Body Art: Marks of Identity

American Museum of Natural History, New York, until 29 May 2000

(see www.amnh.org/exhibitions/bodyart and www.discovery.com/exp/humancanvas/humancanvas.html)

  Every time you shave, put on make up, or squeeze into tight jeans in an attempt to alter your appearance you are unwittingly following in the footsteps of your ancestors, who devised equally ingenious ways of doing the same thing. Now a history of our ancestors' methods of painting and piercing their bodies over the past 30 000 years is on display in a wondrous, imaginative, and sometimes frightening exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History. “There is no known culture in which people don't do this, whether permanently or temporarily,” said Ellen V Futter, president of the museum.

Why do people alter their bodies, sometimes painfully and permanently? Enid Schildkrout, curator of the show and chair of the museum's division of anthropology, thinks there are many reasons: “To be human. For beauty, as a sign of change or rebellion or conformity, to show status, to mark a moment, to be able to wear a certain ornament, to identify with spirits or ancestors or deities, to show group membership, to show gender distinctions.”

Organised in six major sections, with several short films, the exhibit traces body art through history, showing the techniques, the tools, the results, and the way other cultures looked at body art that was strange to them. Among the techniques shown are body painting (including henna decoration and makeup), body shaping, piercing, scarification, and tattooing. The earliest signs of human interest in self decoration appeared 30 000 years ago, when handprints, ochre deposits, and ornaments are found alongside cave paintings. Thousands of years later, in ancient Egypt, humans were grinding natural substances—malachite, lead, and antimony—into eye makeup for both men and women. In the show are a makeup palette and dispensers like modern mascara tubes, inscribed with the names of the donors, who may have handed them out at festivals, much like the free samples at modern department stores.

More recently, Nuba men in the Sudan painted their bodies as traditional signs of changing status—from boy to adolescent to adult—and also to win favour from their wives and wives' families, until European photographers and tourists came and paid to see the art. Then body painting became more profitable, but less meaningful to the society.

Body art reflects what one society believes is beautiful, expensive, noble, religious, or of high status. An outside society may react quite differently to beards, tattoos, black teeth, or oddly shaped bodies. When Westerners, mostly Americans, came to Japan in the mid-1800s, Japan had been a closed society for about 300 years. The Japanese commented on the extravagant facial hair of the American men and the strange clothing—hooped skirts—of the women. Americans found strange the Japanese habit of women beautifying their teeth by painting them black.

When meeting other cultures, Westerners focused on the absence of clothes and the use of body painting and scarification or cicatrisation, in which substances are rubbed into cuts to produce raised scars, often in a decorative or symbolic pattern. The exhibit suggests that body art links an individual to a society, group, or class. In 18th century Japan, for example, elaborate full body tattoos were taken up by those on the margins of society—labourers, firemen, and gangsters. In the Marquesas Islands of the Pacific, men were elaborately tattooed from head to foot, beginning during adolescence. The tattoos showed courage because tattooing is painful, wealth because the tattoo expert was expensive, and beauty because tattooing made the wearer attractive to women.

Among the Maoris of New Zealand, facial tattooing involved deep, grooving cuts in the face, severe enough that the exhibit includes elaborately carved feeding funnels for use by those recovering from facial tattooing. For modern devotees, the exhibit includes a warning from the New York City Department of Health: “Tattooing is an invasive procedure that can result in serious skin and blood infections. Where procedures involving penetration of the skin are not correctly performed, they can be means of transmitting organisms that cause diseases like AIDS, hepatitis B and hepatitis C.”

Some body art practices may have had a medical intent. For the 4000 year old “ice man” found in the Alps, tattooing may have been meant to ease pain. He had tattoo marks near his spine and on his legs, near where x rays have revealed joint degeneration. Body art may mark life's changes. An African woman's beautiful beaded corset in coral, blues, and white was worn while she stood all day with a pitcher of water on her head as a sign she was ready to endure the rigours of married life.

Non-Western societies shaped babies' heads into longer, flatter, more aristocratic shapes—easy to do when children's heads are relatively malleable, up to about age 7. Until this century, Chinese women suffered foot binding to produce deformed tiny feet thought to be beautiful. Western societies to this day are attempting to shape women's bodies—in appearance if not in reality. The show includes corsets from the late 17th century and undergarments up to the present. These garments are designed to temporarily reshape women's bodies into the currently desirable form. People may also practise body art to reinvent themselves, to become something different through art. “Western society is more tolerant of body art now than it was during the colonial period, when it was associated with tribal cultures. We're seeing a revival,” says Dr Schildkrout.

Figure.

AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY

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