Art History

What is a tattoo sans ink? Without something to render the design permanent, the marking will inevitably heal, leaving no trace of the pain endured. As a result, the creation of inkless tattoos is an ephemeral performance, one that emphasizes the painful process over an end product. In recent years, contemporary artists have produced inkless tattoos in order to enact performative healing. Though the wounds depicted in these works are physical in nature, they often materialize psychological trauma for the viewer in a very visceral way. Whether the (in)visibly tattooed individual has endured racism, sexism, or homophobia, these projects re-sensitize viewers to the horrific realities of these experiences and allow both the artist and participants to heal the wounds associated with these events.

This session explores the edge effects encountered during a collaborative course design project to convert a resident introductory lecture course to a team-taught, project-based online course. The course, Introduction to International Arts, a requirement for a minor, had long been taught as a large lecture course with multiple choice quizzes as the primary activity for students. An opportunity arose to explore a different strategy for the course - alternative delivery modes, new expert perspectives, richer projects for students, and a team teaching approach. The new strategy required the team to explore zones of transition - from traditional to digital, from individual to collaborative course design, from objective assessments to student-led course projects, from instructor-led to team-taught.

To begin the project, a cross-disciplinary team consisting of two instructional designers and three graduate students from art history, music, and architecture, respectively, was convened. We began the design process by interviewing the previous instructor to discover what worked best in the lecture format, and preserved the case study approach the course had long employed. With a framework for organizing the course in place, the team crafted a shared vision, identifying course goals and learning objectives, selecting more global and diverse artifacts for study, and brainstorming new student activities. The team worked collaboratively over a summer to prepare the online course, refining the design, identifying a project-based assessment strategy, and creating media-rich course content. The online course was piloted in Spring 2018, co-taught by the graduate student course authors to about a hundred students. In this session, we'll discussion our collaborative design process, best practices and challenges encountered, and the outcomes, including student survey data, of the collaborative project.

As a global phenomenon, anthropologists and ethnographers have historically examined tattooing through a lens of localized, culturally-constructed meaning. Claude Lévi-Strauss pioneered this approach in his seminal text Structural Anthropology (1963), positioning Maori tattooing as an integral element of social interaction and cultural cohesion, simultaneously indicative of the individual and the “philosophy of the group.” This understanding of the medium has resulted in tattoo scholarship that is regional, focused on bodily markings as indications of an individual’s position within particular societies. In recent years, several contemporary artists have expanded this anthropological interpretation and materialized the tattoo’s global relationship to geography and cultural memory through the creation of tattooed maps. I look to Qin Ga’s tattooed map of China The Miniature Long March (2002-2005), Wafaa Bilal’s 2010 borderless tattooed map of Iraq and Counting..., and Douglas Gordon’s film Portrait of Janus (Divided States) from 2017 as examples of this emerging trend. Using these pieces, I interrogate the role of tattooed cartographies as embodiments of human displacement, disrupted notions of homeland, and shifting conceptual boundaries by virtue of their location on the body’s ownboundary: skin. I argue that cartographic tattoos prompt discussions of bodily mobility, marginality, nationalism, liminality, borderlines, (in)visibility, unity, and division. Each of these artworks expands the role of the tattoo beyond historically localized cultural practices into a medium well positioned to address poignant global issues such as immigration reform and the rise of nationalism in the twenty-first century.

This chapter conceptualizes tattoos as an itinerant medium grounded in lived experience, which allow wearers to visually map their travel through space and authenticate their experiences of displacement on those same traveling bodies. I examine the work of three artists, Qin Ga, Wafaa Bilal, and Douglas Gordon, who build on the tattoo's historical relationship to bodily mobility and systems of power to formulate critical geographies. The chosen works vividly demonstrate the ways in which tattooed cartographies speak to disrupted notions of homeland and shifting conceptual boundaries by virtue of their location on the body's liminal zone: skin. Each of the artworks examined within this chapter serves as a touchstone for discussing the thematic relevance of tattooed cartographies in relation to those experiences of forcibly displaced subjects, namely their relationship to issues of mobility, marginality, nationalism, liminality, borderlines, (in-)visibility, unity, and division among others.

This Crosscurrents segment by Wendy Reyes (producer at KALW radio) details the recent shift in tattoo culture within the Bay Area and highlights the tattoo studio Diving Swallow. As part of the piece, I was interviewed on tattoo history in the United States and changes to the industry over the past few decades, especially in terms of artist demographics.