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Tag: Features

  • Sean Dowdell’s Opportunity

    Written by

    Jordan Ginsberg


    What Sean Dowdell misses most about the old days — and as of April, his “old days” will go back 15 years — is having his Club Tattoo crew be a tightly knit family that would spend damn-near every waking second together. Back then, it was him and four others, working out of Dowdell’s original Club Tattoo shop in Tempe, Arizona, that he opened with his friend, business partner and then-bandmate, Chester Bennington, now of Linkin Park. Those were days when there were eight tattoo and piercing shops in Arizona, total, as opposed to the 140 or so that one can now find in Phoenix alone. Dowdell and his crew would go out every night, hang out on their days off — closer than blood in some ways, he says. That’s what he misses.

    But that isn’t to say he resents his current station in life. Over the last five years, Dowdell has opened up three more Club Tattoo locations in Arizona, expanding that family to 54 employees. Not as tight as the days when one might have found the eventual lead singer of Linkin Park painting the walls and laying tile, perhaps, but Dowdell stresses the importance of cohesion in the face of expansion: A person, any person, should be able to walk into any Club Tattoo and have it feel familiar, he says, and that includes employees.

    And what better place to put to the test a mandate of cohesiveness than Las Vegas? On December 1, 2008, Dowdell oversaw a crew begin construction on the newest addition to Club Tattoo: a 3,300-square-foot shop opening up March 1, 2009, on the Miracle Mile in the Planet Hollywood casino, with a staff of at least 14 tattooists and piercers, plus clothing (Club Tattoo has its own clothing brand and recently launched a menswear line called Ve’cel) and high-end body jewelry. But don’t call it a tattoo parlor, Dowdell says: “I’m opening up a lifestyle store.” It’s partially because of this that he doesn’t see himself in competition with Mario Barth at Starlight or Carey Hart at Hart and Huntington, two other prominent casino-based shops in the city.

    “Carey is a really good friend of mine,” Dowdell says, dismayed that Hart gets a bad rap in the industry for not being a tattoo artist, “and I want to keep it that way. I’m not looking at it like, ‘Oh, those guys tattoo also, so I have to hate them.’ I’ve never agreed with that behavior. It’s not a positive quality to have.” There’s also the fact that each casino is like an entity unto itself, and with 60,000 to 80,000 people walking in front of your store a day, one is less concerned with a so-called “competitor” down the street. Hell, with crowds like that, it’s almost like being on stage, and for a guy who used to think he’d be a rock star first and run a piercing shop on the side, it’s perhaps fitting that Dowdell would end up on the Vegas strip — at Planet Hollywood, no less.

    In 1992, a few years before Club Tattoo first opened its doors, Dowdell played drums for Grey Daze, an alternative rock band fronted by Bennington. They weren’t unsuccessful, managing to score a handful of record deals over six or seven years, putting out three albums, and touring with the likes of Seven Mary Three, Candlebox and Suicidal Tendencies. “It wasn’t a little local band,” Dowdell insists. “We were playing in front 1,500 to 2,000 people every show, at least.” And when the pair started Club Tattoo in 1994, it was Grey Daze that helped put them on the map. Every show was an opportunity to promote the fledgling shop, an advantage that few young businesses have, and by the time the band had run its course in the late ’90s, Club Tattoo was a legitimate success. Plus, with Grey Daze having some cachet, the stage was set for Linkin Park, as well. “We still had our attorneys and everything,” Dowdell says, “and they were still excited about what we were doing, so they placed Chester with a few guys from L.A. and plugged in the machine that was there.” For Dowdell, it was actually a relief to get off the road. “I hate touring,” he says plainly. “It sucks. Seventeen hours of boredom, a couple hours of soundchecks and more boredom, an hour of fun, and then you go to sleep and do it again. There’s just not enough going on on the road.”

