Conscious Choice: Consumer Tribes

May 1995

Consumer Tribes

by Traci Carroll

Interest in tattooing and body piercing has surged during the past ten years, spawning a new aesthetic of personal appearance for many young people, along with an explosion of information on body art. About fifty different tattoo magazines are now available, whereas ten years ago there were only four. You can now subscribe to a tattooing and piercing discussion group on the internet. Detailed books such as Modern Primitives, which treats the history and theory behind body modification, have become widely available and immensely popular.

Modern Primitives, as its title suggests, argues that this resurgence of interest in body art speaks to a primal, universal human need, brutally suppressed by our civilization, for painful and meaningful rituals of self-marking. Modern Primitives seems to bridge several different genres of writing: anthropological treatise, autobiography, pornography, and coffee table art book.

The variety of perspectives on tattooing presented in this striking book raises a wealth of questions: What are the roots of this social movement, often called "New Tribalism," which places such an emphasis on the blood rites of self-ornamentation? Does the practice of body alteration suggest some larger dissatisfaction with American culture, or does it merely offer a medium for masochistic, self-destructive impulses?

Is the fascination with tattooing and piercing a generational fad, a postmodern form of body fashion that merely allows people to carry their consumer goods on their bodies? Does the prevalence of gang tattoos suggest that these marks signal a wholesale rejection of authority, or that they symbolically allow people to create their own groups and communities in a society that offers the nuclear family as the only acceptable form of group identification? After talking with some tattoo artists and enthusiasts at Underground Art in Memphis, these questions have become, if anything, more difficult to answer. Tattoo artist Benn Wallenborn contests the accuracy of the phrase "New Tribalism" to account for the present status of tattooing in American culture. He suggests that the confusion over the phrase "New Tribalism" arises from the fact that tattoos run through fashion cycles just like clothing.

While he hastens to qualify his comparison between tattoos and mass-produced items like clothes and jewelry, Wallenborn notes that the late 1980s witnessed a resurgence in tribal tattoo work. Centuries-old, traditional patterns from New Guinea and Indonesia were in high demand, as were Native American designs from the Pacific Northwest tribes.

Wallenborn notes that people may choose designs to reclaim a sense of their ethnic history, declare a symbolic identification with another cultural history, or appropriate histories and cultures they know little or nothing about.

Since all the artists practicing at Underground Art have formal art training, they are not strangers to the challenge to unified identity, artistic authenticity, and originality posed by poststructuralism over the past fifteen years. Wallenborn takes this circulation of cultures very matter-of-factly, maintaining that "there is no original" for the artist or the customer to steal.

Although Wallenborn talks of tattooing mainly as an art form and a business venture, he also notes the tendency of just-turned-18-year-olds to come into the shop in groups in order to get tattoos in a sort of rite of passage. Wallenborn’s observation, as well as the disproportionate popularity of body art among teenagers and young adults, perhaps attest to our culture’s lack of meaningful initiation rituals that "mark" our entrance into adulthood.

In fact, one strand of Modern Primitives highlights this deficiency in a culture that only allows us a very indirect, alienated experience of our bodies, unconsciously mediated through mass-produced anti-perspirants, mouthwashes, depilatories, and hairsprays. The editors of Modern Primitives draw some of their ideas from fringe cultural theorists such as George Lingis and George Bataille, who argue that humans partake of a universal, transcendent "will to excess," or a desire to engage in nonrational, useless, wasteful, but nevertheless relentlessly passionate activity. The desire for ornamentation and intense physical experience, including ritual suffering, supposedly derives from this restless will to excess, which constantly finds new avenues of expression and rediscovers old ones.

Such an explanation would admittedly meet with blank stares from groups of Sigma Nu pledges, hot for the fraternal bonding experience (or displaced homoeroticism?) of a group tattoo. Wallenborn suggests, albeit rather hesitantly, that for some people, tattoos serve as a way of forging or reinforcing group identity along quite traditional lines.

Though most of the groups he tattoos are 18-year-old self-initiates and gang members, he also has an occasional family arrive as a group and ask to have the same tattoo. These variations complicate the widely held assumption that tattoos have an inherently subversive, anti-authoritarian meaning in our culture. Everyone I talked with remarked on the fact that, for better or for worse, body art is becoming mainstreamed. Tattooing and piercing are increasingly acceptable and increasingly visible in magazines and on billboards and television.

Regardless of the political or social message one attempts to broadcast by getting a tattoo, in many cases tattoos do seem to fulfill a need to claim group membership, whether that group is the nuclear family, Generation X, or the social and economic unit of the street gang.

