Back to the Body: Tattoo Art as Identity and Cultural Memory

In one of his songs Jimmy Buffett sings "It's a permanent reminder of a temporary feeling," and indeed for me, that is what a tattoo is. It is a means of embodying memories or fleeting moments in a tangible, physical way. For over 5000 years tattoos have been used cross-culturally for numerous different reasons (National Geographic.com). Until the last two decades of the twentieth century in North American popular culture, academics recognized tattooing as a semiotic representation of pathology & deviancy (Kosut 76). Today, tattoo art is not only less taboo than it once was, but it has also outgrown its roots as a subversive subculture and become a prominent aspect of popular culture. When did this shift in cultural and collective memory come about? What socio-cultural changes occurred in the last two centuries that caused the transformation of a tattoo from being a mark of deviance, to a mark of normative expression?
The discourse surrounding tattoo art has certainly changed the cultural categorization of people with tattoos. Recently, tattooing has been designated as a meaningful way to modify the body and a valuable cultural form (Kosut 75). Through a series of interviews with individuals of various ages and backgrounds, my aim is to gain a better understanding of tattoo art and its current status in Toronto’s artistic landscape. I am hoping to get a sense of why this bodily practice has taken on such significance, because as Olick and Robbins point out “it is virtually impossible to discuss collective memory without highlighting historical developments in the material means of memory transmission” (113). For the purposes of this endeavor I will be qualifying tattoos as a “material means of memory transmission”. This is because I am acknowledging the individual body as a site of political transformation, as Tobin Siebers suggests the “personal is not necessarily political… but the political is always personal” (227). Through the recording of these personal accounts I hope to uncover changing perceptions of this art form over time and explore its place within the larger discourse of the body politic.
In a culture that is driven by consumerism and capitalism, it has become easy for us to abandon our bodies. We are living in a toxic environment, a place where the rich profit off of our deteriorating bodies. For example, the Chisso Corporation’s Chemical Factories in Minamata, Japan were only forced to stop dumping mercury compounds into the water after thousands of people had suffered brain damage, paralysis, and deformation (233). I propose that the discourse surrounding tattoo art has transformed because it is a means of reclaiming that lost connection to our bodies. It is a way for people, especially women who are expected to achieve a very specific standard of beauty, to shape their own physical identities and rebel against the prescribed beauty ideal. Throughout this process, I will explore the work of body artists such as Orlan and Stelarc, who will hopefully give me insight into this cultural movement back to our bodies. I will also be talking to a range of people, from professional tattoo artists and apprentices to people both with and without body art. I think that this will be an interesting endeavor as Siebers suggests, “change in the human body and mind is most significant when it forces us to face our inherent mutability and not when it presents human beings as bombastically perfect and unvarying” (220).