I turn now to the consideration of individual art forms as structure- and content-providing aspects of artistic meaning in the visual arts. As noted before, I’ll consider in turn bodily modifications and decorations, especially tattooing, then textiles and ceramics, and finally (for the purposes of a first draft) masking. The second draft will continue with considerations of drawing, painting, and sculpture, but since I have in recent years written a great deal on these art forms (see, for example, my blog posts on Mu Qi’s Six Persimmons), I’ll save consideration of those topics for the later draft.
I have found the philosophical consideration of tattooing as an art form to be of exceptional difficulty, in particular because of the seemingly endless complexity of the issues, the relative lack (in comparison with all the other art forms to be treated) of philosophical, art-historical, and art-critical thinking on the form, and the difficulty or impossibility of access to the vast range of works and its most accomplished instances (or even knowing what those might be). So here I’ll offer a two-fold consideration—top-down (philosophical) and bottom-up (evolutionary)—with philosophical remarks on the category of body modification and adornment, and with remarks on the emergence of the forms from everyday practices. Then I’ll summarize and reflect on the best documented instances of tattooing with a claim to artistic status, Polynesian tattooing, in particular the extensive documentation of the practice in the Marquesas Islands and its canonical anthropological account in the writings of Alfred Gell.
In Reason in Art (1905), the philosopher George Santayana introduces the concept of art with the assertion that “any operation” that “humanizes and rationalizes objects is called art” (Santayana, p.9). An arrow replaces a footprint, or a well-planted orchard replaces a disordered room—the footprint and the room betray some agent’s habits, but the arrow and orchard are expressions of the material embodiments of the agent’s intentions, and so (instances of) art. Footprints and arrows are both based upon instincts, as the former are the products of habits, the latter the products of arts, that arise to satisfy the needs, interests, and desires arising from and motivated by instincts. As expressions of intention, arts have purposes, and so through practice develop characteristic methods of realizing those intentions. As historical and social, the methods are practiced as routines, and so the their routines carry with them a sense of rationality, even if the artist is not typically conscious of the art’s purposes: “Thus weaving is an art, although the weaver may not be at every moment conscious of its purpose, but may be carried along, like any other workman, by the routine of his art” (p. 10). Santayana immediately adds that because of their routine nature, arts “are no less automatic than instincts” (ibid). Santayana goes on to posit a typology of the arts: the oldest are the ‘spontaneous arts’, which arise from basic aspects of life and action (p. 31; one would wish from Santayana greater explication and examples); then the ‘useful arts’ such as ship-building that involve devising elaborate instruments; and the fine arts of music, speech, prose, the plastic constructions of architecture and sculpture, and the plastic representations of drawing and painting. Later in Art as Experience (1934) John Dewey, with explicit reference to Santayana, partially takes up and transforms Santayana’s conceptualization in a way that carves out a place for the putative arts of adornment. Because of the unfamiliarity of the points, I give the full quotation: “When we view the arts from the standpoint of media and expression, the broad distinction that confronts us is between the arts that have the human organism, the mind-body, of the artist as their medium and those which depend to a much greater extent upon materials external to the body: automatic and shaping arts so-called. Dancing, singing, yarn-spinning—the prototype of the literary arts in connection with song—are examples of “automatic” arts, and so are bodily scarifications, tattooings, etc., and the cultivation of the body by the Greeks in games and gymnasia. Cultivation of voice, posture, and gesture that adds grace to social intercourse is another.” (Dewey, p.227) It’s not at all clear to me that Dewey’s conception of ‘automatic arts’ coincides with Santayana’s conception of ‘spontaneous arts’, since, if nothing else (and if I understand Santayana rightly), for Santayana automaticity is a feature of all arts in their routine practice. Still, Dewey treats it as unproblematic to consider tattooing and scarification as arts on the same level with dance and song; all are organized expressive practices whose products necessarily have material embodiments. What distinguishes tattooing and scarification from other arts is just the character of their medium, that is, the human body itself. Unsurprisingly, neither Santayana nor Dewey anywhere (to my knowledge) develop this basic conceptual determination into an account of the (putative) artforms of tattooing and scarification, and so a fortiori offer nothing explicit on the distinctive kinds of artistic meaning they provide.
