submit themselves to
some form of corporeal revision. But for nice people, the body
remained an undiscovered country,
far beyond the reach of human artifice. |
Body Art Paint with Hair and Flower Installation |
Body Art Paint with Parrot painted on upper front |
In most other societies, however, the body was the
first thing to be called into question.
From China to Peru, the irksome fixities of
inherited form were relentlessly challenged, until living tissue came to
be viewed as a kind of canvas to be adorned, a clay to be sculpted and
carved. Body Art presents us with images of Inca princes with conical
skulls and Nuba warriors whose bodies are painted to a supernatural
sheen. Dozens of tiny shoes, which once shod the bound feet of well-born
Chinese women, are set near pendulous weights that hung from the
elongated ears of the Zapotec Indians of Mexico. More appalling are the
ritualized scarifications of the Papuans of New Guinea, whose bodies
teem with hardened masses of patterned welts.
Ethnology aside, the real thrust of the show is the recent and
faddish introduction of tattoos and piercing into the mainstream of
modern industrial society. In tracing the history of tattoos in the
West, the curators have included reproductions of the watercolors of
John White, one of the first English men to visit the New World,
depicting the natives of Virginia, their fronts and backs marred with
mysterious symbols. We learn as well of such 19th-century characters as
Edith the Tattooed Lady and Mildred, "New York's Only Lady Tattooer."
Nearby are the tools of her trade, contraptions with spikes and cranks
and knobs that look for all the world like the implements of medieval
penitence.
Now that tattooing, like everything else, has become
computerized, it is a little more highbrow than in the past. True, most
customers still choose hoary standards like the Blessed Virgin, the
bulldog, and the rose. But one woman featured in Body Art, naked except
for her turban, has adorned her back with a reproduction of Joan Miro. A
young man has opted for Boldini's portrait of Verdi, while another has
chosen to cover his entire body, including his shaved head, in the
patterns of a jig-saw puzzle. No one, however, does it better than the
Japanese, though they have only relatively recently imported tattoos
from the West. Whereas Occidental tattoos are mostly isolated images
placed here and there on the skin, in Japan they have a much more
organic relation to the human form, their dizzily swirling dragons and
vines exploding across the body like fragments of a shattered
kaleidoscope.
How did it happen that this interest in
piercing and tattoos has made its way from the fringes of society to
the center, or very near it? It is a question that does not greatly
interest the curators of the exhibition. The closest they come to an
explanation is pure '90s boilerplate. "Body art allows people to
reinvent themselves as rebels," the
opening panel informs us, "to follow fashions, to play and experiment
with new identities.
Like performance artists and actors,
people in everyday life use body art to cross boundaries of gender,
national identity, and cultural stereotypes."
Of course, there is more to it than that. As with any cultural current,
even the simplest, this new taste is a composite of heartfelt
convictions and half-formed ideas. It engages that spirit of
nonconformity, real or feigned, that has been lodged in our collective
semi- consciousness since the '60s. Both the biker who covers his body
with skulls and the coed who chooses a rose for her ankle or a ring for
her lip believe that they are engaging in acts of nonconformity. "I knew
that my mother would hate it,"one polite young woman remarks, by way of
motive, in a taped interview for the exhibit. Her attitude is in curious
contrast to that of the inhabitants of New Guinea, Ama zonia, and Sudan,
where such practices originated and where, invariably, they represent
the most ent renched conformity to inherited cultural patterns.
In part, tattoos reflect that convergence of high and low culture
that defines much of postmodern society. This convergence ex presses
itself in everything from the graffiti art of Jean-Michel Bas quiat to
the casual clothes donned in the boardrooms of Silicon Valley. By
wearing a tattoo, by co- opting the insignia of popular culture, even
outlaw culture, one seems to embrace the person at the fringes of
society. The process of assimilation is an interesting one. The
glamorous world of high fashion and high culture dips into the
"colorful" world of the fringes, and five years later these borrowings
filter down into the middle class, where they eventually expire. Put
another way, piercings and tattoos have passed from bohemia and the
inner city into our elite college campuses, only to end up in suburbia.
