Scholar Puts His Mark on Civilization

The point of his work has always been to “raise people’s consciousness about the diversity of ways of being human.” It has also been the point of Arnold Gary Rubin’s life, because the art historian and university professor has sought to make the two seamless.

Over the years his choice of cultural weapons--the “battering ram” that can change people’s minds--has shifted. For the last 10 years, it has been what he calls the most intimate of arts, tattoo. It is a form of artistic expression most people consider “weird” at best, “perverse” at worst, acknowledges the associate professor of art history at UCLA. Good. Anything that shatters stereotypes about what it means to be civilized and, hence, human is what he’s after. Anything that “shakes the pillars” of the academic Establishment and gets it to reexamine what is studied, why it’s studied and how it’s studied is great.

Nobody is “neutral about tattoo,” he says. There are very few forms of art “that arouse strong feelings any longer, but tattoo is one. Tattoo is the only art form that is still prohibited in large areas of the U.S. You can’t tattoo legally in New York City, for example. Do you know of any other art form that is still legally sanctioned? I don’t.”

Rubin has laid out the American renaissance of the ancient art of tattoo in an anthology to be published this spring by UCLA’s Museum of Cultural History. It’s called “Marks of Civilization” and presents for the first time a scholarly examination of both tattoo and other forms of body modifications. Rubin is both editor of and a contributor to the book.

Before he found tattoos as his latest cultural battering ram, it had been African art, still his area of specialization, specifically the art of Nigeria.

During the 1960s and ‘70s--as a graduate student and instructor at Indiana University and later as a professor at UCLA--he was attempting to validate African culture at a time, he says, when people believed Africa had no history or culture worth acknowledging before Europeans arrived.

Further, he explains, “I believed that it was possible to use works of art as data for historical reconstruction in situations where the conventional resources are not available--no archeology, no preserved sequence of monuments like Michelangelo’s sculptures, no documents. So here we are using art as a way of demonstrating the richness and depth of African civilization.”

Altered Culture

Eventually, he reached a dead end. Nigerian traditional culture and values had been so altered by Western influences by the mid-1970s that he no longer recognized the place, he says. And the whole field of African studies had been so thoroughly taken over by the academic Establishment that he saw little room for real innovative work. He moved closer to home.

Trying to prove that you didn’t need to load three 747s with academicians and go to New Guinea to find significant cultural rites worthy of investigation, Rubin took his UCLA art history students over the mountains to Pasadena to study the Tournament of Roses Parade in the mid-1970s.

“The idea was to see whether insights--that were not otherwise available--into aspects of American popular culture could be derived from a phenomenon as vast and complex as the Tournament of Roses. And we did.” That published research, he says, was well-received. And, since it was done by an art historian as opposed to a folklorist, “it now has a certain legitimacy, not as a study of the masks, or instruments or costumes, but as a way festivals, as an art form, are organized.”

When, as with the African research, he reached a dead-end, Rubin says he “looked for something that could no longer be dismissed and I came up with body art.” It “nominally threatens Judeo-Christian conceptions of how the body is to be treated.”

In “Marks of Civilization,” Rubin says he explains how European ideas maintain “the integrity of the body as a kind of pure vessel for the Holy Spirit. Whereas most other peoples conceive of the body as a vehicle for intense experiences. That was where the body art research came from. This was the last category of art production that I could identify that still had the capacity to raise strong feelings.”

In fact, he says, the most fundamental cultural contrasts have to do with values as they are expressed by the human body.

“We put holes in our noses or we don’t. We put plugs in our ears, or we don’t. We put designs on our bodies or we don’t.” All these things “tend to challenge implicitly everybody’s definition” of what it means to be civilized.

In fact, all these acts of body modification are marks of civilization. They are aesthetic choices that are essentially no different, says Rubin, than a suburban housewife choosing to have a nose job, a lawyer seeking a tummy tuck, teeth straightened by braces or encrusted with gold. And if people can understand that the same human impulse underlies all these decisions--the desire for group identification and acceptance and the enhancement of physical beauty--then people may begin to understand that “this is not a phenomenon of Asia or Africa or the Amazon basin, it is right now, it is right here, it is us.”

