Art, if not for the squeamish

The New York Times has a review by Edward Rothstein about a peculiar art show in Philadelphia:

Cain was branded on his forehead. The town of Bethlehem was once renowned for its tattoos, applied by pilgrims as if to commemorate Jesus’ stigmata. During the Renaissance, tattoos of astrological signs were thought to confer cosmological powers. So it is hardly the case, as many histories have it, that tattooing entered the Western world in the 1770s, when Captain Cook and the crew of the Endeavour came upon the elaborately inscribed flesh of Pacific Islanders, who called their markings tatau. But that is certainly when tattoos entered wider circulation, carried by currents of trade and conquest, from port to port.
It is also where the traditional shame or shamanism of the tattoo began to change into something else— something we still live with. The tattoo has now mutated into a form of popular fashion, the mark of the outlaw and outcast becoming an inscription of pride, a declaration of allegiance or a proclamation of daring.
If you want to understand something about this transformation and the culture that has grown around it— its folk history and its heroes, its origins and its significance— pay a visit to the Independence Seaport Museum here, where the curator Craig Bruns has put together a revealing exhibition about how sailors became the carriers and creators of tattoo culture: Skin & Bones: Tattoos in the Life of the American Sailor.
It is a measure of the reach of this modestly sized show that objects come not just from the museum’s own collection (scrimshaw or clothing demonstrating the iconography that became part of sailors’ tattoo repertory), but also from the archives of the Kinsey Institute in Bloomington, Indiana (a photo of a sailor sitting in a tattoo parlor papered with images, getting another added to his densely decorated torso). There is even material from the Whitney Museum of American Art (a drawing by the much-tattooed artist Horace Clifford Westermann, who served as a Marine during World War II).
Last week, in conjunction with the exhibition, a documentary about a tattooist, Hori Smoku Sailor Jerry, was shown, introduced by its director, Erich Weiss. Its subject, Norman Collins, known as Sailor Jerry, who died in 1973, is recalled in the film by his equally crusty colleagues. They testified to his merging of Japanese and American imagery in tattoos, a heritage that seemed to reveal its continuing influence on the arms or necks of young audience members. So mainstream has tattooing become that the screening was also being used to promote a Sailor Jerry spiced rum, along with a clothing line meant to compete with another brand trademarked by a rival tattooist.
So the exhibition is not stepping into calm seas but into vaulting, thrusting waves. It was also clear from the decorative inscriptions on fellow visitors that the show hardly needs to proselytize for its subject. But the innocent among us still put their hands on a display table, selected a design from a series of buttons and, accompanied by audio of the whine of a needle and the recorded banter of a stage-set tattooist, watched as a tattoo, etched in light, took impermanent shape on virginal flesh.
The show doesn’t shun such sensation, and some of the photographs and books of “flash”— recipes of images— offer plenty, but it is also careful and sober as it traces the history. It knows not to put too much weight on the Cook link or, indeed, on any single lineage, citing Darwin’s comment: “Not one great country can be named, from the polar regions in the north to New Zealand in the south, in which the aborigines do not tattoo themselves.”
But it shows that in the one great landless country of seafarers, the association went far deeper than it might seem. In the late 18th century, the show points out, tattoos would have served as a way of identifying bodies in cases of drowning; they were marks of association and identity that could not be eradicated by pirates, shipwrecks, or enemy capture.
Early tattoos of American sailors are known mainly through description. But the exhibition shows how much can be pieced together about the nation’s seamen by examining archival records. Each had a Sailor Protection Certificate that was carried as a form of identification that detailed the tattoos on its bearer’s body; these descriptions often remain the sole remnants of individuality in these once-anonymous figures. Aaron Fullerton (born in 1778), for example, “has a ship on his right hand and on his left hand” along with his birth year etched in tattoos made by gunpowder. Black sailors, like James Forten Dunbar (1799-1870), found a form of equality at sea that was unavailable on land; he had a tattoo on one forearm of his family, who had died before he joined the Navy, and, on the other, a mermaid.
We learn too how this tradition grew alongside other ship crafts: the carvings in bone, the weaving of fine string and rope, all displaying the literacy of meticulous workmanship. And there are tattoo tools here, whose purpose is best left to the imagination: sharp sailmaker’s needles that would be used with urine and gunpowder to mark indelible images under the skin.
Sailors’ tattoos also had magical associations. The exhibition’s poster shows two feet, one inscribed with a rooster, the other with a pig— animals that were thought to ward off the threat of drowning, perhaps because, packed in wooden crates, such creatures often survived shipwrecks, floating landward. Sailors also often served in the Navy. Was it from this that the custom took hold for their fellow fighters, even among the landlocked, to share the same tattooed image, along with a battle?
We see, too, how these images spread via the traveling tool boxes of itinerant tattooists, who set up shop in the major harbors. (The show even traces the lineage of one particular tattoo parlor on the Bowery in Manhattan.) The red star trademark of Macy’s department store, we learn, might well have evolved from the tattoo that the store’s founder, Rowland Macy, had on his arm when he sailed on a whaling ship.
The exhibition is so successful that by the end it leaves you more curious rather than less, as you begin to understand a small part of this subculture’s customs and heritage. Sailors were not, of course, the only conduit for the culture of tattooing. They were marginal figures once on land, and in this may have shared something with carnival workers, who also pulled into “ports” and went on their way. Many of them treated tattooing as a form of daredevil self-imagining, covering their bodies with fantastical imagery.
And any attempt to describe the contemporary preoccupation with tattoos would require yet another show, drawing on an ever-growing scholarly enterprise. (Are there courses yet in tattoo studies?) One anthropologist, Susan Benson, has pointed out that, in the West, tattoos have been associated with worlds that restrict the body: on ships or in prisons.
Yet tattoos stand against constriction: their images are typically defiant, showing dragons and other fierce creatures or promising untamed sexuality. But they are also declarations, more than skin deep, soliciting the like-minded for an alliance. Tattoos proclaim a refusal to belong, but also a desire to belong. They announce with now public labels the bearers’ once private passions, proudly combining sentimental rebelliousness with a sharp appeal.

Skin & Bones: Tattoos in the Life of the American Sailor continues through 3 January 2010 at the Independence Seaport Museum, Penn’s Landing, 211 South Columbus Boulevard and Walnut Street, Philadelphia; (215) 413-8655.

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