"People put urns on their mantle and to me, my tattoos are more meaningful than an urn on the mantle," says [the son]. "It's an actual piece of a person that symbolises something."...I haven't mentioned this in a long time, but for many years, I maintained the opinion that the best blog post I ever wrote was "Tattoos remind you of death," written in 2005. It was about a Belgian artist, Wim Delvoye, who had a place in China called Art Farm, where pigs were raised and tattooed. When the pigs eventually died — we're told they got to live until they died of natural causes — their skins were removed and turned into wall art.
"When my husband passed away, half of me passed away with him," [Wentzel's widow] says. "I didn't know what to do. I just knew he wanted this preservation done. I had to set aside my own emotion to get this part done."
Ms Wenzel chose the pieces to be preserved - two full sleeve tattoos including the top of Chris' hands, his throat and chest piece, his full back piece, two thigh pieces and calf piece. It was the largest tattoo preservation the Sherwoods had done....
The quote from Delvoye was: "The Art Farm is a real enterprise and by selling, eventually, the skins, the whole thing gets financed and I can go on... Tattoos remind you of death. It's leaving something permanent on something non-permanent.... Even when tattooing flowers, there is a morbid side to the activity."
From my post:
I agree: tattoos do remind you of death. When I see someone with a tattoo, I usually think: you're going to have that as part of your body until the day you die. And then you're going to have that on your body in your grave. You and that tattoo are in a death grip....What was good for the pigs is good for the humans. Why call it a "sleeve tattoo" if you don't envision slipping it off like a shirt?
[T]here's the question whether we're outraged about the use of pigs or about going to rural China to do the project. And if we're outraged about both, which is worse? Maybe it's kind of a positive thing, though, both for the pigs and the villagers.
Surely, the villagers must be getting some laughs -- perhaps at the expense of Westerners generally. Maybe we Westerners should be irked that some egoistic artist is making us look ridiculous.
For the pigs, it's a nice life. They get to take sedatives, so they probably enjoy the tattooing experience. Then, they are "raised carefully" until they die a natural death. Think of the pig alternatives. These pigs are living like kings!
And what of the rich folk with tattooed pig skins hanging on their walls? I think the final artwork might look quite nice, and they're not exploiting poor Chinese any more than you are when you buy cheap leather shoes made in China. In fact, it's less exploitative, and the Chinese are learning tattooing skills. Maybe they will emigrate here and tattoo your ass for you as a memento mori.
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39 comments:
I have never understood what is artful about personal mutilation.
“Tan me hide when I’ve died, Clyde, tan me hide when I’ve died”. - Tie Me Kangaro Down
Rather than frame the skin why not make something useful.
Like lampshades.
John Henry
The radiant past has made brilliant promises to the future: it will keep them. To scrape together my sentences I needs must employ the natural method, regressing to the savages so they may give me lessons. Simple and majestic gentlemen, their gracious mouths ennoble all that flows from their tattooed lips.
- Lautreamont, who finds tattoos comical
I see Nobody beat me to it although I thought of a different part:
“So we tanned his hide when he died, Clyde
And that's it hangin' on the shed!”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_D-LmRNdQiQ
“"The Art Farm is a real enterprise and by selling, eventually, the skins, the whole thing gets financed and I can go on... Maybe they will emigrate here and tattoo your ass for you as a memento mori. What was good for the pigs is good for the humans.... These pigs are living like kings!”
Some tattoos are more equal than others.
Ed Gein
Ilse Koch.
Tank has a Gibson SG tattooed on his arm. He will be glad to take it with him into the next world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXhbZu1tifg
Half the charm of that song was its absurdity.
It’s almost as if the soul of a person resides not inside them, but rather on the surface.
Death becomes only a skin deep experience.
I always find it strange when I stumble onto old albums of photographs at estate sales. At one time those images were prized possessions.
After the deaths of one or two generations they become meaningless and lose all apparent value.
I suppose in a hundred years or so, the walls of Cracker Barrel’s will be adorned with human skin.
this helps to show Why GOD see tattoos as an Abomination (Leviticus 19:28)
Roald Dahl, I think, had a short story about an obscure artist that tattooed a random bum. Then the artist became famous. Then a collector discovered the existence of the bum. You know the rest of the story.
Effing nutjobs.
Tats are one of the worst things of modern life.
There’s a reality contest show called Ink Masters. After the tattoo is permanently affixed to the “human canvass” the judges render their judgment. They are frequently quite harsh and point out all the flaws and mistakes. The people stuck with the tat - forever - are listening. Idiots all.
Roald Dahl, I think, had a short story about an obscure artist that tattooed a random bum. Then the artist became famous. Then a collector discovered the existence of the bum. You know the rest of the story.
Saki did one first, and probably better (I'm a fan): The Background
Lots to think about. I have never wanted a tattoo (well, maybe when I was very young), but it has become a huge phenomenon. Very roughly: permanent or lasting things used to be communal or shared by many, like great buildings. Great art or books were less likely to last. (Recently I've become interested in the theory that the main reason ancient Greek and Roman books disappeared was not Christian "book burning," but the sheer fact that it was a hell of a lot of work to copy out a book, character by character, and with wars and (indeed) a change in religions, and increasing illiteracy, it was harder to find one person to pay for it, and another person to do it). Now tattoos are more or less lasting and "permanent" (unless the skin ends up in the ground) in a world where we are constantly told everything is ephemeral. For tattoos people choose from templates, but there is lots of room to be individual or idiosyncratic. The same template may end up looking very different on different people.
