More than Skin Deep: Artists and Tattoos

I got my first tattoo when I was 18. I eagerly went to a local tattoo shop with my then-best friend and we both got suns tattooed on our backs. At the time it didn’t mean much, but ultimately, it set the pace for the rest of my tattoos, which are all nature-inspired. After that, most of my tattoos were images I drew myself or pieces by my ex-husband. (No, I do not regret that his work is forever on my body, I love the art and they will always remind me of the beautiful times we had together.) Recently though, a local artist, Ben Muñoz reached out to me about a tattoo. Best known for his printmaking, Muñoz has begun to learn tattooing as an additional income and artistic outlet. 

I had seen Muñoz’s designs and adored them, but I didn’t quite feel like a Gato Vato or even an iguana mask would fit into the collection of art on my body. But, through a dialogue with the artist, we landed on a design of a whale. A whale was something I had considered as a tattoo for over a decade, and having Muñoz design it in his style was perfect.

Over the course of four hours, he worked on my side, a strangely intimate experience in a room full of other people. As I worked through the pain, my mind wandered to the work of Bernardo Vallarino and José Villalobos, both Texas artists who have received tattoos as part of their performance practices. Later, when discussing the experience with a friend, I was also pointed in the direction of Lauren Woods, who was tattooed during her Tuesday Evenings at the Modern lecture nearly a decade ago. 

Of course, artists working in tattoos is not a new thing, especially when you consider that tattoo artists are just that, artists. They simply have a different medium (ink under skin) than what is traditionally considered art (oil on canvas, print on paper, tempera on wood panel, etc.). As tattoos have become more ubiquitous, it makes sense that artists are not only getting tattoos themselves, but adopting the act of tattooing into their practice.

Currently, José Villalobos has a solo exhibition, curated by Rigoberto Luna, on view at Art Yard in Frenchtown, New Jersey. Diseñando Masculinidades / Designing Masculinities showcases a body of work that re-conceptualizes Western clothing. Perhaps best known for his performance pieces, Villalobos’ artistic practice has long sought to highlight and question issues related to traditional symbols and characteristics of masculinity. The exhibition brings together sculptural works created from design elements of Western attire alongside photo documentation of performances in which the artist was tattooed with similar designs.

The first of these tattoo performances, Cultural Reminders (Cowboy Boot Toe Medallion Tattoo),  took place and was recorded on February 27, 2019. Photographs taken throughout the process and a video of the performance can be viewed via the artist’s website. Watching the act, I was most surprised by how tame the performance was compared to Villalobos’ other works, which can feel overwhelming as he puts his body in dangerous and painful situations. In the soundless video, his feet stay quite still and seem unphased by any associated discomfort. On the contrary, the way the gloved tattoo artist’s hands move, as they attentively follow the dotted-line pattern of the design, gives the sense of a strangely caring action.

Though Villalobos has other tattoos and has incorporated mark-making on his body in performance pieces before, this 2019 work was the first time that he engaged the tattoo as part of a performance work. More recently, in Cultural Reminders: Lineage, the artist had a design tattooed on his back. The design is pulled from an embroidered element on a Western-style shirt he inherited from his father, who died in 1999. As a gay man who grew up in a religiously conservative family, Villalobos often conjures his father and other male family members in his art. In various ways, through sculpture and performance, the artist builds his work out of the practices and visuals of his culture. He takes these actions and items and transforms them, and in many cases embodies them. The tattoos seem to be the next step in that process of reclamation.

In Bernardo Vallarino’s 2022 exhibition The Butterfly Case, among an array of sculptures that use butterfly imagery to comment on the human condition, a curious set of prints hung in the back corner of Love Texas Art Gallery. The individually framed pieces each depicted a softly rendered butterfly wing. On the adjacent wall was a video that provided context for the prints. As part of a performance piece titled I AM, Vallarino had tattoo artist David Alcantar tattoo a large T-pin separating a pair of butterfly wings on his back. 

The performance took place on April 15, 2022, which was Good Friday, a holy day celebrated by Christians in observance of the crucifixion of Jesus. The choice of this date is a clear reference to sacrifice as well as religious practices such as flagellation as punishment. In a statement on his website, Vallarino notes, “​​I chose to engrave my skin with the butterfly symbol to acknowledge and somehow take responsibility, “cleaning my sins,” of my own short-comings of the topics I address in The Butterfly Case, which are social apathy, racism, classism, and elements of cultural appropriation.”

