ART : FLESH TONES : Laguna Exhibit Looks Beneath the Surface at Artists and Tattoos

The summer after graduating from Newport Harbor High School, aspiring artist Don Ed Hardy had a booth at the Laguna Beach Sawdust Festival. It’s safe to say that the wares he exhibitedthere didn’t raise an eyebrow.

“It was around 1962, and the prevailing aesthetic was like really pleasant seascapes and clowns,” recalled Hardy, who was raised in Corona del Mar.

Such pleasantries still dominate the festival. Hardy, however, now favors bloody daggers, venomous snakes and Stinky the skunk.

Hardy is a tattoo artist, who designs and applies the indelible designs, as well as a trained contemporary artist. His current project is to show how tattoos and more traditional artworks fit together in “Eye Tattooed America,” a traveling group exhibition at Laguna Art Museum that Hardy curated.

“It’s great to see this wild art form I’ve embraced kind of coming back to the old stomping grounds,” said Hardy, whose works are among those displayed. “It’ll be fun to see what sort of reaction it gets from people used to a more staid kind of art.”

If another Laguna Museum exhibit exploring the impact of lowbrow culture on highbrow art is any indication, public reaction could be gonzo. “Kustom Kulture,” the 1993 show linking custom cars, hot rods, raunchy comics and contemporary art, scored as one of the 75-year-old institution’s most popular efforts ever.

“Eye Tattooed America” includes an in-your-face profusion of flash--designs of the images, such as snarling panthers, skulls, roses, hearts and U.S. Navy insignias, worn by the tattooed.

Eye-popping photographs show people vividly tattooed from bald head and bare butt to toe. But the exhibit’s thrust is how tattoo art has left its mark on fine art, represented here by paintings, sculpture and etchings.

There are about 150 pieces, dating from the 1930s through the ‘90s. About 30 artists contributed works, including tattoo artist “Sailor Jerry” Collins, who was Hardy’s mentor. There are also artists who, like Hardy, straddle both worlds and leading fine artists who have at one time or another found inspiration, imagery or both from the phenomenon of flesh branding. Among them are Ed Paschke, Terry Allen, Tony Fitzpatrick, Karen Carson, Manuel Ocampo, John Altoon and Masami Teraoka.

A bloody dagger protrudes from an envelope carried aloft by a blindfolded bird in Hardy’s enigmatic, foreboding watercolor “Bad News (Tweeter Is Sick)” (1992). The disconcerting “Painted Lady” (1971), an oil painting by Paschke, perhaps Chicago’s best-known artist, depicts a 1940s-era pinup beauty covered in tattoos, her sweetly smiling face included.

Fitzpatrick, a self-taught artist, tattoos animals--dogs, horses--as well as humans with cockroaches, religious imagery and spiders. George Klauba creates sculptures reminiscent of African masks, painting each one’s face with tiny dots and designs evocative of Australian aboriginal sand paintings.

“Many of the works here are not directly identifiable as tattoo designs but carry their spirit: A sense of distilled and forceful emotion, regardless of subject or style, with a kind of weird beauty that is simultaneously dumb, funny, frightening and seductive,” Hardy wrote in the show’s catalogue. Hardy, a nationally recognized authority on tattoos, went on to say, “Sacred emblems, powerful animals and popular symbols are frequently used--tattoo designs have always tended to be exotic and amuletic.”

Bolton Colburn, the Laguna museum’s curator of collections, was enthusiastic about the exhibit: “The work has an incredible wallop. Visually, it’s overload; it’s very fast-paced and relates to ‘Kustom Kulture’ in that sense too. Work by a lot of contemporary artists influenced by the custom car scene is about overload and about taking imagery and spitting it out, regurgitating it in new ways.”

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Reaching back thousands of years, tattoo art has been practiced by cultures around the globe. Not merely decorative, its ritualized markings delineated cultural affiliation or community status, for instance, among indigenous Pacific basin groups. (Former Laguna Museum chief curator Susan M. Anderson expanded “Eye Tattooed America’s” Pacific basin orientation with historical information and artifacts from Polynesia and Mojave Desert Native Americans. Anderson also added work by several Southern California artists.)

“Polynesia played a major role in the beginnings of tattooing in the West, especially during World War II,” Colburn said in a recent interview at the museum. “Sailors going off to fight the Japanese would see traditional work on the islands and brought the [stylistic] ideas back with them.”

The Long Beach Pike amusement park was the site of a tattoo resurgence close to home. During the ‘50s and ‘60s, the Pike had the largest cluster of tattoo parlors in Southern California, according to Hardy, who nurtured his dreams there.