    Funny, then, that Dowdell found himself touring another circuit over the past two years — and loving it. Having gotten high-profile magazine recognition for some large-scale microdermal projects he’d been doing, he started getting calls from tattoo convention promoters to teach a microdermal seminar. He’d never considered teaching, but after consulting with his friend Trevor Thomas of Urban Art Tattoo and Piercing in Mesa, Arizona, the two decided to give it a shot. Their first crack at it went well, and before long they were being courted by dozens of conventions across the country, drawing an average of 50 attendees per appearance, and typically garnering overwhelmingly positive feedback.

    “I wanted to have two different aspects of doing dermals,” Dowdell says of his reasoning for wanting to include Thomas: Dowdell uses the dermal punch method, while Thomas works with an 11-gauge needle. “It’s kinda cool, because when we’re teaching — I wouldn’t say we argue, but we debate a little bit on techniques and why we think things work. It’s a fun situation.” After a while, however, requests for classes started coming from places too remote to justify the travel time and expenses. “I had a few piercers who wanted me to go to Calgary to teach, and I thought, ‘Well, that’s gonna take four days of traveling to get there,’ and it just wasn’t financially worth it — as much as I like to teach people.”

    It wasn’t finances that put an end to the seminars, however. After a class over the summer — Dowdell forgets where, but, “Probably Atlanta or Philly,” he says — Dowdell jacked up his back during a game of pickup basketball, herniating two disks and relegating himself to couch duty; between the injury and the subsequent surgery and rehab, he was out of commission for four months. His status started to improve towards the beginning of December, but a relapse sent him back to the hospital for a week. Traveling had been out of the question entirely, so it was lucky that he’d already been working with Vanessa Nornberg, the president of the jewelry wholesaler Metal Mafia, on putting out the course as a DVD and booklet. For Dowdell, given the popularity of the seminars, putting out the DVD was a no-brainer, though the catch was that Nornberg would only sell it to shops with which she had a good rapport.

    It wasn’t an accident that it was Metal Mafia to put out the DVD. A year and a half earlier, Dowdell had teamed with them to design and manufacture a new piece of microdermal jewelry. He’d had experience in the field: Around the time he opened up his first Club Tattoo shop, he also began making and selling jewelry under the banner of Fetish Body Jewelry, a company he sold three years later. “I definitely have a wide background in [jewelry making],” he says. “The alloys, what’s in the compounds, the metallurgy involved and how to cut, how to anodize, all that stuff.” So when he ran into Nornberg at a trade show a couple years back and told her the microdermals she was promoting at the time were terrible, it was at least partially out of professional courtesy. “They had this other dermal anchor they were pushing from another piercer named Ben Trigg,” he says, “and I’m sure he liked the stuff, but I hated it. I thought it was awful. And when they asked if I would take on their jewelry line at the shops, I said, ‘No,’ and told them why. I was not nice about it.”

    Five months later, however, Dowdell got a call from Nornberg; what he’d said had resonated, and she wanted his help. “At the time,” says Dowdell, “I was not a fan of Metal Mafia, on account of the sub-par jewelry they were selling,” but after meeting with Nornberg, he was convinced that the company was truly dedicated to improving their product. He’d been speaking with other jewelry manufacturers beforehand, and was unimpressed with their philosophies and methodologies. “Usually, you’re dealing with jewelry companies who just don’t want to spend the money to make jewelry the right way — and that includes some of the bigger, more well known companies,” he says. “And I kept talking to these companies, saying, ‘Well, this would be better if …’ and they’d say, ‘Yeah, but it costs too much money, we’re not gonna do it.’

    “Well, you’re not a piercer, and you have a piercer who knows what he’s talking about telling you that this should be better, and you don’t care because of money. That sucked.”

    “Permanent” corset with microdermals by Sean Dowdell.