Similar to Villalobos’ performance tattoos, though I know there is pain involved in the act of tattooing, the video documentation somehow distorts this and hides the pain. Vallarino gets around this through the prints. The hazy watercolor-like washes on paper are actually a combination of ink and blood; the prints were taken from the artist’s back immediately after the tattooing. And while on the surface the prints look delicate, the medium reveals the inherent suffering that comes with thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands) of pricks from a tattoo machine. 

But, tattooing is not new in Vallarino’s work. Since 2006, he has gotten an annual tattoo of an ant on his body, as part of an ongoing, life-long performance piece called Decay. The ants are a direct reference to the work of Salvador Dalí, who used the insect as a symbol of death and decay. 

A tattoo can both represent a specific moment or idea — acting as a milestone or remembrance of an event, a person, or an experience — or, it can be part of a longer-term marking of time that changes and shifts over the years. While Villalobos’ pieces fall more into the first category, Vallarino’s two performance tattoos serve each of these purposes. Lauren Woods’ performance tattoo falls more into the latter category.

On November 10, 2015, Lauren Woods, a Dallas-based conceptual artist, spoke as part of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth’s Tuesday Evenings at the Modern lecture series. Her talk was less of a traditional artist talk and more of a performative lecture. In the piece, The Line, Woods reads aloud a letter she wrote herself in the midst of an existential crisis. At the time of the talk, and the year leading up to it, the artist (and her collaborator Cynthia Mulcahy) was in a dispute with the City of Dallas about a project for which they had been commissioned related to historical markers in Dallas’ historically Black parks. 

Her letter covered a lot of ground, including traditional elements of an artist talk like discussing  her recent works, and dove into the larger issues of being an artist and single parent. But, because she was in litigation at the time, she was careful not to share any information about the City of Dallas issue. About halfway through the recording, as Woods completes a slideshow of her work, she moves to the center of the stage with her then-five-year-old son and removes her shirt. A tattoo artist joins them on stage, marks her son’s height (around her bra line) against the side of Woods’ body where a tattooed line runs vertically, and then tattoos a small horizontal line.

Woods gets dressed and sits to take questions. She explains that the idea of the tattoo came a few years earlier when she had the realization that despite having a child, she was not a homeowner. Woods worried about what that lack of permanent property might mean in terms of a place to hold memories. She remarked, “It just became clear that if it wasn’t going to be architecture that we were going to put these memories on, then it would be my body.”

Woods gave credit to visual artist and tattoo artist, Patrick Romeo, noting that he helped her conceptualize the idea, which ended up being a straight line that runs up the side of her body and the inside of her arm to her fingertip. The line, which had been tattooed on her body the night before her talk at the Modern, was meant to be a yardstick of sorts that she would continue to measure and mark her son’s growth. However, Woods told me recently that since that performance, her son has refused to consent to allowing her to mark his height on her body. Though, she still records his growth on paper.

As a mother, the idea of this piece resonated with me on multiple levels. Time is ever marching forward and in the day-to-day dealings of life, it is easy to lose track of the small markers of time — the slow forming of a wrinkle, the subtle shift of hair color, the new aches that appear after completing simple tasks. But, having a child brings the passage of time into sharp focus. Their growth reveals itself in the ever-present need for new clothes. Their body undergoes rapid changes like the loss of baby teeth and the development of much larger adult teeth in the same small mouth. Their new heights announce themselves as part of the mundane tasks of the day — just recently I realized that I cannot see the top of my daughter’s head when I am sitting on the couch to brush her hair. The idea of marking a child’s growth against the parent’s body is at once a novel idea and something that feels so familiar.

Every day artists invest time, energy, thought, money, and so many other assets into their work. They do this because they are compelled to create, to make sense of the world around them, to respond to situations and experiences, and to record a moment in time. Art is a labor of love. Villalobos, Vallarino, and Woods (among many other artists I’m sure), take that labor to another level by using their bodies as a medium in their art practice. Not only do they endure pain as part of performance, but they have permanently marked their bodies with the remnants of those performative acts.