A small joke: I knew a guy who was divorced and went "back" into the dating scene in middle age. He was surprised at the sexual assertiveness of women compared to when he was young. One woman, younger than him, had visible tattoos. To get the conversation going he asked what they conveyed. She pulled away various items of clothing to expose various dramatic images, each with its own story. One included the name of a former boyfriend, let's say Darrell. My comment was: has anyone seen Darrell recently? Do we know what happened to him?
Someone should alert them to the recently developed daguerreotype, which promises to capture the images of their tattoos. Who wants to walk around in the afterlife without those beautiful tattoos that are so important to their self-identity?
"People put urns on their mantle and to me, my tattoos are more meaningful than an urn on the mantle," says [the son]. "It's an actual piece of a person that symbolises something."
Norman Bates found an alternative that was even more meaningful, and cheaper too.
The epidermis is a blank canvas, which is colored to make an impression. I don't treasure it, but it's not wicked. Flaying the skin, a colorful clump of cells, is clearly, obviously weird.
Why would anyone want to preserve for posterity the evidence of their stupidity or lack of taste while they were living?
The Art of the Peel.
"Tatt's All, Folks!
this is just Looney Tunes
People who get tattooed are mentally ill.
People who have their tattoos preserved after they die are really mentally ill.
However, if their objective is to disgust and repel normal people, mission accomplished.
There is a cashier at the place where my wife gets her nails done who has a ring through the septum of her nose. It resembles the nose rings one sometimes see in depictions of domestic cattle. Whenever I see her, I have to suppress the urge to ask her if that's what they use when they tie her up in the back yard.
She also has these strange black patterns on her arms. They look like she got drunk at a party, fell asleep, and woke up after someone had scribbled on her with a ballpoint pen.
Absent those self-mutilations, while no raving beauty, she'd be reasonably nice-looking.
Sad!
Saki did one first, and probably better (I'm a fan): The Background
Me too! The Clovis ones are some of my favorites.
Dahl's story was "Skin". Rad Bradbury also had a short story about a tattooed man called "The Illustrated Man".
There was a cashier at the drugstore I go to. He was chunky and undistinguished in his looks save for the tattoo on his arm. It really caught your eye. It was a tattoo of some kind of tree with graceful hanging branches. The tattoo was very delicate and, if you saw it as a sketch on paper, you would say it was lovely. However, the sketch was on the skin of a clerk in a drugstore........I never knew the backstory. It looked expensive, but he couldn't have been making much money. I wonder if the tattoo helped him get girls. He wasn't particularly good looking, but the tattoo was. I wonder what effect, if any, a really beautiful tattoo has on its wearer. Some tattoos are really repulsive, and you can't help but feel repulsed by the people who wear them. I wonder if beautiful tattoos have the reverse effect.........They say the past is a foreign country where they do things different. After you pass a certain age, it's the present that's the foreign country......I don't have a clue as to why someone would want a tattoo or how that tattoo would shape their life.
If tattoos are an art, couldn't there be some way for the tattoo artist to create that same art on another medium . . . say, oh I don't know, maybe canvas or paper, rather than having to flay corpses and put their body parts on display?
Yeah, and keeping an urn of ashes on a mantel is disgusting too.
It was a tattoo of some kind of tree with graceful hanging branches
A muscular nurse at the ER where I spent yesterday had 3-4 nicely detailed 8" fir trees stuck randomly up one arm. His right arm was unblotched, so he looked unbalanced.
Can grafting the tattoo onto another living human be far away?
That Art Farm is awesome. I'll try to bring that up next time I'm dealing with an annoying person with a tat. (pointing) "Oh hey, that reminds me of.."
Blogger William said...
the sketch was on the skin of a clerk in a drugstore........I never knew the backstory. It looked expensive, but he couldn't have been making much money.
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Conspicuous tats can limit the upward mobility.
Sadly, the two adopted kids of my brother (both with learning disabilities) got tats the moment they turned 18. I've yet to ask him whether there was any discussion of that since neither one is making much money and still living at home.
When I see a beautiful woman with disfiguring tats, I can't help but think how many hours some dude wearing a backwards baseball cap labored on her canvas.
Blogger alanc709 said...
"I have never understood what is artful about personal mutilation."
See; "Rusty's theory of spandex, piercings and tatoos."
Continually amazes me that people with tattoos thing those tattoos are attractive.
I was wondering when this day would come. Just a week or so after Althouse's 2005 post, I jokingly suggested that a cottage industry in tattoo taxidermy would no doubt be taking off.
It took a little longer than I thought. Should've trademarked the term...
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/10008657_irezumi. A Japanese art film. Tatooing!
When I first started working in special collections at my ESU library, one of the first things I learned was that tattoos were going to take off . . . or, go on. Students who looked like they would otherwise not be caught dead in the library would come in asking about the often rare and expensive books we had on the exotic art of skin-decorating, and they usually sported a few amateur looking tattoos themselves. Sure enough it mushroomed. That would have been the mid-80s.
Ten years before, the only person I recall on campus with any tattooing besides some physical plant guys, was an art history prof who had been in the navy. He had one, small, rose-bloom tattoo on a forearm (at least that's all that showed).
Now callow freshmen come equipped with enough tattoos for a small Maori warband . . . and don't even mention the boys!
Narr
Fine people, the Maori
File this under things I don’t want to inherit.
There is flayed alive. Now there is flayed dead.
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