The intellectual situation is similarly sparsely populated in what seems to me the most illuminating of bottom-up approaches, Ellen Dissanayake’s account of ‘making special’. I have discussed Dissanayake’s account earlier in this draft, so to recall and re-summarize: in her works in the 1980s and 1990s, culminating in the book Homo Aestheticus, Dissanayake posited a basic kind of human behavior, ‘making special’, wherein human beings alter what are otherwise ordinary features of their bodies, their environments, and their artifacts so as to make them more salient, more striking, more attractive, more puzzling, etc. The central manifestations of this behavior in human life are in play, in ritual, and in the arts. In Art and Intimacy (2000) she claims that making-special is rooted in the earliest human interactions between infants and their ‘mothers’ (that is, anyone caring for the infant), and is readily seen in the human universal of ‘motherese’, the caregivers’ sing-song language and exaggerated facial expressions. After the year 2000 she re-names this behavioral tendency ‘artification’ and repeatedly characterizes it with five features: formalization, repetition, exaggeration, elaboration, and manipulation of expectation (such as ‘peek-a-boo’). In a series of papers up to the present she analyzes the origins of various arts in light of artification, and further applies it to understanding the widespread early human phenomenon of ‘cupules’, making rounded depressions in rocks.
On her full account, then, making-special/artification arises phylogenetically in infant-mother interactions as an evolutionary adaptation to the lengthy immaturity of human infants, that is, their long period of caring required for their survival and maturation into minimally self-sufficient beings. This evolved feature is then ‘exapted’, that is, adapted to further needs, namely to addressing the pervasive anxiety arising in humans from their awareness of death and their precarious existence (Dissanayake repeatedly cites the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski on this point), and to sustaining and re-invigorating humans social bonds in festivity, song, dance, communal religious ecstasies, etc. Dissanayake repeatedly stresses that her account of making-special/artification is not an account of the arts; this behavioral tendency manifests itself much more broadly than in the arts, as she is at pains to show. And she readily agrees that any account of the arts and of art forms will require further philosophical, anthropological, sociological, and historical material. So while one readily recognizes arts of bodily modification as expressions of artification, her methodological focus does not allow her to develop an account of any art form, including tattooing.
In my theoretical desperation to find an account of tattooing as an art form, and in the spirit of Aristotle’s methodological precept of collecting the opinions of the many and the wise, over the past few days I have asked a large selection of Berkeley California’s tattooed baristas for their opinions on the artistic status of their tattoos. One offered a sensible piece of philosophizing that perhaps in certain instances tattoos might constitute artworks, but that neither her tattoos nor her magnificent hair-stylings were artworks, only rather just kinds of adornment. Most others affirmed upon reflection that (a) their tattoos were artworks; and further that (b) the identical images on a piece of paper would also be artworks; with the qualifications that (b’) the same images painted upon the skin would be the same artworks, but with an added resonance; and (b’’) the evident permanence of the tattooed images adds a further resonant dimension. The kinds of meaningfulness that accrued to the bodily images stems from their expressions as marks of personal identity, and the permanence of the tattoo adds as certain existential seriousness to the artwork.
The few recent discussions of tattooing in Anglo-American philosophy are somewhat cruder versions of the baristas’ views. For example, the author of perhaps the most prominent relevant article, Eva Dadlez, offers little more than the bland assertion that “For a tattoo to be art, it needs to reflect on the body in some way or another.” The one relevant sustained philosophical account known to me comes from the philosopher Stephen Davies book Adornment: What Self-Decoration Tells Us About Who We Are (2020).