    But Metal Mafia, he found, was different, almost repentant, and when he took that call, Nornberg essentially told him that she knew they weren’t an elite jewelry company, but she was prepared to spend the money to make sure they became one. “It was a very bold way to approach it,” Dowdell says, who hopes the trend of jewelry companies consulting with piercers when designing jewelry continues. “They can’t just produce poor quality jewelry and put it out there and expect to be respected.”

    Dowdell is big on respect. At this point, he feels like he’s earned it, but being as successful as he is, he’s used to being trashed publicly. “With four large shops here in Arizona,” he says, “some of the smaller shops just think we suck because we’re popular. Well, OK. That’s just the way it goes in business, I guess — once you start doing well, you’re gonna have haters.”

    But does he take it personally?

    “If it’s personal, I do!” He laughs. “If it’s somebody running their mouth and they’ve never been in the stores, then no. But my shops have set the standard in Arizona, and that’s just the truth of it, whether they like it or not.”

    It’s bravado, to be sure, but it’s well-earned — and probably a necessity with Club Tattoo’s upcoming Vegas expansion, a project that itself is nearly five years in the making, that began with Dowdell being approached by the Hard Rock about opening up a shop on the grounds.

    “We came down to the finishing touches on the lease,” he says, “and then they jacked us pretty good. One of the guys ended up taking a bribe from another tattoo shop that got wind of the deal, and we ended up getting pushed aside so they could get those guys in there, even though we’d worked for months with them.” But of course, nothing in Vegas is ever that simple. “They have to do background checks in Vegas, and it turned out that one of the guys had a sexual assault on his record, so they couldn’t give them the lease.” The Hard Rock came back to Dowdell, who told them to go screw — he was being courted by another casino, called The Cosmopolitan.

    “It was right around the time that Hart and Huntington opened up inside The Palms,” he says, “so we agreed to go with The Cosmo, which was supposed to open last year. Well, they went into bankruptcy after we’d already had our lease in place with them, and at the time, we’d already been delayed for a full year. We were tired of waiting.”

    Luckily, Planet Hollywood had been keeping tabs on the situation, and once The Cosmo deal fizzled out, they made their move, and Dowdell has been thrilled with the results thus far. Planet Hollywood was one of only a few casinos with positive growth in 2008, Dowdell says, and its demographic — 18-to-35-year-olds — fit right in with Club Tattoo.

    As the opening of the Planet Hollywood shop approaches, Dowdell’s days are only getting fuller. He still pierces (by appointment only), and typically visits at least two of his Arizona shops a day to check in with his artists and piercers, to make sure the jewelry cases are well organized and that all buying is up to date, and to deal with any complaints from customers. “Generally, there aren’t any,” he says, “but I like to deal with those first thing in the morning.” His afternoons usually involve a couple of meetings, plus, at the moment, speaking with the Vegas construction crew for at least an hour, and he tries to be home by about 6 p.m. to spend time with his two sons, aged 13 and eight. His staff may not be the small and symbiotic family it was 15 years ago, but having a family of his own makes those sorts of changes easier to deal with.

    He prefers where he’s at now, the slow and steady shift from managing an independent shop to overseeing a burgeoning chain delivering plenty of satisfaction. He balks at the idea, however, that it was a natural progression. “I saw an opportunity,” he says. “You have to be prepared when an opportunity presents itself and make the best of it. Some people do and some people don’t.”

    Club Tattoo partners, left to right: Sean Dowdell, Chester Bennington, Sean’s wife Thora Dowdell.

    All photos courtesy of Sean Dowdell. Visit Club Tattoo online at ClubTattoo.com.

    * * *

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  • The Most Heavily Tattooed Mayor in America. (Probably.)

    Written by

    Jordan Ginsberg

     

    Ray Johnson and “Pixie” at a convention.

    The people of Campo begged. They went to the home of their mayor, 46-year-old Ray Johnson, and pleaded with him — told him point blank, “You can’t quit. You’ve gotta keep going.” They distributed petitions and collected signatures, but Johnson was apprehensive. He’d beaten the incumbent mayor, Syd Kraier, a few years earlier, on the familiar political promise of bringing positive change to the community in the form of concerts and other activities. And, according to Johnson, progress was being made, but he still felt like he’d been doing his town a disservice, that he hadn’t been around enough.

