After watching Skin, I wasn’t sure how to feel about the film. I noticed some of the people involved in the project referring to the human body as a canvas (like they do on the TV show Ink Master); I can’t tell if this feels degrading, empowering, or both. The human body as a canvas is, in a sense, an empowering concept, because it implies that we are all capable of becoming works of art, depending on how we choose to decorate ourselves. At the same time, likening the body to a canvas is objectifying, implying that we are worthless without “valid” decorations on our person. Skin also depicted all the subjects as following basically the same life path: escaping oppressive, boring, conservative home lives (often in the suburbs), and moving to the city to be artsy, free, drug-addicted partiers. This seems unfair, and goes against what seemed to be the goal of the project, to prove that tattoos should be revered in the fine art world. It doesn’t seem wholly effective to create a contemporary art project about tattoos that just perpetuates stereotypes about tattooed people to untattooed people. In turn, this made me wonder if the goal of the project was authenticity (like the Dr. Lakra quote we discussed). However, if the film sought to portray these tattooed peoples’ “real” lives, it didn’t come off that way to me because this “authenticity” conformed to a predetermined narrative.
I think I might be able to explore authenticity in my research on tattoos and the music industry. I love discovering new music, and have found myself more and more drawn to music that feels really authentic to me. To the people around me, I think this pursuit of authenticity just comes off as me listening to more amateur, lo-fi, worse-sounding music. For me, listening to “DIY”-sounding music makes me feel more connected to the artist, and the emotions they are portraying. I feel closer to them, and thus their message, without the wall of high-tech production to create separation. I think that, in a roundabout way, tattoos are very similar. They are not seen as “fine” art – in my strange music analogy, they would be lo-fi. So, would musicians (especially those involved in non-mainstream subcultures) be more drawn to tattoos because they feel like an authentic expression in the same way as their music?