Hello again Los Angeles, it is Astor, reporting live from Speakeasy Tattoo where today we are going to get a little serious. So, for the past 20+ months or so we have… let’s be charitable and say, going through it. The vibes have been rancid. The energy… somewhat off, and as we round on the approaching second year anniversary of the pandemic, we are going to take some time and reflect on how the art of tattooing has evolved with the shifts brought on by the increase in death, illness, and near universal isolation. Before we continue, I wanted to give a quick shout out to the Order of the Good Death, who recently published their own piece on tattoos and the grieving process, which helped serve as the inspiration for this week’s topic.
Epidemics have always influenced art. That influence may be subtle or hard to detect at first, but it always happens. As communities grapple with the invisible threat of illness, so too do the artists within those communities. Historically, art has been used to transform the amorphous and unseen terror of illness into the visual, and in so doing, help make it conceptually manageable. The most well-known example of this is, of course, the art made during and directly following the Ur Plague, the Black Death, which ravaged its way across Asia and Europe capping off at a staggering 25 million dead by the 14th century. During this time visual depictions of plague in Europe were usually framed through a strictly Christian lens, with the plague being symbolically linked to divine punishment that, not unlike the Biblical flood, was ultimately for the betterment of humanity. Those figures represented in art, suffering from the plague, were meant not to be pitied, but despised as they wore the marks of God’s displeasure on their skin. The tell-tale bubo which gave the plague its name, reminiscent of the Biblical mark of Cain, signified the supposed transgressions of the infirmed against the Almighty. Figures were not distinguishable as individuals, but more like icons—non-specific representations of the hypothetical dead and damned.
This attitude in European art toward the sick changed as outbreaks of plague continued into the 17th and 18th centuries. At this time, there began an overall change in the Church’s relationship to public health and civic management, resulting in the creation of the first church-run hospitals and healthcare facilities, with greater pressure put on clergy members to interact directly with the populace. Artists too followed suit, as they were largely employed by the Church and its affiliates during this period, visually linking the suffering of the sick to the suffering endured by Christ. There was, as always, a practical side to this shift in the visual framework of illness as well. Plague art historian Dr. Sheila Barker argues that this new depiction was meant to persuade the fearful and repulsed friars who would now be tasked in caring for the sick and dying to see the infirmed as martyrs, and thereby to see themselves, men of God who eased the torment of the afflicted, as Christlike. ‘Did not Jesus heal the lepers?’, the art would silently ask. Plague art of this period, while somewhat rare, would often focus not upon contemporary plague outbreaks, but historical or legendary ones. This gave artists the necessary distance to urge mercy for the sick, without directly chastising any clergy who might be squeamish about tending to the stricken. Several artists used the Plague of Ashdod, which appears in the Book of Samuel in the Old Testament, as their symbolic reference for these purposes. The most influential of these was painted by Nicholas Poussin, from which, a number of other artists derived their own works (See, for example, the woman and child pair in Gaetano Zumbo’s striking waxwork). Poussin’s painting of circa 1630 was completed during the 1629-1631 outbreak of the plague in Italy, and while it refers to the contemporary belief that covering one’s nose protected one from the ‘miasma’ emanating from the dead, it avoids any physical marks of disease upon their corpses. An old woman in the middle ground greys with decay, but gone are the marks of Cain, replaced by the limp, lifeless bodies of a young woman and an infant, glowing white as with holy light. Around them are grieving mourners, similar in composition to paintings of The Lamentation.
All this of course leads us to ask the question: how have the arts help shape our communal relationship to the current plague that has, as of this writing, claimed the lives of over 5 million people worldwide? What works of art will stand out as influential, four hundred years from now, and will visually define our attitudes toward our sick and dying? It’s hard to say. The nice thing about history is that distance helps us see patterns and through-lines that are not always possible to detect when living through an event. Even still, there are a few ways we can see the arts responding to Covid, and so, at long last it’s time to talk about tattoos.
According to a poll taken in 2015, nearly 3 in 10 Americans have at least one tattoo, and of that 30%, roughly 80% are for some sort of commemoration. Commemorations include symbols of mourning, and unfortunately, the last two years have given us ample reasons to mourn. Yet like all mourning traditions, memorial tattoos honoring those lost to this most recent plague can serve a vital purpose in the individual’s process of grief, both physically and ritualistically, they anchor us to our grief and help us heal. Grief is not an easy subject to talk about for a lot of people— especially in this country, where public displays of grief are somewhat taboo. If anything, it’s frequently uncomfortable and awkward for a lot of people to experience that level of vulnerability in front of others, and memorial tattoos give those dealing with grief a dialogue by which they can openly express it. York University professor and tattoo scholar Deborah Davidson claims that by being part of living flesh, the memorial tattoo may “serve as a translator of experience into a language more readable by others – a language comforting to the griever, and less disturbing to others.”
