Inked Encounters and Expanded Narratives: Exploring the Tattoo Medium in Contemporary Art
My dissertation investigates the appearance of tattoos within 21st-century avant-garde art. Recognizing the ways in which the West has historically marked tattooed peoples as ‘deviant’ or ‘other’, I argue that tattoos have the power to amplify narratives of oppressed and disenfranchised populations within environments that perceive tattoos as ‘nonnormative’. The four case studies of popular trends in tattoo art that appear in my dissertation explore the historic implications of the medium, while also offering the first multi-faceted analysis of tattoos within art history. The first of these case studies addresses the creation of digital tattoo hybrids, objects which highlight the medium’s ability to encourage the ‘reading’ of physical bodies in an increasingly digital world. The second case study explores the skin’s ability to act as a symbolic borderline, especially when adorned with critical geographies (tattooed maps) that gift the wearer with the ability to reclaim and revise national narratives. Case study three examines inkless tattoo performances, wounding events that produce opportunities to heal personal and collective trauma. Finally, the fourth case study takes the history of tattooed skin collections as a starting point for discussing the potential futures of contemporary tattoo objects and the relative impossibility of ethical acquisition. Through the following chapters, I argue that each of these case studies not only reveal the tattoo’s ability to represent the experiences of marginalized populations, but also the ways in which its qualities aid in the witnessing of these narratives and in many instances work to enact individual and communal change.