 Perhaps
the best explanation of the new fashion is contained in two tiny
questions that go to the heart of postmodern society: Why not? and What
if? From electronic books to virtual reality, from online universities
and same-sex marriages to cloning and S&M, the spirit of the age
expresses itself in a restive and reflexive calling into question of all
things. The very fact that something is a cultural given, that it has
been established for as long as men can remember, is sufficient to make
it an object of suspicion and a target of radical revision. Part of what
drives the taste for tattoos is the collective awakening to the fact
that the body, which Western society has traditionally viewed as
inviolable, as the most fixed of all things, can indeed be altered by
conscious art. In this sense, body art, like cosmetic surgery, is the
flashy epidermal counterpart to pace-makers and a whole generation of
cloned and bionic parts that, science assures us, lies just around the
corner.
One cannot say how long the taste for piercings and tattoos will last.
What is certain is that, with the promise of ever-longer life spans, a
whole generation in its teens and twenties will have many years to
reflect on, and perhaps to repent of, these all-too-permanent whims of
their youth. Author James Gardner COPYRIGHT National Review, Inc. and Gale Group
Body image: are tattoos taboo?
Salvador Dali had his mustache, Andy Warhol
had his wig, and Wendy O. Williams had her duct tape. Artists have
always drawn outside the lines in their work and their lives, decorating
themselves as an extended form of creative expression. Over the years,
the age-old art of tattooing has gained new currency, growing
increasingly popular as an individual--and indelible--declaration of
self. If you're a painter, a writer, a comic, of a rock star, you can
ink yourself as often as you like, but if you're a working dancer, your
body is your instrument. Beyond movement, how much freedom do you have
to express yourself with it?
Dance companies are more lenient about tattoos than you might expect,
and certainly more so than they once were. Urban Ballet Theater artistic
director Daniel Catanach, for example, has no objections to his dancers
having tattoos, and didn't think tattoos would have been a problem when
he danced with Karole Armitage. But when he danced at the School of
American Ballet and Kansas City Ballet, he said the dancers would
scarcely have dared. "We were too afraid," he said. "We didn't do
anything--we didn't even speak."
company administrator put it, "Obviously,
Siegfried doesn't have a tattoo.") San Francisco Ballet spokesperson
Kyra Jablonsky said they have no official policy but, like tans or very
short hair for women, "If someone changes their look in a way that is
drastically different from the look of the company, they will be
expected to cover it up or fix it. Women with really short hair wear
falls for romantic roles; those with tans powder themselves, and tattoos
are covered with makeup."
That's the case at Houston Ballet, says corps de ballet member
Peter Gleeson. He agrees that a tattoo would look out of place in a
classical ballet, although he has danced for contemporary choreographers
who liked his tattoos and incorporated them into the costuming.
"Everyone has their idea of what's beautiful of cool," he said. Gleeson
got the Chinese symbol for dance imprinted on his lower back when he was
a student in Houston's ballet academy. Before he began dancing, he had a
large dragon's head tattooed on his shoulder. Recently he had his
family's coat of arms tattoed on his other shoulder. He sees his tattoos
as a natural extension of his dancing journey. "Tattoos mark a time and
place in your life," he says. "They're a road map." He can think of at
least a half-dozen other dancers in his company who have tattoos too.
"It's really a large part of our culture," he said "A tattoo creates
something more personal; it helps you stand out, and catch a person's
eye."
Brian McCormick, a critic and the managing director of
nicholasleichterdance (See "25 to Watch," January 2002, page 67) agrees,
but it's the eye-catching aspect that he objects to. "For a viewer it
can be distracting," he said. "It's their bodies, but it pricks you out
of your viewing of what's happening. It's like 'Oh, what is that?' I saw
a dancer recently with a really beautiful costume but she had a tattoo
on her back, and it didn't look like the costume was designed with that
in mind. It got in the way of what was happening movement-wise."
McCormick said Leichter's company has no rules about tattoos, and
wouldn't rule out a dancer for having one. But because the work,
non-narrative "pore" dance, "is very much about the group and the
relationships in the group," nobody wears jewelry onstage, and dancers
would be asked to cover tattoos. None of the company's dancers have
visible tattoos, although some have piercings, which they remove before
performances for partnering safety as well as for aesthetics. "The body
is a vehicle of communication," McCormack said. "I guess that's really
the main issue for me."
Dancer-choreographer Kriota Willberg takes a similar position. "As an
audience member during performances, I've often found that something
like a tattoo catches nay eye, and if I like it, I stop watching the
dancing, and start watching the tattoo itself move around the stage.