Davies argues for two claims: 1. Human beings are self-adorners, where ‘adornment’ (or ‘ornamentation’) means making something aesthetically special (‘beautiful or sublime’ (p. 21), typically without thereby changing the physical identity of what is adorned (p. 24); and 2. Adornments are for the most part not artworks, nor does their application change what they adorn into an artwork. The first claim strikes me as the less problematic of the two, in that the restriction of adornment to aesthetic enhancement, itself understood in terms of and restricted to the beautiful and the sublime, seems to narrow, given the extraordinary range of adornments trans-culturally and -historically; but of course as stated by Davies one would need explication of what he means by the terms ‘beautiful’ and ‘sublime’ to evaluate his views. In any case the term ‘adornment’ is capacious, as it includes tattoos, scarification, tooth-filing, neck-stretching, forehead flattening, foot-binding, body painting, hair-styling, and jewelry. The second claim, that adornments are not artworks, which as stated here seems to represent Davies’ ‘official’ view, is immediately heavily qualified in the text. On Davies account artworks are artifacts whose original or typical primary function is to be for aesthetic pleasure and contemplation, and for it to realize this function it must achieve some degree of aesthetic value (p.28). Also, artworks have a kind of aesthetic integrity, completeness, and wholeness that adornments typically lack; as he puts it, “artworks are appreciated for their individuality as complete, self-contained wholes and, as a result, are not regarded as adornments. They are made up of, not supplemented by, their aesthetic features.” (p. 31) However, if a putative adornment is integral to the meaning and/or fulfilled function of an artwork, then it’s not an adornment at all, but rather just part of an artwork. One immediately senses the need for an account (here missing) of artistic coherence and aesthetic wholeness. And then he immediately revokes the strictness of the distinction between artworks and adornments with the thought that “a society might invest so much attention and care in modes of aesthetic decoration that they take their places alongside music, painting, drama, and literature as among its art forms. Paper folding, quilt making, needlepoint, and flower arranging, as seriously practiced in some cultures, might be accepted as art forms, with their products recognized as works of art.” (p. 32) It would be cruel, but not obviously unfair, to characterize Davies ultimate view as ‘parts of artworks are not artworks except when they are’ and ‘adornments are not artworks except when they are’. With the qualifications Davies’s account, despite its initial seeming distinctiveness, turns out to be just a more elaborated version of Dadlez’s statement. I cannot see anything in these published accounts that rises to the philosophical level of Berkeley’s tattooed baristas, who at least offer some indications for thinking about kinds of artistic meaning that might be distinctive of tattooing practiced as an art form, meanings arising from the use of skin as a medium and from the evident permanence of the artistic tattoo.
The beginning of wisdom on the topic of the possible status of tattooing as an art form may (or may not) be to turn to the most extensive extant analysis of the most fully described practices of tattooing, Alfred Gell’s in Wrapping in Images. I have written about Gell previously, and will not repeat any of that other than to recall Gell’s precept that the anthropology of art should be carried out under the attitude of ‘methodological philistinism’, whereby the putative artwork is solely treated as an index of social meanings related to the agencies of the patron, maker, artifact itself, and/or its audience; and that his work on Polynesian tattooing must have been carried out at roughly the same time (late 1980s-early 1990s) that he was working on what were to become his revolutionary essays on art, the essay on technology and enchantment and the essay on artworks as traps, and he does in the book unemphatically characterize tattooing as an art (at one point he refers to “tattooing, and its sister-art scarification” (p.18)). I’ll treat his account in a way very much contrary to Gell’s intentions, that is, as if it were the beginnings of an account of tattooing as an art form. Gell formulates what he calls “the basic scheme of tattooing” (on the account I’ve proposed this would be ‘ur-tattooing’) as first of all “the making of indelible pigmented traces which are inside or underneath the skin” (p. 38). Tentatively following the psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu’s conceptualization, Gell suggests that the human skin “in many ways” (and so its meaning-bearing uses in tattoos) is “the social person himself/herself” (p. 28); we would say that tattooing induces a basic-level metaphorization ‘skin = (social) person’. Again following Anzieu, Gell considers a number of basic functions of tattooing—as containing the interior person, as armoring the inner person, as manifesting and expressing individuality, etc.--, subtending which is the effect of producing” a paradoxical double skin” (arising from the nature of the tattooing process: “The tattooing-tool goes through the skin, the ink is absorbed into the interior of the body, and remains there, subsequently being inaccessible from the outside, but still visible, behind what seems like a transparent layer.” (p.38) Tattooing is “the creation of an extra layer by folding the skin over upon itself, making an inside of an outside and an outside of an inside” (p. 39; we shall soon see a very similar statement with regard to masking).