Immortalizing the deceased is only one way people mark this period in our history on their skin; there are other reasons why people have been feeling the itch to get inked. Perhaps it is a way of showing solidarity with others. Last year so many people were cut off from their communities, lonely and isolated, it is no wonder people find comfort in physical markers of our shared trauma. We can point to these tattoos and reminisce on what it was like, talk about our experiences and facilitate connections we couldn’t while in quarantine. In effect these tattoos are allowing us to rebuild a feeling of mutual solidarity. They even are in a way helping connect us to traumas of the past. While searching the “Covidtattoos” hashtag on Instagram, I was delighted to see oodles of plague doctor tattoos, referencing the second pandemic of the Black Death discussed above. Not only are they helping us reconnect to each other in the present but assisting in forging a link to the past.
Welcome back Los Angeles, it is as always, Astor, the secret sauce which makes the Gumbo that is Speakeasy Tattoo extra spicy. I hope you all had a lovely week. I wanted to start off this sojourn into whatever esoterica piques my interest with a personal confession. Ok here it goes, forgive me father.
….I… like bad art. There I said it, send in the inquisition.
Ok so it’s maybe not that dramatic of confession, but look, I have four total degrees in art and art history, which means basically two things: that I will be in debt for the next 200 years and that I have been taught to have, for lack of a better word, categorically ‘good taste.’ I have been rigorously indoctrinated—as we all have to some degree—to the value system we place on art and aesthetics deemed ‘good’ as well as what’s bad. Granted what is bad and good will vary based on the cultural milieu, but the simple reality of living within a globally dominant *cough* colonial *cough* culture is that our Western aesthetic sensibilities tend to hegemonize those of others. So if dominant aesthetic practices and a truly vomit inducing amount of art school values have been drilled into me, why do I like bad art?
I keep going back to this quote by mustachioed film daddy John Waters on the subject. Paraphrased, Waters claims: “one must remember that there is such a thing as good bad taste and bad bad taste. To understand bad taste, one must have very good taste.” Bad art does something different for us than ‘good’ art, which, in whatever medium it takes, follows a certain set of aesthetic rules. Rules like, composition, balance, narrative, flow, symbolic consistency. By contrast ‘bad’ art, either due to a lack of care or sheer ineptitude of the artist, tends to break these rules. In that way bad art tends to lack a certain level of predictability and restraint that good art can have by virtue of being, well, good. Let me give you a personal example of this effect. In the winter of 2019 (which was roughly 10 years ago by my count), a bunch of my buddies and I went to see the film adaptation of the musical Cats. And—incoming hot take—it was, to us, quite bad. Yet despite it being a true Nietzschean hellscape of a film and a breeding ground for a whole new generation of sleep paralysis demons, I loved it. Like, not even ironically, I genuinely loved how absolutely unhinged and audacious it was. That year I had been to the movies a lot and saw all the big budget tent poles as well as a smattering of acclaimed indie releases and what I had come to notice after seeing Cats (for the second time) was that movies had become really safe. There weren’t many films I had seen recently that seemed to be taking risks in their filming or story and it took something as bananas as Cats to put that in sharp relief for me. This, I argue is the unique power of bad art. Through its hypnotizing ineptitude it is able to shine a light on the shortcomings of “good” art. It can shock and surprise us in ways that better art sometimes can’t.
So that’s my defense of bad art.
However what if the bad art in question isn’t a film or a painting or some other medium that is similarly detached, what if the bad art in question in on someone’s skin. Forever.
That’s right, it’s time to talk about the aesthetics of bad tattoos.
There is something truly special about a bad tattoo isn’t there? Be it a scratchy hipster doodle, a busted-looking portrait, or ten-inch block text that proudly reads “Bron to Die”, the fear of bad tattoos is, I would argue, the reason a lot of people don’t get tattoos at all. I totally get it. Nobody wants to be labeled cringe for their piss-poor ink, or to be featured on some bad ink Facebook group, of which there are a shit-tonne. And there is some debate across all art forms on how much intentionality plays a part in bad art, that can an art be truly ‘bad’ if that was the artist’s goal. For anyone interested, there are artists out there who have made careers in ‘bad tattoos’. But I for one think it's time we embrace bad tattoos, at least a little bit. I’m not advocating for someone to go to a shoddy artist and get a busted backpiece, far from it, but what I am saying is that if we can concede that there is some value in bad art, that bad art does something for us, and is occasionally able to achieve effects even better than good art, then perhaps we can begin to appreciate the bad within our own artform. A lot of people get tattooed for a lot of different reasons, but a unifying factor practically across the board is that they want the tattoos to look good, so the wearer, in turn, looks good. No judgments, I am the exact same way. But perhaps there is a little narcissism inherent to that line of thinking. Maybe bad tattoos are a way out of that, a way of simply acknowledging that we are not that important and that our foibles are really not that big of a deal.
I spoke previously on this blog about the most memorable tattoo I have ever seen, but I’ll retell the story here. In 2007 a buddy of mine, a crusty 17 year old punk kid, came into class looking somewhat dispirited. When I asked him what why he was so upset, he responded that the previous night, he’d gotten hella crossfaded in his parents’ garage, and decided to give himself a tattoo, at which point, he pulled up the leg of his basketball shorts to reveal what he’d put on his thigh. In large, block letters each over an inch tall, he had written “FUCK THE POLESE”. Now, obviously tattooing Fuck the Police on yourself in your parents garage is pretty gosh darn punk rock, but what’s even more punk rock is doing so without checking your spelling. Personally I really hope wherever he is now, he still has the undoctored tribute to his reckless childhood intact, and he now shows it off with more good humor then shame. Just like a bad cat movie that has the sheer furry balls to open the same weekend as Star Wars, the audacity elevates a series of bad decisions into a form of pure unvarnished self-expression.