Another artist, Joel, also emphasized the fact that some of the negative associations attached to tattooing have fallen away in the past few years due to the evolution of tattooing as an art: more highly trained artists, better equipment and inks, and the circulation of a larger volume of information have created more possibilities for artists and customers. In turn, as the medium expands, more and more talented art students are turning their attention and talents to tattooing.

Like others, Joel expresses an ambivalence toward this change in the reputation of tattooing. He balks at the suggestion that customers come to get tattooed out of a deep spiritual need for ritual, for the purpose of cultural rejuvenation, or out of a political impulse to use their bodies as a means of rejecting the status quo, but he does associate body art with a counter-culture, "...if it exists.

"There’s always gonna be freaks," Joel explains, referring to people who reject what he calls a "Leave It To Beaver" lifestyle, and who will display their rejection visually.

Although the stereotype of the typical customer in a tattoo shop has shifted from that of the violent, leather-clad biker to that of the white urban hipster, the section of counter-culture that makes up a large proportion of Joel’s clientele is the African American street gang. Joel estimates that almost half of his business comes from African-American gang members, and he attributes his popularity among this group to the racism ingrained in the more established tattoo studios in Memphis.

Joel receives a great deal of this business because other shops will not accept it, although the sociological distinction between black customers who want tattoos of their gang insignia and white fraternity boys who want tattoos of their Greek letters seems to him rather slight. The only markers of group identification the shop will not tattoo are racist and sexist slogans; Joel says that once in a while a skinhead comes into the shop asking for a racist slogan to be tattooed on his forehead, but he claims that those examples are pretty rare, since the shop publicizes in its list of rules its refusal to do hate tattoos.

One of the more interesting regulations at Underground Art is its right to refuse service to "anyone displaying a dysfunctional personality," which Wallenborn explains as a catch-all category designed to include people who are obviously drunk or high, people whose speech or behavior make other customers feel uncomfortable, or men who sexually harass female employees by trying to force them into long conversations about genital piercings.

Wallenborn dismisses this latter group of people as "sexual deviants," but the prevalence of almost-naked, young, thin, beautiful tattooed women on the covers of the tattoo magazines in this shop and others also suggest a possible connection between an aesthetic engagement with the craft of tattooing and a voyeuristic interest in women’s bodies.

In his book Excesses, Lingis argues that the drive to manipulate and decorate the body is a fundamentally erotic one; tattooing, piercing, and scarification all focus more attention on the erotic surface of the skin, in some cases actually increasing the surface area of the skin. And as anyone with a fresh tattoo or navel piercing will testify, one’s first impulse is often to go out and buy more revealing clothing — tank tops, midriff shirts — in order to show off her work.

The younger customers I talked with did tend to be proud of their body work; they want to display it and talk about it with other people. In 23-year-old Ben Nguyen’s words, seeing a tattoo on a woman is "like an aphrodisiac," and he is also eager to pull up his pants leg and show his new tattoo to anyone who wants to see it. Ben views tattoos as a social sorting technique, a means of separating himself from those who look down on tattooing and a way of meeting other like-minded people who appreciate tattoos and the social freedom that tattoos represent for him.

Of course, Ben Wallenborn and Joel also have a large clientele of closet tattoo enthusiasts who get tattoos on more private skin, which they don’t intend to show off. Joel characterizes these people as "businessmen or dentists [who] want to secretly buck the system" without risking their professional respectability in doing so.

Whether getting a tattoo on your butt that only your wife and the guys at the gym will see bucks any kind of system is doubtful, but many people do think of tattoos as a means of expression, regardless of the fact that those people have nothing to do with producing that expression — they simply choose the image and hand over the money.

Ben Nguyen sees his tattoo as a way of telling others who he is; he believes that tattoos "express your personality," and he chose to have placed on his ankle a brilliantly-colored sun, three inches in diameter, to express — as his own — the sense of vitality he associates with the sun. Perhaps tattoos and piercings bridge the gap, then, between commodity consumption and artistic expression. Social theorist Michel de Certeau claims that buying consumer goods and watching films and television aren’t simply passive activities; they imply a kind of creative consumption. In the act of consuming objects and images, some people make stories about the images they see, use objects for purposes they weren’t intended for, or think up new uses for things altogether.

From that perspective, having a tattoo also means showing it to others as a sign of common interest, whether that interest is aesthetic, social, or erotic. Exchanging these signs of group membership and voluntarily excluding oneself from a definition of dignified, mainstream, professional appearance, surely produces something, although maybe not a table or a chair in the traditional Marxist sense of production. These exchanges do, however, help some people declare an alternative identity, reinforce a sense of community, and enhance the pleasure of being in a body.

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