Following up on Gell’s characterization, we might speculate that if tattooing is practiced as an art form (at least in certain places at certain places), the artistic meanings of tattoos will include this metaphorization of ur-tattooing, and build up meanings in innumerable ways. Gell’s book provides an extended account of the traditional tattooing style of the Marquesas Islands, “the most elaborate and extensive of any to be found in Polynesia” (p. 163), for consideration. Gell is primarily concerned to investigate the relations between tattooing and social, political, and gendered spheres among the Marquesans, from which I focus only on the symbolic aspects.
Gell notes “the extraordinary visual complexity of the design [in Marquesan tattooing] as a whole, and like Gombrich in The Sense of Order (discussed earlier in the post on decoration), considers this as part of the tattoos’ “apotropaic (hard-deflecting) purpose” (p. 189), aiming to protect the person from both physical harm in battle, and spiritual harm generally by supernatural forces. Motifs in tattooing are organized within zones (the face, the trunk, the back, the hands, etc.), often manifest a kind of visual ambiguity of constituting faces under one possible grouping (pp. 190 and 196), and serve one of the other of two functions: closure, that is protecting what’s underneath; and multiplicity, multiplying the person’s defenses (p. 190). So if Marquesan tattooing practices constitute an art form, we would expect to find aspects of complexity of design, choice of motifs, and uses of ambiguity among the meaning-bearing features of tattoo artworks. Is that enough?
It seems to me that, on the basis of the conceptual material and descriptions introduced so far, we do not have sufficient material to substantiate the claim of tattooing generally, and Marquesan tattooing in particular, to the status of an art form. We lack a sense of the historicity of the practice, of evaluative criteria, and the body of rich descriptions and complex interpretations that characteristically accompany an art form. On the other hand, I cannot see any conceptual barriers to the thought that tattooing is, or might become, an art form. With that disappointing conclusion, in my next post I’ll turn next to the consideration of textiles and ceramics as art forms.
References and Works Consulted:
Didier Anzieu, The Skin Ego (1989)
E. M. Dadlez, ‘More Than Skin Deep with Eva Dadlez’, in Aesthetics For Birds (May 1, 2018)
Stephen Davies, Adornment: What Self-Decoration Tells Us About Who We Are (2020)
Ellen Dissanayake, Homo Aestheticus (1992)
--Art and Intimacy: How the Arts Began (2000)
--'The artification hypothesis and its relevance to cognitive science, evolutionary aesthetics, and neuroaesthetics’, Cognitive Semiotics (2009)
--‘The Genesis and Development of ‘Making Special’: Is the Concept Relevant to Aesthetic Philosophy?’, in Rivista di Estetica (2013)
--‘Mark-Making as a Human Behavior’, in Darwin’s Bridge: Uniting the Sciences and Humanities (2016), ed. Carroll, McAdams, and Wilson
--‘Roots and Route of the Artifaction Hypothesis’, in Avant (2017)
--‘The Concept of Artifaction’, in Early Rock Art of the American West: The Geometric Enigma (2018), Dissanayake and Ekkehart Malotki
Alfred Gell, Wrapping in Images (1993)
--‘The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology’ and ‘Vogel’s Net: Traps as Artworks and Artworks as Traps’, in The Art of Anthropology: Essays and Diagrams (1999)
Matt Lodder, ‘A Medium, Not a Phenomenon: An Argument for an Art-Historical Approach to Western Tattooing’, in Tattooed Bodies: Theorizing Body Inscription Across Disciplines and Cultures (2022)
George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty (1896)
--Reason in Art: Volume Four of The Life of Reason (1905)
Karl von den Steinen, Die Marquesaner und ihre Kunst, i. Tatauierung (1925)