This pushed me to decide to put my tattoo on my hip, so that it could be
hidden if need be," she says.
 
Kimani Fowlin, who teaches at Rutgers University Mason Gross School of
the Arts, argues that tattoos transform the body into living art.
Fowlin's back is tattooed with Kali Ma, the Hindu goddess of dance and
destruction, and she has a snake-like form near her pelvis. She round no
problems at M'zawa Danz, a mix of modern, hip-hop, and African dance led
by a tattooed choreographer, Maia Claire Garrison. The same was true of
African company Harambee and the modern choreographer Andrea E. Woods,
although the wardrobe in Woods' period pieces required that the dancers
cover up anyway. "It's a part of me," said Fowlin, who also has nose and
navel piereings. "If they tell me that [I can't have them], I know that
I can't be a part of that company."
Bradley Shelver also got his tattoos
with dance specifically in mind. Shelver has performed with Ailey II,
Elisa Monte Dance, Complexions, and as a guest artist with ballet
companies. He got his tattoos his first year in New York: Like Gleeson,
he has the Chinese symbol for dance tattooed on one ankle, and a pair of
footprints surrounded by the sun tattooed on his hip. At Ailey, he was
told to cover them up; with Monte, whose work he says "is all about the
physical body and its beauty," the director let the dancers show them.
"I have always felt that dance would stay in my life and therefore with
me forever," he said. "I wanted to take that a step further, so that
people could know the importance it has in my life. I consider them to
be a reminder of how difficult but emotionally rewarding dance is."
Most dancers have not found their tattoos to be a problem in getting
roles. "I've never been turned down because of my tattoos," said Fabio
Tavares, a performer with Streb. "In some cases, choreographers even
want to show the tattoos. Only one time was I required to cover a
tattoo, and I think it had more to do with the character in the piece
than the choreographer's preference."
Tamieca McCloud, a former Pilobolus dancer and artistic director of
Restless Native Dance, agrees. "I haven't been turned down because of my
tattoos--body art paint or nay brow piercing--at least not to nay
knowledge," she notes.
So how do dancers reconcile their love of tattoos with their love of
dance? Creatively, of course. Some get tattooed and body art paint
in less visible places, like Michael Waiters, who had his hips tattooed
after he left Juilliard and before he landed a job with Nederlands Darts
Theater, which be described as fairly conservative. When she needs to,
Fowlin covers her ink and body paint with costumes or regular
foundation. Gleeson has used flesh-colored tape, and he's partial to Ben
Nye tattoo and body art paint cover-up. "It's a very thick, heavy
makeup," he said. "I usually do two layers plus setting powder. If you
take time to match the skin color, you can be standing next to someone
and they won't even know."
Most dancers have a good sense of what's appropriate, said Gleeson's
boss, Houston Ballet artistic director Stanton Welch. "I've never heard
of a policy in my travels. There's always someone with a tattoo, and
they always cover them up. I don't know how fashionable they were--it's
definitely a fashion now. The funny part is, they're not that visible in
the audience. You think everyone can see them but they just look like a
birthmark."
Welch said he has seen tattoos incorporated
into the work. "We've had costumes where we actually made tattoos and
body paint--X, at The Australian Ballet, and Taiko at San Francisco
Ballet. It's no problem as long as, depending on the ballet, dancers can
cover them up." Welch doesn't have any himself, although he has
contemplated getting one. The problem, he said wryly, is that, "You have
to have a body part that will stay the same shape for the rest of your
life. I don't know what that would be on me."
Heather Wisner, a former DM associate editor, is a freelance writer.
COPYRIGHT Dance Magazine, Inc. COPYRIGHT Gale Group
Welch said he has seen tattoos incorporated into the work. "We've had
costumes where we actually made tattoos--X, at The Australian Ballet,
and Taiko at San Francisco Ballet. It's no problem as long as, depending
on the ballet, dancers can cover them up." Welch doesn't have any
himself, although he has contemplated getting one. The problem, he said
wryly, is that, "You have to have a body part that will stay the same
shape for the rest of your life. I don't know what that would be on me."
Author
Heather Wisner, a former DM associate editor, is a freelance writer.
COPYRIGHT Dance Magazine, Inc.& Gale Group
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