Inkside Out: Visual artists are incorporating tattoo imagery and techniques into their art, and gaining mainstream exposure
In Roald Dahl’s 1953 short story “Skin,” a man bearing a portrait tattooed by a young Chaim Soutine stumbles into an opening of the late artist’s work, reveals his signed back piece, and inspires an impromptu bidding war. One dealer offers to pay him to live on permanent display at a seaside resort; another proposes removing the portrait surgically, but the portrait-wearer declines. Weeks later, a new work by Soutine, heavily varnished, hits the market. And the man is nowhere to be found.
The story crystallizes two of the three reasons tattooing has never earned respect in the art world: the difficulty of displaying—and harder yet, selling—a work that eats, sleeps, and ultimately dies. And the third reason: class. As folk art, whose iconography has long been linked to the military, prison culture, and alternative lifestyle subcultures, Western-style tattooing has remained a resolutely low-brow medium, attracting little institutional interest.
Until now. Visual artists are not only dropping tattoo imagery and techniques into their art, but are also gaining mainstream exposure for it. If only Dahl could have witnessed the opening of Belgian artist Wim Delvoye’s installation at the Louvre this year, which featured a tattooed Swiss man named Tim Steiner. Steiner, or “Tattoo Tim,” wears on his back a black-and-gray Madonna positioned beneath a Mexican skull and pink roses, flanked by bats and swallows and anchored by Japanese waves, all referencing classic tattoo styles and imagery. Tim had been purchased in 2008 by the German collector Rik Reinking for 150,000 euros. Steiner’s contract requires that he exhibit himself three times a year, and when he dies, his skin—varnished or not—is to be given over to his buyer.