Ryan Hope’s Skin [Film] is an examination and analysis into tattoo culture as a form of high art. The film merges famous, well-known artists like Jeff Koons with famous tattoo artists such as Damien Hirst, to design and in a way, distribute works of art to the public in a contemporary art project. The film shows at least six individuals who participate in this project and also shows some of the tattoo artists speaking on the matter. Something that truly resonates with me were the parting words of the last participant who spoke in the video, 31 year old Conrad Lochner, who described that this project was, in a way, “representing some sort of weird synthesis between two genres previously segregated” (Skin 38:36). Much of what this film did was depict a sense of how the contemporary art world is slowly accepting and realizing the potential of tattoos as a form of fine art. I will say that I felt like the participants who were selected, at least the ones who were shown and spoke in the film, seemed to have either criminal history or an extreme change in their life, the mention of drugs or alcohol seemed to be a present statement throughout each of the little biographies given by the participants, which I felt gave off the classic stereotype of who gets tattoos. I think the reason that this bothered me was because of the vast diversity in who chooses to get tattooed and that the individuals shown in that film all seemed to be very “stereotypical,” but maybe my understanding became jumbled.
To tie this in with Mifflin’s reading, I chose to do my artist presentation on Shelley Jackson, who was mentioned through the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive’s showing of Shelley Jackson’s “Skin,” a short story tattooed on volunteers word by word as she traveled the world. Mifflin primarily concentrates on the reasons for why tattoos have not gained recognition in the art world. The obvious reasons being the morality of selling someone as a work of art in addition to the ethical judgment of exhibiting a work that is a living, breathing, and functioning person. The last paragraph of this reading took note of the intersection of the contemporary art world and tattoo culture through the incorporation of “sub-legitimate tattoo imagery into [many visual artists’] work” and vice versa (Mifflin 97). Mifflin points out the inevitable interconnection of the tattoo culture and the art world by expressing the presence of art movements or styles like Cubism or tattoo techniques shown in both contemporary visual artists’ works and contemporary tattoo artists and their work.