His left forearm bears a tattoo, its message written in Greek. “It’s a secret, a personal kind of statement I made at a crucial stage in my life. It’s not something I tend to share,” says Rubin, 51, who lay on a couch in a friend’s home in Venice with an intravenous needle in his chest. His thoughts are clear, organized with apparent determination, though his voice is soft and quivers on occasion. Only when he gently places an unsteady finger to his lips, trying to capture a wandering thought, is fear and sadness detectable on his handsome face.

In appropriately professorial tones, he continues talking, a dying man with gastric cancer. As it is, the doctors expected him dead a month ago. An adoring daughter, Hannele, 27, sits nearby as he speaks.

Asked if he considers “Marks of Civilization” his most important work, he answers, “I didn’t intend it that way, but that’s the way it turned out.”

Is he a religious man?

He shakes his head and says, “No.”

“I feel myself rootless and a wanderer and that has advantages and disadvantages. The disadvantages are that you are nowhere at home and you have nothing of your own.”

When he wasn’t in Africa with his two children, Gabriel and Hannele, and his wife--from whom he is divorced--then he was in India searching for the African influence on that subcontinent.

The effect of his travels and world view on his children have been profound, they both agree.

His son, Gabriel, 19, spoke Hausa, a language common in many parts of West Africa, before he spoke English. But when he returned from Nigeria to America “it wasn’t a problem,” he says in a phone interview. He’s always been adaptable, he says. An aviation and public relations major at the University of North Dakota, Gabriel says his family background has always made it easy for him “to go with the flow. I’ve never been closed minded.” And he adds, he’s never been “scholarly” like his father and sister. “I’m more physically oriented.”

Take judo for instance, he says. When his mother left and his parents divorced, he and his sister stayed with their dad. “I knew I could have gotten into drugs or something,” he says, “so I turned to judo. It was a reaction to my parents divorce. I coughed a lot too when my mother left,” he says with a laugh. Then he got into wrestling and surfing. “My dad bought me my first surfboard. Up until now he was a lot like my best friend. I could just about tell him anything.”

He has come to Los Angeles to be with his father and says he is dealing with his dad’s illness “better now, facing facts. No point being bummed out all the time.”

His sister is curled up in a chair across from her father. She studied art history but has become a journalist, something of which her father approves.

“She has always been active in the cause of social justice,” her father says proudly. We have a little picture of her carrying a poster picketing George Wallace.”

His daughter laughs. “He was blocking black kids from integrating schools in Alabama” and was scheduled to speak at Indiana University, where her father was in graduate school. She was about three at the time, she recalls, and was photographed carrying a poster that reads “The issue is moral justice not states’ rights.”

It was precisely that issue and the culture of racism in America that shaped her father’s personal and professional choices, he says.

“I grew up in southeastern Virginia is the ‘40s and early ‘50s when the school desegregation decisions had come down. And I remember vividly my schoolmates, their parents, and all the local demagogues talking about the fact that the Supreme Court or the legislature could introduce all the laws that they wanted but they never could change people’s minds.

“And that always seemed peculiar to me.” If you went about it the right way, “using principles of indirection,” you could, he says.

As he got older and his academic career progressed, he decided that if one could make a case for African history and culture, by extension one could make a case for the descendants of Africans in America and chip away at the ingrained notion of black inferiority. And again, by extension, he could begin to destroy all stereotypes based on fear and ignorance.

He returns to the subject of religion, it’s meaning as his life is coming to a premature end. “I define myself in terms of what I do.”

Note From a Friend

He pulls out a note from a friend who is a great collector of African art, one of the best-educated people he knows and deeply religious, he says. “I may not be able to get through this,” says Rubin as he begins to read, “because, as ever, he has the capacity to define my pressure points.”

He reads: “ ‘You were with me in church this morning, including Holy Communion. Some day we will feast together again in His kingdom. God be with you till we meet again. Will I be able to keep that date? I am not sure. Though not without hope. There is much in my life that needs forgiveness . . . but trust in His mercy. But why am I sure that you will be there? Because you have confessed His name in your life if not in church. It is without a feeling of impiety that I believe you can say with St. Paul . . . for I am now ready to be offered. . . .’ ”

Rubin stops, his voice breaking, his daughter watching silently, her jaw firm.

“ ‘And the time of my departure is at hand. I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course. I have kept the faith.’ ”