I am tool and substance: A Tattoo Adventure
I am tool and substance
I apply force, I rotate
I give way and transform
Offering myself
That’s the chanted refrain that stuck in my mind after visiting Janine Antoni’s I am fertile ground performance-installation at Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery in 2019. I’ve long loved and been inspired by Antoni’s work that combines so many things I love: expressive movement and feminism and playfulness and relationships between bodies and ideas. I am fertile ground incorporated all of these into a series of repeated, ritualized movements and mantras that accompanied artworks installed in Green-Wood’s Catacombs. And the mantra at the top was the linguistic element of the piece, I am tool and substance, that’s stayed resonating in my life, in various ways, for the past three years.
I can’t describe the movement-mantra combination of I am tool and substance any more eloquently than Antoni’s own description, which I include here:
“I am tool and substance” reverberates with an insistence. She establishes that her body is both at once — the one that acts and the one that is acted upon. Her left elbow bends and locks to create a horizontal surface of forearm and flattened palm, waiting with anticipation. The right fingers fold into a fist and push up against gravity. Her body braces down to create a counterweight, balancing the fist as it pushes up against gravity. Ball and socket swing and rotate. The fist builds momentum as it arches over and accelerates down. Palms meet with the force of the task at hand. She enacts a mortar and pestle, asserting, “I apply force, I rotate.” The weight of the dive collides into the flat surface of the palm. Unable to stop, the energy is redirected, spiraling out from the horizontal plane, stirring the pot of creativity. She acquiesces, “I give way and transform.” Innovation springs from confrontation. The body surrenders to its own resistance. In the swirl, an offering is made, springing from the self propelling energy. She extends her palms. In this gesture of laying bare, she proclaims, “offering myself”.
And again…
Imagine this enacted in a small, dark, skylit vault cut into a hillside and holding the remains of several dozen people at rest in its walls. The person enacting the ritual both verbally and physically is dressed all in black, with bare arms and hands. The physical relics that accompany this movement-mantra are two individually mounted photo-based images, each a circular depiction of one of the repeating hand positions, highlighted in gold and surrounded by wide haloes of gilt finger-bone reliefs.
At the time I first encountered this piece, I was wrestling with how to take my professional next steps. I was working in a large museum and feeling a simultaneous calling to and frustration with working toward change from inside the belly of the change-resistant beast. Where was it time to apply force, to refuse to budge on my moral beliefs? and where might I better achieve my end goals by giving way, by rotating, by transforming? How could that delicate and strategic work be my way of offering self to a larger purpose?
Soon after experiencing this performance installation myself, I made the brave decision—and oh, how it’s taken me a long time to be able to own the bravery in it aloud—to leave New York City for Aspen, Colorado and a new role as head of an education department at a contemporary art museum working with a rural, politically-mixed population with very different demographic realities than I was used to in urban NYC.
That was February 2020. I resigned from that job at the end of that same year.
One of the many lessons I learned throughout that experience was that I’d taken the I am tool idea to heart in an unhelpful way. My inspiration for my work in Aspen was partly a desire to lead change from a senior role where I thought I had buy-in from my department and colleagues. I would be—along with several other new hires in senior roles—a tool for change.
But that American individualist idea of forging ahead, making change happen was naive and not to be. I found myself surrounded instead by promises about change without actions that matched them and by a lack of deeper understanding or support for the ways I wanted to work.
For all that I’d gone out there with an I am tool mentality, it was I am substance that guided my efforts to support my staff through the early lockdowns and uncertainties of COVID. I wanted to be there for them in ways that held the team together and prioritized care. That substance-focused work style and prioritization did not mesh with an institution prioritizing accomplishment and tasks, and I was very much at odds with the work culture I found myself in.
I’d arrived thinking of myself as tool, attempted to be substance, and found that in the end, there wasn’t much real appetite for either.
Over the past several years of processing that ugly situation and piratically building my own business as an independent arts and culture worker, I’ve had cause to reflect on this mantra in even more widespread ways.
Where to transform and how to offer myself are now things that feel much more embedded into my approach to not just work, but life writ large. How can I be a tool in service to my own core values of TRANSPARENCY, COLLECTIVITY, and VULNERABILITY? How can I offer myself to others who want to be making change? Where is there room for transformation and giving way to new self-conceptions about my approach to the world? What force can I apply without having to weigh the responsibilities of an institutional role? How do I need to be mindful of my physical body to keep all of this possible?