    Why? Because he’d been getting tattooed too much.

    Campo, Colorado, is a town of about 400 people, divided down its center by U.S. Route 287. There are fewer than five businesses (including a small gas station, a bed-and-breakfast and a cafe), the nearest Walmart is 72 miles away and the closest major city is Amarillo, Texas, 140 miles south. But during his first tenure as mayor, Johnson was making the five-hour northbound trek to Colorado Springs to visit Maria at Glory Badges Tattoo, often missing up to three days of work a week in the process. “I wasn’t doing it justice here,” he admits.

    Campo, CO. [Image source: Google Maps.]

     

    Johnson had already had a number of tattoos at the time, but when his best friend was killed in a car accident, he started making his regular pilgrimages to Glory Badges to map out a body suit to be done, at least in part, in tribute. He opted for traditional Chinese and Japanese imagery, dragons and geisha girls, koi and cherry blossoms — dueling “good and evil” samurais crawling up each thigh. But it’s the phoenix rising up from the flames on the right side of his ribcage and the swan carrying a flower petal on the left that were done specifically with his friend in mind, chosen for the long-standing acknowledged and cherished meaning of the symbols. “And,” Johnson says, laughing, “I just think it looks awesome.”

    In addition to a covered torso and fully inked thighs, Johnson’s also got a pair of hard-to-miss sleeves that may seem out of place on the mayor of a small and admittedly conservative town. He says, though, that he’s never been hassled by the townspeople — either they don’t know he’s heavily tattooed, or they do know and they don’t care enough to bother him about it. “I pretty much hide it,” he says. “Sometimes maybe not, if I’m with my buddies. Probably everybody knows, ‘cause I’ve heard some talk, but nobody really asks. I try to keep it hidden — I guess I’m a little conservative too.” But even when he is approached, the problems have been few. The principal of the town’s school caught a glimpse of his ink not long ago, and after a brief “Oh my gosh! I had no idea!” moment, laughed it off and went about his day. Things may move slowly in Campo, but apparently not slow enough for people to get worked up over a few tattoos.

    It could also be, of course, that Johnson has been extremely effective as the town’s mayor. Campo, for the most part, is a farming and ranching town, surrounded by fields on all sides, and Johnson, through some connections he’s made at a music school in Lubbock, Texas, is in the process of organizing Campo’s first music festival, slated for next summer. It may seem like a small gesture for a mayor to make, but Johnson’s role is less formal than one may expect, and instead functions more as the community leader. The hierarchy still exists, but it’s less relevant than it may be other places.

    In a town of 400, though, municipal jobs have some overlap: Johnson, as mayor, is also the Chief of Police — a department comprising only two full time officers. Crime tends not to be too much of a problem in such a small community, so when Johnson’s cops are forced into action, it’s usually to deal with motorists passing through Route 287 — and even then, they’re often limited to writing speeding tickets for cars shooting down the highway. Trivial? Maybe. But those speeding tickets, as Johnson explains in his sweet, slow drawl, are how Campo generates most of its income.

