Kimmelman's figure might not apply to many tattoo artists, or to those whose work appears in the latest installment of Dirk Vermin's Tattoos And Trash show at MTZC, but tattoos clearly enjoy a "told you so" moment in American life. As Times columnist David Brooks recently noted, by way of examining edginess' infiltration of the middle class, 24 percent of Americans 18 to 50 have tattoos—make it 36 percent for those aged 18 to 29. But it is another matter entirely for tattoo artists to leap from rebel-lite market penetration to the sort of respectability accorded cartoon and graffiti artists.
The three once-outré graphic forms share some characteristics, and characters, but of course they are wildly different endeavors. Kimmelman's loner unfolds narratives in storyboard panels. Graffiti is the id at heart—Hey, look! Me!—whereas in part what tattoo artists do is animate the id urges of others—Hey, look! My lover! My kids! My attitude! But just as some taggers have turned legit, some tattoo artists take their practice beyond mere self-display.
Vermin, the venerable local musician and Pussykat Tattoo Parlor proprietor, is no exception. Tattoos And Trash was a staple of Vermin's Gallery au Go-Go at his tattoo emporium, and his work, twisting tattoo roots through '50s lounge culture, remains a staple of the roaming show. His eye has sharpened along with the talents of his colleagues. From people who stipple skin, you might expect a level of technical graphic competence, and for the most part it is obvious in the show's acrylics, watercolors and pencil drawings.
I have not seen every version of Tattoos and Trash, but this is the first from which I took away a sense that the icons of tattoo constitute an iconography, that the grotesquely adorned skull is every bit the memento mori as the more sober one gracing a 17th-century Dutch still-life. Justin McRoy's watercolor, "Til Death," which envisions the veiled bride as skull, or Ryan Downie's watercolor trio of phantasmagoric skulls, carry this fierce fundamental of the trade into realms trod by Bosch and Brueghel. Meanwhile, artists such as Cody Moore and Rogerio Silva deftly manipulate images from Asian symbol systems.
The important point here is that these works advance beyond mere adornment—even into a mordant irony, as in Steve Thompson's watercolor of an actual heart wrapped in flower petals, with stylized teardrops of blood that seem to leave blotches in the paper.
Kimmelman closed his Masters of American Comics review by apologizing for justifying comics through art-history analogies, and many comics and tattoo artists would no doubt disown or disdain such comparisons. But art is art, and if a claim is made to the title, discussing it in terms of art history seems apt—even if the artist never heard of Bosch or Brueghel. The medieval association seems appropriate, too, because much of this work has the feel of art from that age, especially in the heady reliance on iconography, symbols asserting meaning in symbolic space.
A yearning for the simplicity and sincerity of the Middle Ages has colored social and cultural conservatism since Victorian days. Another kind of conservatism lies behind much underground art, from comics to graffiti to tattoos: a contempt for the officially ordained. It's the point at which punk meets patriot, where both hear jackboots in the march of society and social custom. Arguably, though, the "official" acceptance of underground art forms parallels the officializing of the assertively libertarian Web world. When social custom makes your work another tool of middle-class self-advertisement, along with the obligatory MySpace page and earnest YouTube postings, how do you hone your edge?
The irony for the punk artist might be that as society absorbs and normalizes its imagery, the best way to maintain integrity is to absorb and transform society's ideas about art.