Ink-Stained Wretches - Body Art: Marks of Identity exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History, New York, New York

National Review, June 5, 2000 by James Gardner

MOST of us view the human body as a rental rather than a condo: We have the use of it during the brief season of our tenancy, but we are loath to initiate any permanent modifications beyond those dictated by nature and medical necessity. Which is to say that we have no intention of getting ourselves pierced, scarified, or tattooed if we can possibly help it.

But if this is the majority opinion, the majority is shrinking every day. By treating the current fad for piercings and tattoos, a new exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History in Man hattan addresses a cultural phenomenon that can no longer be ignored. It concerns the first frontier of primitive cultures and the last frontier of our own, the human body itself. Near the entrance to Body Art: Marks of Identity stands an Athenian red- figure vase portraying a tattooed Thracian, a barbarian living at the fringes of the known world. For over 2,000 years, this was about as close as our society came to body art. Surely hair styles and clothes, those vain "lendings" that Lear flung off in his madness, were subject to infinite variation. And surely pirates, lowlifes, and drunken sailors might 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.

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 piercings 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 piercings 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.