    Being mayor of Campo, as it turns out, isn’t necessarily a full-time gig, but Johnson keeps busy. He’s still a cattle farmer — as his parents were before he was — and sells off his calves each year. More than just cattle, however, Johnson’s also got his car dealer’s license, and runs a car lot selling used vehicles at cost to others in the town. “There’s nothing I hate worse than going to buy a car,” he says. “You always leave and feel like, ‘Man, I got screwed.’” So Johnson hits the local auctions in surrounding areas, buys up cars as cheaply as possible, and then sells them at no profit, for no other reason than to help out his constituents and neighbors. “You get taken advantage of so much” in situations like that, he says, so why not cut out the middle man if he’s able? Johnson’s voice lights up when asked what he personally drives: “A 2000-model Chevy pick-up that I got for 1,500 bucks. And it’s nice. Really nice,” he says, impressed and chuckling. And aside than the car lot, and the farm, and the mayoral office, and the police force? He’s also building a cafe with a street patio — by hand. Building the wrought iron, installing the flagstone — and hopefully bringing a few new jobs to the town. What he’s not doing, however, is acting as the head of the Democratic Party for Baca County, the surrounding area of Campo, although he has held that position in the past as well. Johnson calls Campo “conservative,” but says that shouldn’t imply that it’s full of Republicans. “People are just old-fashioned here,” he says. “Politics doesn’t have much to do with it.” As far as the current presidential election is concerned, Johnson’s non-committal: “Oh my goodness, I don’t know. I don’t care for either one of them,” he says, laughing, referring to John McCain and Barack Obama.

    And in many ways, traditional politics don’t matter quite as much in a place like Campo. As the mayor — traditionally, an inescapably politically charged job — Johnson sees himself as the person to listen to and act on the concerns of the townspeople, rather than dictating certain rules and a way of life. That is to say, in many ways, Johnson is the mayor that many others claim (and fail) to be. And now, having gone about as far with his tattoo work as he feels necessary, he feels comfortable in his position again; apparently, so do the people of Campo, who have made him their mayor for the last eight years and, in doing so, have elected quite possibly the country’s most heavily tattooed civic leader. At a recent tattoo convention in Denver, Johnson actually placed second in the “Overall Male” category for his body suit. “Should’ve gotten first!” he says in mock anger and with a rare raising of his voice. He’s silent for a second afterward, and seems to feel like even that joke, that split-second of false bravado, is in need of correction.

    “But,” he adds — humbly, gracefully, earnestly — “there were a lot of people there.”

    * * *
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  • Contemporary Blood Letting [Guest Column]

    Written by

    BME

    Contemporary Blood Letting
    by Jason Oliver

    As part of an ongoing investigation into private rituals and public spaces, this article will consider the growing interest in Live Art in which the artists use their own bodies as the site of inquiry. Social taboos such as bloodletting, self-flagellation and body modification will be considered, alongside the objections to this particular practice.

    Live Art has its history in the performance art practice of the 1970′s. Informed by the work of such artists as the Viennese Aktionists, Coum Transmissions and Chris Burden, the artists who engage in this particular practice choose to use their own bodies, pushing the boundaries of social taboo. Creating more of an interrogation than a dialogue, the spectator is forced into making choices about questions of identity and difference and the nature of mortality.

    In order to negotiate these particular practices has proved problematic, as the performances now only exist in a fragmentary way within photographs and videos. Of course, this documentation is not the performance itself. A photograph or video is a snapshot of time and cannot be totally representative. In an age of mass information overload, where we have become de-conditioned to atrocities committed in the name of politics, global terrorism and famine, the ‘news’ documentation played back on radio and television does not tell the real story. We are conditioned to objectify violations of the body and remove ourselves from immersion in such actions and feelings. The curators (journalists and TV news presenters) of this spectacle manipulate our points of view, numbing us to the reality of events happening in distant countries to ‘the other’.

    The use of blood within Live Art forces the viewer into re-considering their own bodily vulnerability and to question issues of gender roles. As Live Artists use their own bodies as a site for inquiry, there is an immediacy of similarity between the viewers and viewed, which does not require any academic training to understand. As such, immediate actions onto the body have generated a discourse that reaches beyond the confines of the Fine Art arena. Press interest has created a reputation for these artists that places them as ‘the other’ onto which we can project our own fears about bodily invasion and destruction, where we can directly experience such violent actions by attending a performance, not constructed and removed from reality in the manner television forces us to.

