Organising a quirky art history event in Edinburgh a week on Tuesday. Our invited speaker is the wonderful Dr Matt Lodder who will present his research on tattooing. All welcome! Here are the details:
As part of the AAH’s commitment to bringing the best in cutting-edge art-historical research to a wider community, we have been running Art History in the Pub in Camden, London.
Due to the overwhelming success of these events, we’re delighted to be able to announce our new event series in Edinburgh, Art History in the Pub in Scotland
Our talks present a selection of the wide vareity of topics, periods, methods and apporaches common in art historical study, and are aimed at a generalist audience.
AHitP Scotland is held at:
The Banshee Labyrinth
35 Niddry St
Edinburgh EH1 1LG
Tuesday 28 February 6:30pm
Dr Matt Lodder (Association of Art Historians; University of Reading) “Tattooing as Artistic Practice”
The term “body art” seems familiar, and on the surface quite straightforward. It appears interchangeably with the term “body modification” in writing on these practices from every conceivable scholarly discipline: sociology, cultural studies, media studies, literary studies, psychology, ethnography, criminology, anthropology and even in articles which approach the topic from a medical or scientific point of view, including dermatology and psychiatry. Interestingly enough, however, the term “body art” has rarely appeared in any writing which takes an explicitly art-historical or art-critical approach, and has never been subjected to any sustained analysis which uses the methodologies deployed by specialists when engaging with other forms of art. If tattooing and its coincident technologies are “body art”, they have not as yet been understood as such by art historians.
Almost without exception, critical writing on body modification technologies throughout history concerns itself with questions of subjectivity and motivation. Most who write about body modification technologies employ methodological approaches which limit investigations to the circumstances which prefigure any modification procedure, and concern themselves exclusively with issues which deal with that which comes prior to the modifications being carried out. As such, questions of impetus and impulse dominate the literature: Why would someone get a body piercing? What subjective truth are criminals expressing when they tattoo themselves? What drives someone to alter their body? What cultural coercion is at work when a woman gets a breast augmentation? What is the ritual significance or utility of a Maori facial tattoo? What psychiatric disorders are at work in such auto-destructive behaviours?
These are all important, pertinent and interesting discussions, of course, but they all end, abruptly, once the scalpel blade or needle touches the skin. Once the procedure has begun, the answers to these types of question are already apparent; once the body begins to be altered, the period of interest ends. And with this myopic focus on what comes prior to the modificatory procedure rather than what results from it, such analyses studiously ignore what to me has always seemed the most fascinating and intriguing aspects of modified bodies: their look; their aesthetic; their materiality; the body art object itself.
In an talk drawing on his doctoral thesis, Matt will address the history of tattooing as a professional artistic practice, illustrate several examples which complicate any simplistic notions of tattoos as art works in the conventional sense, and discuss various interactions between tattooing and the institutional fine art establishment.
Biography: Dr Matt Lodder is an academic art historian, based in London. His work is concerned with the artistic status of body art and body modification practices, including tattooing, body piercing and cosmetic surgery, applying art-theoretical and art-historical methodologies to the study of the modified body specifically as an art object rather than a site for psychological, psychiatric, anthropological or ethnographic interest. He has acted as a contributor and expert consultant for various radio and television projects on body art and body modification, including BBC’s ‘Coast’, on BBC Radio 5, BBC Radio Sheffield, on Channel 4 and on Australia’s Triple J, and is currently working on a book which presents an art historical survey of tattooing from the 16th century to the present day.