“At 10, I wanted to become a tattoo artist, but I got sidetracked,” he said during a recent phone interview from his San Francisco tattoo shop, instead opting to earn a degree in printmaking at the San Francisco Art Institute. Hardy returned to his first love, however, rather than go to graduate school. “I decided tattooing would be more challenging. It was a strange, unexplored medium.”

The medium, along with other forms of popular culture, began to meld on a broad scale with the institutionalized art world in the late ‘60s, and Hardy had a front-row seat.

“All important culture comes up from underneath,” he said. “Cultural and aesthetic changes arise from popular consciousness and from artists willing to extend themselves and their work beyond the bounds of what’s been given the official stamp of approval.”

Colburn agrees--but refutes any notion that the museum is pandering to popular taste with the show.

“High culture often gets affected by low culture or underground culture,” he said. “I think that’s an interesting thing and something we’ve always been interested in here at the museum.”

Hardy, who has published a dozen books on tattoos, began developing “Eye Tattooed America” while he was the subject of a solo show at Chicago’s defunct World Tattoo Gallery (a showcase for outsider and emerging artists, owned by “Eye Tattooed” artist Fitzpatrick). He opened the exhibit in 1993 at the Windy City’s sponsoring Ann Nathan Gallery. It subsequently traveled to such venues as the University of Iowa’s Museum of Art.

(Attendance at the University of Iowa museum was above average, a spokeswoman said. She added that the exhibit was “very popular” with their less-scholarly museum-goers.)

James Yood, who teaches art criticism and theory at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., and has seen the exhibition, cautions against giving too much weight to the tattoo world’s influence on mainstream art.

“I think one could go wrong etching it as too large of an interest,” Yood said. “But I’d liken it to such things as graffiti art having influenced Keith Haring or Jean-Michel Basquiat, or children’s art having influenced Paul Klee.”

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So what draws the mainstream to the tattoo fringe?

Although losing much of its outlaw stigma--witness the publicity of skin designs on such celebrities as Cher and Roseanne--tattoos, like hot rods and underground comics, still symbolize a renegade stance. That’s a lure for those who find contemporary art “too cerebral and self-referential,” Hardy said. “It provides an edge that lots of contemporary art had lost.”

In a phone interview from his New Mexico home, Terry Allen, who appropriates some of Hardy’s tattoo designs (a panther, a blue rose, a rat) in a painting he did with William Wyley that’s on exhibit, said: “Art is basically an anti-Establishment, outlaw act. So there’s a kinship right there.”

Allen dismissed any distinctions between high art and popular culture and has had his hand in both at least as far back as 1967, when he produced his first of many rock-country records. While tattoos haven’t been a major inspiration for his own artworks, he said he is particularly intrigued by the “attitude that makes a person use their own body and alter it to appease something inside, where a tattoo is not so much a decoration as a map of something that’s going on internally.”

Any artist, he added, is attracted to the rich metaphoric possibilities of blood and pain, constants in the arena of the roughly 10,000 professional tattoo artists wielding needles in this country today.

“Another thing is that the really good tattoo artists are incredible draftsmen,” said Allen, who has four tattoos, “and it’s always been kind of ironic to me that tattoos have this stigma as a second-rate art. Those guys are some of the best drawers in the world.”

Yood further relates the fine-art/tattoo zeitgeist to Chris Burden’s performances of the early 1970s. Burden, who challenged the fundamental ideas of what art is, subjected himself to painful events. He had himself shot in the arm and crawled across cut glass. Yood likens that to the act of having oneself repeatedly punctured.

In Burden’s case, “the body was at risk, and I think there’s still, in tattooing, that kind of edginess. It involves needles and pain and that kind of commitment.”

Hardy asserted that the strongest link between the two worlds has to do with his inability to explain why he’s had his own body--his back, chest, arms and legs--tattooed.

Getting tattooed, he said, “pushes this button at the basis of all true art and comes from this realm that’s beyond rational. It’s an irrational act; it’s just something you feel you want to do, that’s right for you, and you just explore through it. That’s the most important thing about it and relates it to all mediums and artistic traditions.”

* What: “Eye Tattooed America.”

* When: Through Oct. 8. Exhibit hours: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday.

* Where: Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach.

* Whereabouts: Exit the San Diego (405) Freeway at Laguna Canyon Road and go south. At Coast Highway turn right; the museum will be on your left.

* Wherewithal: $4 to $5.

* Where to call: (714) 494-8971.

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