Tattoos in American Visual Culture, Mindy Fenske

Tattoos have during the last few decades undergone a cultural transformation, from being a mark of deviance belonging to the lower social classes and something one should not “do to oneself”, to being relatively accepted in today’s society. This is not just as a passing fad, but also as representative of a broader change of how we view our bodies and their decoration.

Mindy Fenske writes in an American context, but many of her arguments remain relevant in a Danish context, and her most interesting points are not national, but relates to understanding tattoos and tattoo culture. Fenske basic premise is that tattoos not only function as cultural representations, though they are also that. Tattoos are also performative in J.L. Austin’s sense - they do something, both to the owner and the viewer. This understanding of tattoos comes primarily from Austin and Jacques Derrida’s conception of the performative, as well as Judith Butler’s conception of gender and identity as performatively produced. Fenske also draws on W.J.T. Mitchell’s picture theory (primarily from What Do Pictures Want?, but also Picture Theory), which specifically focuses on understanding images “as if” they are alive. This is meant metaphorically, but Fenske provides a good example of how pictures perform actions; even an example we know well here in Denmark: the Mohammed caricatures in Jyllandsposten. These images act in the way they position the viewer, and can be considered as alive, because their action demands a reaction. In this way of dealing with cultural products as performative, Fenske is closely aligned to similar views, such as those expressed by Matt Hills in his How to do Things With Cultural Theory.

This is approach is a very useful way to deal with tattoos, because as Fenske puts it herself, a tattoo is not just an expression of one’s identity, but also a way of creating that identity. Furthermore, Fenske points out that tattoos are not simply evidences of resistant practices, attempting to deny a specific body ideal or opposing a mainstream culture. Rather, it is because of tattoo culture’s existence and location within mainstream culture, that tattoo culture gains its performative force. This a well-conceived and nuanced way of doing cultural analysis. Rather than viewing culture as a struggle between two extremes, it is rather conceived of in terms of processes in a productive network. She gains much of this argument from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, in their rhizomatic and territorialization discourses.

The analyses of tattoos fall in three parts: tattoo conventions, tattoos in advertising and modern primitivism. In doing so, she locates fields within and outside mainstream culture, which provides a good and balanced overview.

Departing from her personal experiences, we get an account of how tattoo conventions function as both an inclusive and exclusive space. As conventions often take place in hotels where other, nontattooed, guests are also present, a specfic space is created both physically but also more symbolically and performatively - in here you are different, if you are not tattoed: an inversion, in other words, of the outside world. Fenske points out how tattoos function not just as identity markers, but also how tattoos performatively creates a distinct cultural and social space, which makes this identity construction possible.

The next chapter focuses on advertisements who use tattoos. Here we are dealing with representations only, with no actual people behind. This also makes the chapter the weakest in the book, for even though it is shown how Tampax advertisements reinvent Rosie the Riveter, or the PlayStation game UmJammer Lammy employs tattoos, it does not move beyond standard representational analysis. Here it becomes evident how difficult it is for perfmative criticism to deal with textual products. The chapter remains interesting, but is not as strong as the other chapters.

The final chapter deals with the movement that Fakir Musafar has spearheaded in many ways: modern primitivism. Fenske convincingly shows how the modern primitivism movement employ earlier, often primitive, cultures’ use of tattoos, and how they view themselves as a continuation of these traditions. Fenske points out this use of original, primitive traditions is both an expression parallel to Edward Said’s Orientalism and a deeply felt desire to find one’s own space. These authentic cultures are not used in their historically founded actuality, but rather as a performative act and identity strategy.

The conclusion argues for the use of performative criticism, which the book itself is a fine examle of. It is evident that this method achieves more with this subject, while also making the analyses more dynamic, and so Fenske does not fall into classic traps of reductionism. It is, however, also evident that the more text-based a cultural product is, the more difficult it will be for performative criticism to deal with it.

Read the Danish review here.