    Artists such as Franko B and Ron Athey provoke such a discourse, but one that is fuelled by reputation rather than experience. A sense of control, which could easily lapse into chaos, is the constant concern of such direct actions onto the body. With the disneyfication of difference so prevalent within Western culture, these artists are seeking to re-address the balance and re-affirm their own identities, using taboos such as blood, nakedness and socially sanctioned ‘self-harm’ to explore their own bodies. Traditional Fine Art notions of ‘the space’ and ‘the body’ become ‘this space’ and ‘this body’.


    Ron Athey’s practice is informed by his years of heroin addiction, a fundamentalist pentecostal upbringing, his mother being an institutionalised schizophrenic and ultimately his diagnosis of HIV fifteen years ago. His performances seek to negotiate his relationship to these events, creating a theatre of spectacle in which the viewer is implicated. His use of religious tableau to address these issues further enhances notions of social taboo and stigma. Disussing the idea of theatre and performance as cathartic methods of expression, Athey states,


    "Like the plague, the theatre is the time of evil, the triumph of dark powers that are nourished by a power even more profound until extinction...The theatre like the plague, is in the image of this carnage and this essential separation. It releases conflicts, disengages powers, liberates possibilities, and if these possibilities and these powers are dark, it is the fault not of the plague nor of the theatre, but of life".

    (Exposures, 2002, pg 6)

    In “Four Scenes from a Harsh Life” he inserts 30 hypodermic needles into his arm, referencing his time as an intravenous drug user. He then, with the help of his ‘medical’ staff, inserts a crown of ‘thorns’ (hypodermic needles again), enacting Christ’s death. As he collapses on the floor, his assistants cover him with a white shroud and he is carried to the centre of the stage. After a short while he is cleansed with water and is ‘resurrected’.

    During “Nurses’ Penance,” he re-creates the institutional terror of a hospital setting, with a patient brutalized by huge drag-queen nurses with sewn-together lips. In another piece he’s writhing naked, on one end of a double-headed dildo. His richest source for material, though, is the church. Most of his pieces have religious names like ‘Martyrs and Saints’ and ‘Deliverance’, along with characters like St. Sebastian, who’s martyred with a literal crown of thorns that causes blood to rain onto his face and the floor. Much of his work is driven by a sense of martyrdom and, arguably, a self-hate instilled on him from childhood.

    Athey attracted international attention in 1994, after a Minneapolis performance in which he sliced into the back of a fellow performance artist, placed strips of paper towel over the wounds and then hoisted the bloodied strips of paper towel, via pulley, over the heads of the audience. Though no blood dripped down onto the audience, and though the performer who was cut was HIV negative, Athey’s own HIV positive status led one audience member to claim that the crowd had been spattered with HIV-positive blood.

    Within these performances, the spectator is forced into a position of passive voyeurism. The audience act as conduits for this dialogue that is critical to Athey’s performances. Whilst Athey maintains the power, the audience are left helpless as he metamorphoses himself, through methods of live body modification. Although Athey presents himself to us as an artist, he is also allowing us to observe a process of healing and catharsis. Though Athey does not use documentation in a way that is representative (ie he doesn’t exhibit this work in a gallery), videos of his work provide us with a snapshot of the experience of his performances. His use of theatre to present the ‘real’, adds further signifiers to his work. Referencing notions of catholic ritual and linking this to the idea of Christ as drug taker (although by inference) he opens up a discourse on the nature of religion and its use of ritual.


    The use of blood in Franko B’s performances operates as a different signifier. Franko B is not HIV+ and he uses blood as an affirmation of life. His short pieces involve cutting, scarification and other apparent S/M practices. The direct use of his body in these performances removes any notions of ‘representation’. In order to fully experience Franko B, one has to be present as part of a complete visual, physical and emotional immersion in the work.