So yes, I am tool and substance kept right on resonating in more and more meaningful ways over the three years since I first shared space with the piece.
And so, in the grand tradition of people who start getting tattoos and find themselves itching for the next one, I decided this might be worth inking into my skin to carry as a permanent reminder.
I don’t have many tattoos (total count: 3), and they’ve each come from a person or a place that’s brought additional meaning to the ink. This time, I wanted to find a spot in London for the project, since it’s a place I lived for a few formative years of my adult life. It’s the first place I was officially paid to be a museum educator. It’s the place I fully leaned into dyeing my hair wild colors. It’s where I found a real embrace of my many coexisting nerd interests.
I like who I was in my London life, and that person is still in me, especially when I head back to visit, which I used to do about once a year and was scheduled to do in October 2022 for the first time since 2018.
To make a long internet search process story short, looking for London tattoo artists who were available when I’d be there and had the kind of style I wanted led me to Varvara. She’s an artist and art school grad who’s done some seriously awesome art-related tattoos. She works at the all-female and excellently named Velvet Underground Tattoo studio in East London, and when we had a phone consultation, we talked Hilma af Klint and physical embodiment and image+text and how to represent motion and gilding in static tattoos without gold ink, and I was IN.
Even more IN when Varvara sent me her proposed sketch for this tattoo, and I fell in love with its combination of delicate and forceful, its physicality, its artistry.
Varvara proceeded to make this magic happen on my left arm throughout one very long day. I arrived at the studio at 11am, and we spent a good hour and a half working with the stencil for size and exact placement.
Then there were a lot of hours of needles. (Don’t worry, vasovagal response-having friends, I’m not going to describe it or post pictures.) But let’s just say that in order to achieve the gilding effect, Varvara worked some wizardry with multiple layers of ink applied over and over in layers on the same skin that had already been outlined in black. Ow!
This partially-completed process shot was taken four hours after we started in with the tattoo machine.
We took breaks for food and water and bathroom trips, but it was 10:30pm when the machine’s buzzing stopped for the last time. It was a long day hazy with plenty of discomfort (and yeah, some of it was just outright pain… especially around the back of my arm), but also full of conversation in the studio about women looking out for each other. We talked about feminism and the freedom to live without our bodies being controlled by men. Relationship advice was exchanged. Tattoo stories (good and bad) were told. Politics and mental health and international affairs and the art market all came up throughout the day. It was a little bubble of femme-positive, affirming space that emphasized care in lots of ways.
And I walked out with this incredible permanent work of art on my arm.
I love how it maintains a sense of the original piece’s movement as it wraps around my arm. I love how the areas of black dots combine with my freckles. I love how certain text elements repeat, the way the performance and the mantra repeated. I love how the last bit of text, “offering self”, is tucked inside my arm in the most hidden spot, protected, where I truly need to offer someone a chance to see it.
I love that I now get to carry this reminder that I can be an instrument of change in many different ways: by making that change myself, by modeling that change for others, by making space for folks to be tools of change in their own lives.
This is my most complex tattoo (so far), and it carries with it the most complex set of shifting ideas: transformation, (r)evolution, the importance of physicality and embodiment that I’ve been increasingly aware of for years now. (Side note: I just had a wonderful chat with Claire Bown of Thinking Museum about this very thing on her podcast, The Art Engager.)
My new permanent art reminds me to treat my body like a precious, powerful vessel, worthy of gold and strong to its bones. It reminds me to keep moving and changing and looking at things from new perspectives. It reminds me to stay true to my needs and goals, even as those needs and goals can shift and grow over time. It reminds me of the power of AND: of being tool and substance, of additive layers of ink, of accumulated life experience, of lessons learned and scars earned, and all of them carried forward.
I love having all those reminders with me physically, with all the memories of the process along with them.
I’ll end this with a list of thanks.
To Varvara for making this magic happen in such a fabulous way.
To Janine Antoni for the original art project that brought these ideas together.
To the Luhring Augustine team (Caroline, Julia, Bianca) for helping me out with the high resolution images of the physical Green-Wood installation pieces.
And to Pret A Manger for the food that kept me energized throughout this long, embodied day, especially for my beloved Posh Cheddar Pickle (the sandwich that sadly only exists in Prets on the British side of the Pond).
Creative Prompt Coda: Design a tattoo that you might want inked on your skin (either permanently or temporarily). What does it communicate to you, about you?
