Stick and Poke: A Review of "Home Made Tattoos Rule"

I did my first homemade tattoo about three years ago while living alone in a mansion, about 2 acres from my nearest neighbors. It's a small lightning bolt on the side of my left foot. It came out alright (hey, its still there) but more importantly it felt good to do it, like I didn't have to ask anyone to give me a tattoo. Since then I've given myself a few other homemades and I have tattooed my (then future) wife and she's tattooed me. The intimacy of homemades makes them more special than shop made tattoos, but the casualness also leaves the door open for spur-of-the-moment, dumb, funny ideas. Home Made Tattoos Rule is a book of such ideas, put onto the skin of friends and folks and all photographed by Thomas K. Jeppe.
This thin book (think photo essay, like Tulsa in color and with less guns) documents the culture of DIY tattooing in Jeppe's native Australia, and later New Zealand, and attempts to elevate the aesthetics of homemades to that of a legitimate art form in its own right. The rich and raw photography has the close, blown out feel of Nan Goldin's snapshots and conveys an intimacy between subject and photographer that mimics the relationship between tattooer and tattooee. At the same time, this is offset by a sparse, one-tattoo-to-a-page layout which gives power and emphasis to each design equally. I for one would have liked to have a little more writing to contextualize these pieces. There is a short preface and introduction, both by Jeppe, giving only a glimpse into the lives of these people who he describes simply as “musicians, academics, professional tattooists, designers, illustrators, cooks, punks, mums, dads, framers, travelers, dockers, painters, photographers, and hairdressers.” It's hard to tell which is more beautiful, the tattoos or the pictures of them. Both have the broken beauty of the cultural fringe but the photos are much more aestheticized. But, that's the great thing about DIY tattooing, it sits outside the “lifestyle fashion” of popular tattooing today and focuses on the impermanent and non-commodifiable nature of tattooing. This is a vital, urgent art form, one that values the relationship between the artist, subject, design as well as the process of making the tattoo over finished product. Even if a tattoo comes out bad, it is still special and maybe even more loveable for it.
And Home Made Tattoos Rule shows some klunkers! But the wide variety of designs, as well as range in quality, shows the democratic and subjective nature of tattooing. Each design is valued as a success by the artist and wearer. Jeppe himself has tattooed many of his friends but also been tattooed by them, in fact this exchange of tattoos is key (if you don't trust someone to poke a deer smoking a joint into your arm then maybe you shouldn't put a farting tooth on their leg!).
Each tattoo is unique, shop made and homemade, but how cool is it to have a great story involving a bunch of your friends, dinner and drinks that ends with “...so I ended up with this tattoo.”? Pretty cool.

Home Made Tattoos Rule can be purchased from Serps Press

Comments:

Major

Raymond Pettibon is still a vital artist, maybe now more than he has been in a long time. He is also, sadly, still largely overlooked. His new show "Here's Your Irony Back (The Big Picture)" at David Zwirner is radical and I can't believe that nothing is being written about it. What's really bugging me is that everyone is obviously going to see it but ends up writing about the Chris Ofilli show "Devil's Pie.", also at Zwirner.

The critical consensus seems to be to give Ofilli a passing grade for having the, er, courage to show us the "arc of a career, the experimental parts, not just chart-toppers" as Jerry Saltz puts it. And the usually-pretty-right-on Holland Cotter (who I will forgive because of this review) must be getting a little senile when he says, "We get a lot of airtight minor shows in Chelsea; it’s not every day that you get to see a major artist thinking. You do here." Ofilli may be using new materials and imagery but this doesn't necessarily mean he is thinking (and what does it say about art today to applaud an artist just for thinking?). "Devil's Pie" looks more like an artist stuck, afraid of being pigeonholed by his signature style. Ofilli is grabbing from too many sources and comes off as shallow. This show is about money and the big, pretty canvases and highly polished sculpture do nothing to cover it up. There might not be any of Ofilli's signature dung in the show but there's still a lot of shit.

On the other hand Pettibon, a genuine thinker, is apologetic for his work to date not doing enough to educate the public. His treatment of the Bush administration, Israeli/Palestinian conflict, Abu Ghraib, and Yale fraternity antics is raw and fresh and leaves no question as to where he stands. The drawings are typically scratchy and graphic (Pettibon fans won't be disappointed) but far less emotionally distant than his baseball or surf pictures. The image on the card for the show Untitled (With their own) is one of my favorites- hard eyes glaring through hairy strokes of blue, green, brown and purple. Pettibon is experimenting, not with material, but with a personal responsibility and openness that is dangerous for him and refreshing for us.

The politics are hard to separate from the art and that's probably the biggest reason for the critical blackout. "The Big Picture" is funny, serious, sad, and full of fucking awesome drawings. Go see it.

Don't forget to leave me your comments!

All images courtesy of David Zwirner Gallery.