    His performances such as ‘I Miss You’, when he walks down a canvas in a room set up like a fashion show, with photographers situated at one end, to heighten the sense of voyeurism, seek to implicate the viewer further. ‘Oh Lover Boy’ sites Franko as an ‘artists model’. To quote from Gray Watsons interview with Franko B,


    "Oh Lover Boy is going to be a performance piece where again, the body is presented: it's there on the table. It is there for you to take, in a way, either to draw or to look at...the set-up is going to be almost like a life-drawing class but there is also a clinical side, where it is like you are looking at a body. But it is not passive; it is not a dead body, in a way it's giving life by bleeding. And he's looking at you".

    (Gray Watson, 2000)

    Franko’s performances reference his childhood being brought up by the Red Cross. Using a diatribe of medical equipment such a syringes, drip stands and wheel chairs, Franko re-enforces notions of healing, but also control, amidst the perceived chaos of his performances. He can only perform three times a year because of the amount of healing that needs to take place after his performances.

    Franko’s other work, (which is regularly exhibited, unlike Ron Athey’s documentation) consists of collages and installations. His collage work, references his ‘real’ experiences, and documents his whole life. This again raises issues of vulnerability, as he is leaving nothing to the imagination. Flyers from his performances and pictures of ‘boys I went out with’ (Gray Watson, 2000) mingle with images of religious artefacts and blood stained sheets from his performances.

    Issues of power arise here, as the viewer is implicated in the performance by default. Franko appears as helpless and vulnerable, but also has power over his audience. If Franko performed in the street, the context would be different and issues of legality would be raised. This issue of contextualisation also raises issues of safety and notions of control and chaos.

    Both Ron Athey and Franko B have ‘medical’ helpers during their performances. They act as signifiers within the performance, to connote to the viewer notions of control and safety. This safety angle is always printed on the flyers, to reassure the viewer. There is a paradox here, as the people that are supposed to ‘help’ during Franko B’s performance, also cut him with a razor during ‘Oh Lover Boy’. The medical helpers are in fact trained body-piercers, with basic anatomy training. As soon as this fact has been established during the performance, these signifiers change.

    Both Athey and Franko B as gay men question the nature of masculinity. At their performances, it is the men who recoil against the walls of the venue, normally in foetal positions, returning to maternal signifiers as if about to be castrated. The spilling of blood, whatever the connotation intended by the artist, has the effect of rendering the audience impotent, either to their own bodies or to the performance itself. They cannot help the performers, even though they feel their natural reaction is to do so.

    There is also a sense that the performers are acting ‘privately’ and the viewer is intruding into a sacred shamanic ritual. Shamanism is normally associated with women, blood letting during menstruation being an important part of ‘walking with the spirits’. Although, shamans tend to operate outside the confines of accepted social practice, they act as a conduit to ‘other-worldly’ access and are relied upon by the rest of the tribe to maintain a sense of unity. Within the framework of Live Art, the performers provide this access so that the viewers themselves can reach the dark underworld of the shaman. Within Western culture, it appears that men are not supposed to reveal their feelings, let alone share any intimate details about themselves with the outside world. By the direct action onto their bodies and the use of blood, Franko and Athey challenge this notion.

    The letting of blood is seen as ‘unclean’. This mythology probably originated in the Old Testament where it is seen that,


    "She is to be 'put apart for her uncleanness' for seven days".

    (Lev. 18:19)

    “Any man who lies with her during this time is also unclean for seven days, anyone who touches her is unclean till the evening, and everything that she sitteth upon shall be unclean”.

    (Lev. 15:19-24)

    Throughout the history of art we have encountered images of blood from the earliest cave paintings through centuries of biblical images and through to war films such as Apocalypse Now. It both fascinates us and repulses us. It has come to represent both the sacred and profane. Live Artists use this dichotomy as a way of personal transformation. At the performances there is a sense of sacredness that transcends orthodox religious methods. This could explain why the Christian Church is opposed to such direct actions onto the body. It appals them that something non-religious can actually achieve the same transcendental experience that religion is supposed to offer. In Judaeo-Christian cultures, blood ‘sacrifice’ cannot be culturally sanctioned because of notions of idolatry, where the artist are using their own bodies to ‘redeem’ themselves as opposed to appeals to God.

