We hunt them for the beauty of their skins
Patrick Skene Catling
DECORATED SKIN: A WORLD SURVEY OF BODY ART edited by Karl Gifting Thames & Hudson, £45, pp. 256 Eery artist's prime, most fondly enhanced subject is his own self. Indeed, as this magnificently ornate book demon- strates, all other kinds of men and women Unmarried Surma men in Ethiopia prepare for the donga stick fight, covering their bodies with a layer of water and chalk on which they make a pattern of lines with their fingers as well, universally and ever since the first hunter-gatherers took an occasional day off, have devoted a lot of artistic effort to making themselves appear to be more than they really are. Skin-deep thoughts and deeper ones are stimulated by this comprehensive collection of 418 illustrations, mostly photographs, 378 of them in colour, which shows that the most primitive and the most sophisticated people alike have always decorated their faces and bodies to present themselves as both distinctively individualistic and ingratiatingly conformist. Evidently, almost everybody, everywhere, has always wanted to assert that he or she is the same as everybody else but more beautiful. As the cosmetics industry keeps trying to persuade us, beauty is not mere truth (sorry, Keats); beauty is romantic fantasy.
Originally a German publishing venture, Decorated Skin was compiled by Karl Gron- mg, Axel Springer Verlag's former art director. It is a picture-book first, well complemented by 14 textual contributors, translated by Lorna Dale. Brief essays on the anthropology, aesthetics and social significance of humankind's past 10,000 years of narcissistic exhibitionism provide suitable grey frameworks contrasting with the hectic drama and gaiety of the colour- ful images.
In a preface from Vienna, Ernst Fuchs sounds the writers' intellectual keynote: . . . human beings stepped outside their ready-made nature to refashion themselves as works of art in their own world. They became non-natural beings in order to give physical form to a supra-nature that could give expression to their concept of them- selves as demons, as spirits and as angels.
These words are worth consideration as the lady of the house toils at her looking-glass when dinner is due.
Since the earliest days of maquillage, as long ago as the Palaeolithic period, natural pigments, such as ochre in shades from red to yellow, pyrolusite (black) and lime (white), have been used in attempts to create awe-inspiring or seductive trans- figuration. Chemists now, of course, can manufacture synthetic make-up in all the colours of the spectrum.
In the beginning, colours and symbols were painted in patterns on the skin for what Martin Sailer calls 'hunting magic'. They still are. The book's most ancient evidence of body-painting is a portrait that whimsical archaeologists have dubbed the 'White Lady' or 'Horned Goddess,' a Saharan rock-painting dated 7000-6000 BC. A slightly more recent example from the same part of Algeria (c. 5000-1500 BC) shows a man whose body was painted equally decoratively, with wavy stripes.
All over the world, from the Americas to Africa and Australasia, warriors and doctor-priests have ornamented themselves with the gaudy markings of animals and birds of superior prowess, to intimidate foes and impress members of their own tribes. Women ditto.
Paint is ephemeral; tattoos, however, like African ornamental scarification, are forever. The word tattoo is derived from the Tahitian tatay meaning 'to inflict wounds,' but the natives of Oceania appar- ently succumbed to them willingly. `According to Polynesian mythology,' wrote the late Dr Banns Peter, 'humans learned tattooing from the gods . . . The costly patterns were a visible sign of prosperity and conferred prestige.' Sixteenth-century Spanish navigators thought at first that men of the Marquesas, tattooed from head to toe, were fully dressed when actually they were wearing nothing at all.
The Japanese have long been the past- masters of tattooing, though in Japan for many years it was a sign of degradation, stigmatising criminals and those whom Sailer calls 'the despised lowest class . . . knackers, grave-diggers and labourers at the most menial tasks.' Then Prince George of England visited Japan, in 1881, with a dragon tattooed on his arm, and suddenly tattooing was socially OK.
Having marvelled at the bizarrerie of A Loma girl in Guinea before her initiation ceremony. The line across the lips signifies that she must remain silent during the rites of passage until the dancing is over other races, one comes at last to a chapter entitled 'The Western World Today'. Jurgen Lotz extols the decoration of skin as a way to . . . regain contact with something inside us that is unfathomable, raw and untouched, something fundamentally and exclusively human that is waiting to be released and allowed to reveal itself.
Here after 10,000 years is the world of Max Factor and Helena Rubinstein, of Vogue and punks, transvestites and lager louts painted the colours of soccer teams and national flags. This revelation is probably why animals never use make-up to look human.
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