CAPTURING THE SPIRIT OF THE TATTOO
New York Times
May 8 2014
By ELAINE SCIOLINOMAY
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 Musee 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 Otzi, 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.
“We wanted to capture the spirit of tattooing, which is part of the
common heritage of most of humanity,” said the museum’s director,
Stephane 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.
“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.
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.”