    In his book ‘Violence and the Sacred’, Rene Girards’ theory of sacrifice states,


    "The physical metamorphoses of spilt blood can stand for the double nature of violence...Blood serves to illustrate that the same substance can stain or cleanse, contaminate or purify, drive men to fury and murder or appease their anger and restore them to life"

    (Girard, 1972)

    The process of purification that the artists are trying to achieve can sometimes fail, not providing the audience with the signifier of life that blood performances seek to inform the viewer about. The aforementioned performance by Ron Athey called ‘Martyrs and Saints’ which used supposed HIV blood being heaved across the heads of the audience on a pulley system created an outcry. This could be because the blood was seen as ‘polluted’, making the ‘artist an unacceptable surrogate sacrificial victim for a healthy community’ (Dawn Perlmutter, 2000). In a sense, the signifier contained within the blood changed its meaning and the ritual which was meant to be a demonstration of transcendence through bodily mutilation failed. The distance between the observer and observed was very wide and the artists role as shaman became disjointed, hence the public outcry. The success of such actions is dependent on the audience feeling close to the Live Artists performance.


    The antagonism towards Live Art does not detract from the fact that Live Art is a growing method of expression. It could be seen as an attempt to disrupt societal and personal boundaries through methods of physical sacrifice and as a process of purification. Although sometimes the ritual, as in Athey’s case, can fail, it is still a ritual which people observe. With the growth of interest in body piercing and tattooing due largely to information being disseminated via the internet, what was once the reserve of underground S/M clubs has now become an overground method of artistic practice. There is an obvious need for people to get back in touch with their own bodies as the site of inquiry, as is evidenced by the recent series of events at the Tate Modern, running over the course of a weekend at the end of March this year called ‘Live Culture’. This exhibition brought together Live Artists from various schools, to inform, perform and debate. Depending on audience interest, the movement will continue to undermine social convention and will move away from the purely aesthetic and personal transformation on the part of the artists, into the realms of communal transformation.

    Jason Oliver
    May 2003

    References

    Bibliography

    • Danto, Arthur C (1986). The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art. Columbia University Press: New York.
    • Eliade, M (1987). The Encyclopedia of Religion. Macmillan Publishing Co: New York.
    • Stuart, H (1997). Representation, Cultural Represenations and Signifying Practices. Bath Press Colourbooks: Glasgow.
    • Keidan, L, Morgan, S and Sinclair, S. (1998). Franko B. Black Dog Publishing: London.
    • V, Manuel, Watson, G and Wilson, S. (2001). Franko B – Oh Lover Boy. Black Dog Publishing: London.
    • V,Vale and Juno, A. (1989). Modern Primitives, An Investigation of Contemporary Adornment and Ritual: Re/Search Publications: San Francisco, CA.
    • Wollheim, R. (1980). Art And Its Objects. University Press: Cambridge.


    Jason Oliver is currently working on his BA (Hons) Graphic Fine Art course in London, UK. His main areas of concern are ritual, body modification, and performances linking the two. He is researching social taboos and the general public’s response to direct actions onto the body and has a special interest in the use of blood, both in art and in ‘tribal’ rituals and how it acts as different signifiers depending on cultural context.

    He is an active opponent to cultural appropriation of body ritual, finding it both undermining and patronising but instead explores the role that modification plays to himself personally, without cultural references, by pushing his body into new areas of experience, with documentation being a pre-requisite.

    This article was written as a precursor to his thesis, currently entitled ‘The Body as Transformative Object’. You can find Jason on IAM as coldcell.

    Copyright © 2003 Jason Oliver and BMEzine.com LLC. Requests to republish must be confirmed in writing. For bibliographical purposes this article was first published online August 20th, 2003 by BMEzine.com LLC in Tweed, Ontario, Canada.

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