (usu­ally fam­ily related issues) to jus­tify the indeli­ble mark they have stamped upon themselves.

Yet even the tat­toos, which may use colour in an inter­est­ing way, show some struc­ture or design, would prob­a­bly be left want­ing on paper. I chal­lenge any tat­too to hold it’s own in exhi­bi­tion, next to Fran­cis Bacon or Whistler. The only rea­son they evoke any inter­est is because they are stained into human flesh. Yet humans are inap­pro­pri­ate can­vases. Under scrutiny the human frame falls apart and so does the tat­too. The art is stretched and creased beneath time, quite lit­er­ally. Art must be removed from the human con­di­tion oth­er­wise it is destroyed, as Dorian’s por­trait proves.

To read the other side of the argu­ment go to:

http://www.redbrickonline.co.uk/arts-culture/on-tattoos-and-art-2/