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Visiting\u00a0Tattoo: British Tattoo Art Revealed<\/a>, National Maritime Museum, Falmouth for New Scientist, 1 July 2017<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n TURN left as you enter\u00a0Tattoo: British Tattoo Art Revealed<\/i>, and you will be led through the history of a venerable and flourishing folk art. Turn right and you will confront a wall of 100 disembodied forearms. They aren\u2019t real, which is a nuisance for the artists who tattooed them \u2013 since silicone is nothing like as easy to work with as human skin \u2013 but a comfort for the rest of us.<\/p>\n Alice Snape, editor of\u00a0Things & Ink<\/i>\u00a0magazine, curated this wall to showcase the range of work by today\u2019s tattoo artists in the UK. But you really need to see the rest of the exhibition first. You need time to contemplate the problem Snape\u2019s\u00a0100 Hands<\/i>\u00a0is there to solve, that this is an exhibition whose subject is entitled to wander off, and cover up.<\/p>\n There\u2019s something frustratingly arch about tattooing. Tattooists jealously guard their stencilled designs (called \u201cflashes\u201d) even as they create pieces that, by their very nature, come with their own sales reps. Clients (perhaps influenced by 2005\u2019s reality show\u00a0Miami Ink<\/i>) wax lyrical on the deeply personal stories behind their tats, then plaster photos of them all over Instagram.<\/p>\n Practitioners exploit their liminal status even while they bemoan their lack of recognition. In a show full of repeating figures and useful (though never intrusive) signposting, my favourites were the boards that tell you \u201cwhat the papers said\u201d at different times in history. Every generation, it seems, has come to the same startling realisation that \u201ctattoos aren\u2019t just for sailors\u201d, yet the information never seems to stick. Tattooing is an art that does not want to be fully known.<\/p>\n The problem facing the show\u2019s curators is: how do you define the limits of your enquiry? If the art has to be invited in, cajoled, reassured, even flattered into taking part, how do you stop shaky inclusion criteria from compromising objectivity?<\/p>\n Natural history solved the problem long ago. The rule used to be that if you wanted to study something you went out and shot it: the rifle was as much part of your kit as your magnifying glass. The Maoris of Polynesia, aware of the value Western visitors put on souvenirs, used to catch people, tattoo their faces, decapitate them and sell their heads to collectors. The draughtsman aboard Charles Darwin\u2019s ship the Beagle had a travel box lined with the tattooed skin of dead Maori warriors.<\/p>\n These days the tattooed collect themselves. Geoff Ostling, for one, has arranged for his heavily (and beautifully) tattooed skin to go to the National Gallery of Australia after he dies. Gemma Angel, an adviser to this exhibition, spent her doctoral study among the 300 or so items in the Wellcome Collection\u2019s archive of human skin, and she reckons there\u2019s a growing interest in post-mortem tattoo preservation.<\/p>\n It is to this exhibition\u2019s great credit that it takes no time at all to find a voice pinpointing exactly what is so discomforting about this idea. In a cabinet of personal testimonies I find this remark by a Catherine Marston: \u201cTattoo is an art form but I don\u2019t think they should be collected because when a person dies they die too. You hear of some really weird designers that use skin that\u2019s cut afterwards, once they die then that goes on display. I think that diminishes the whole idea of a tattoo. It\u2019s art with a time zone rather than timeless.\u201d<\/p>\n Such voices are valuable here because even this democratic, eclectic exhibition can\u2019t quite capture the shuddering intimacy of the form it celebrates. Tattoos are not just artworks, they are also performances. Getting a tattoo hurts just enough to make you dizzy, and lodges that intimate moment in your memory.<\/p>\n Though the art is the point of the show, it would not work nearly so well without the artefacts it has borrowed from working tattooists and from the Science Museum in London. People make tattoo guns out of virtually anything that vibrates. The first machines were made out of Victorian doorbells. You can salivate at images all you like, but nothing gets under the skin like a doorbell-based tattoo gun once wielded by Johnny Two-Thumbs of Hong Kong.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Visiting\u00a0Tattoo: British Tattoo Art Revealed, National Maritime Museum, Falmouth for New Scientist, 1 July 2017 TURN left as you enter\u00a0Tattoo: British Tattoo Art Revealed, and you will be led through the history of a venerable and flourishing folk art. Turn … Continue reading <\/div>\n