Mx.D.P

As always, during my four years of academic fine art, I have returned for a summer of tattooing. I give talks on tattoo history and especially the changing nature of tools and techniques. This year will see the start of licensing for tattooing here in Wales. This will be a test bed for its rollout into the rest of the UK, no doubt. This legislation has been in the pipeline since 2016. This spring, I taught the environmental health inspectors of Wales how to go about a tattoo studio inspection, something every tattoo studio in Wales will have to do to be licensed. I didn’t have long with each group, and I am sure there will be a lot of teething troubles along the way!

What has any of this got to do with my MA? Well, quite a lot, actually. My practice looks at the creative network, emerging technologies and online learning and how that translates into real-life experience.

Art, arts education, art sales, galleries and the commodification of art have undergone an enormous change since Covid-19; some of that is due to economic pressures and anxieties. Online literacy and education, sales and exhibition, and social media platforms also experienced an explosion of need during COVID-19. Together, it has been an art apocalypse. In-person sales are down, online courses that experienced a massive surge of interest during COVID-19 are flat-lining or have reached market saturation, everything is on YouTube for free, and what looked like a new frontier for artists may become a bear trap. Artists have to find new ways to get our art out there and pay our bills.

Online academic arts training, however, is a growth area. Although most will agree it’s good to be in the studio in person, our course, the soon-to-be re-titled MA Fine Art: Global (maybe), was one of the first online Arts MAs in the world. We enjoyed our in-person Exhibition and workshops in March at CSM. Not all could attend, especially those long-distance students (though Holly came from Australia) or those with work or family commitments that couldn’t give the joined-up time. As a disabled artist, it was challenging, to say the least, so online learning, education, and, dare I suggest, art practices are more inclusive and have a lower carbon footprint and are therefore better for the planet.

So, back to tattooing, it has had a similar transformation, but not quite the same. We can’t give you a tattoo over the internet… yet! (Think 3D printers)

But tattooing and fine art are merging, and I’ll describe why. Arts education is churning out vast numbers of young artists with nowhere to go. They have no prospects of a sustainable career within their chosen field. If you are flexible, you may find yourself in illustration, games design or back into arts education; as an educator, you may be able to retain a part-time art practice while doing an art-related job, but many will have to find work in a wholly disconnected area. That’s the brutal truth.

One career that art grads have slowly taken over is Tattooing. Previously, it was the domain of degenerates, convicts, rebels and neuro-spicy individuals (make your mind up where I fit in that description).

The art grad has forged a new path within tattooing. This transformation started in the Miami Ink days of reality TV shows and took off from 2010 onwards with the ready availability of tattooing supplies and new tattooing tools. The Trad Daddie Gatekeepers have long gatekept tattooing. A new studio popping up was often visited by an established studio tattooer, complete with a baseball bat to break your hands!

In the past, the accepted way was to have an apprenticeship, learn the craft, make your own needles and ink, build and tune your coil tattoo machine and be given the rub to be able to buy from an established supply house. You then either worked for your mentor for several years, paying a good deal of your takings to the shop, or go work or travel to a new area and shop. If you did set up your place, it would be in many years time and far away from your original tattoo shop.

Them’s the rules…. Or were…

Today, you can buy all your supplies online; even on Amazon, no one asks for references or licences. Today’s tattoo machines don’t need building or tuning… you just plug and play.

If you don’t fancy learning from YouTube, you can go to a tattoo school, and they will even give you a certificate! Sadly, for those who went the tattoo school route, no decent tattoo studio would give you a job. So what happened was an explosion of new studios with artists that were barely trained or underground unregulated scratches that did work on you at tattoo parties or in your or their kitchen. However, during all this chaos, and we are still in the thick of that, some cream floated to the surface, and some fantastic tattoo art started to appear. There were some issues with it. Some of it did look great when it was first done, especially with an iPhone filter posted on Instagram, but it didn’t age well and soon faded as techniques without the basic foundation in any art are apt to do.

What was intriguing was that clients didn’t seem to care! Their tattoos were immortalised on social media, and that was enough. Quite often, the tattooer would get rich quick but wouldn’t always have the return customers, or if they did, would be demoralised at how their returning work looked. A combination of lots of demanding clients and performance anxiety led to a mental health crisis in tattooing.

Then Covid hit! It shut down tattooing, and the Trad Daddies say it has killed tattooing. I don’t think it has, but it has hastened a massive change within the art form. Many new plug-and-play tattooers emerged from the Covid lockdown, and we are in a strange no-man’s land of economic instability and the blind leading the blind. Many established tattooers are retiring and are taking any helpful knowledge with them. There has been a significant development of serious online training by highly talented tattooers who first came with an arts background 10-15 years ago. Many had burnt out but are now finding a market for digital art tattooing training instead of working as tattooers.

As part of my investigation into digital networks, I’m looking at one of these courses in a style of tattooing I don’t usually do. So far, it’s been extraordinarily insightful, and it was great to see an emphasis on art and drawing at the start of the course. However, I am now at the tattooing stage and watching the videos has seen me shouting at the iPad. It’s seeing the disconnect between usable traditional tattooing techniques that produce a long-lasting tattoo and seeing an appropriation of what tattooing might be. I see the contemporary arts training in this ‘give it a go attitude’, but it’s scary to see what I would consider basic good technique lost!

I hope as we go along, the more arts-based tattooing stuff will be better, and I am looking forward to seeing how it changes my established work.

So what’s the future for art graduates as tattooers and tattooing… that’s too early to say…