Anyway, thank you all for joining me on this journey of epicaricacy, and I’ll see all your bad selves next time.
I can finally say Happy Halloween Los Angeles! Astor again, the Lord of Misrule of Speakeasy Tattoo and in honor of this most hallowed of eves we will be closing out Goth Pride Month with a feature on a truly iconic gothic artist. Now before we begin, a quick word: I had a devil of a time deciding who was most deserving of the privilege of being the Halloween blog entry’s featured artist (don’t let anyone try to convince you that this isn’t a greatest achievement an artist can earn, that’s right I said it, suck it Turner Prize) and to this end there were many artists I considered (including H.R Giger… but then I realized that the previous blog master already wrote a feature on him which is better than anything I could have done and I highly recommend peeping HERE). But more to the point: the real reason I decided on today’s artist is that you probably know his work even if you don’t know his name, as he is something of the silent visionary behind some truly iconic creations, and, like Giger, chances are you have seen traces of his genius grace the big screen. So today in the spirit of the season we are taking the time to look at and appreciate the art of the 20th century’s very own Dante: Wayne Barlowe.
So, who is Wayne Barlowe? Like I said above, even if you don’t know the man, you have probably seen his work, as he is not only a painter and author, but also a prolific and sought-after concept artist— possibly the most sought after concept artist for those looking to bring life to the strange and wonderful. Barlowe got his start in the late 70’s publishing Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials, a fictitious field guide of alien biospheres. Styled to mimic a speculative ecological survey, Barlowe utilizes the aesthetics of scientific inquiry to bring the reader into a world of wild and truly alien creatures, and it is this keen interest in speculative world building that has been a staple of his work ever since. Honestly one of the things I admire about the guy’s work is the level of lore he layers into his creations, so that even when it is not referenced outright in the story he’s telling, his creatures and landscapes carry a sense of internal history which adds to both their strangeness and their richness. Even when his work is somewhat restrained (as is often the case when working on major Hollywood projects) there is that extra bit of artistic/ scientific thought that allows it to stand out. Among other well-known projects such as HellBoy and Pacific Rim (he remains one of GDT’s close collaborators), Barlowe worked as a concept artist and creature designer for both the Harry Potter series and Avatar and, though I would consider the creature designs for both of these projects somewhat tame considering his more fantastical repertoire, they still capture the crucial balance between the familiar and the alien that all great creature design (indeed, possibly, all great art) strives for.
In these projects, one strict fantasy and the other strict science fiction, Barlowe brings a level of mechanical consistency to each respective world, allowing for a level of realism that enhances rather than distracting from the suspension of disbelief— a crucial component of genre fiction that is honestly way more difficult to pull off than it sounds.
Now remember when some 300 words ago I referred to my man Wayne as the Dante of the 20th century? Of course you do, you don’t miss a beat, I’ve always admired that about you. Well, that’s no hyperbole because aside from bringing life to other people’s monsters, he has created plenty of monsters of his own and, following in the footsteps of Mr. Alighieri’s illustrious Italian loafers, created his own version of Hell. Spread across several published works, Barlowe’s hell is a masterclass in world building, unfettered by the restraints of major film productions. Barlowe’s take on the inferno blends classic operatic horror sensibilities with his own alien aesthetic and storytelling architecture to create a vision of the Pit unparalleled in the modern age. Like Dante before him, Barlowe depicts human souls in stages of torment, set upon by the demonic jailers of their eternal prison. Yet unlike Dante, who was focused on notions of poetic or ironic punishments as shorthand for divine (comedic) justice, Barlowe’s punishments are very much— at least in the eyes of this art historian—a reflection of contemporary life under mechanized capitalism.
In Barlowe’s Hell, human souls are the brick and mortar of the abyss, utilized as the base raw material and reduced to literal objects used in the construction of great demonic cities which populate the lower realms. While Dante’s punishments were highly personalized to reflect transgressions in life, Barlowe’s is entirely depersonalized, creating a more agnostic, less anthropocentric interpretation of perdition where a human soul is simply another brick in the walls of Pandemonium. Simply put, it is a vision of Hell that follows the commodification of human life under capitalism to its most extreme conclusion, whereby human souls are reduced to that of pure product or, in the case of the Examination, objects of curiosity to be studied by capricious members of Lucifer’s fallen host.
This discussion only scratches the surface of Barlowe’s worlds, but I will give you a reprieve this week, as I’m sure you all have tricks and treats to attend to. For those of you who are still interested in this I highly recommend following him on Instagram or if you are looking to beef up your home library, checking out his written works for more on his process. And with that, good night, Los Angeles. May flights of devils sing you to your rest.