Category Archives: Musings

I Really Believe in What I Do — “Change your face and Change your evening”

by Christopher Agostino

Being a face and body painter gets a fella into such interesting places. Last night I was part of the 100 Under 2 Festival for the grand opening of Yotel NYC, a chic new hotel on 10th Ave and W. 42nd (#yotelnyc). One of 100+ performers ensconced in hotel rooms with the task of entertaining people for two minutes as they moved from floor to floor, room to room — “performance tapas” they called it. 2 minutes is not an ideal time frame for getting someone to sit down and get painted. Face and body painting works best cumulatively with people standing and watching you paint someone as they decide if they want to do it, especially with adults. Here I had to convince people cold — the glitterati invited to the event would walk by my room and I’d say “come in and be transformed”, “transform your face and transform your evening”, or just  “I’m doing body painting and looking for someone to paint.” Some did, most didn’t, most wouldn’t cross the threshold into the room. (I’d suggested to the producers that I bring a body model to paint throughout the event but they preferred that I try to get the guests painted instead).

When I was younger, a night like this of trying to sell myself with limited results would have been much tougher on me. Now, I believe more in what I do. I believe that painting someone’s face (especially an adult’s) gives them an opportunity to experience an adventure, to “transform their evening.” I wish more adults would get painted at events because it would do them some good.

Still, events like this are tough. Too much rejection, too little of the joy of painting, and the painting itself is tough with no chance to work into a good groove. Over the two hours I painted about 15 people, mostly women’s arms but also a few faces on a handful of men.

There was one older man (which means older than me, which is starting to get really old), who’d come by my room a few times, hesitating, then finally he’d made the effort to come back to me later in the event after his group had moved on to another floor. He was still hesitant and asked for something subtle, but I told him that “subtle” misses the point, that the reason to get painted is to have an effect on how people see you. And I wrapped a feathered serpent (Quetzalcoatl) around half his face. (It was a random choice on my part, I was using the colors of the decor and trying to paint less usual things to fit the unusual festival concept, but it turned out he’d recently come back from Tikal in Guatemala and so it made a connection for him). As I painted him there was a young turk in the doorway making fun of the process, calling out stupid things I could turn him in to, really the only rude person I had to deal with last night. I hoped that the he didn’t know the older man, because if he did he was being cruel.

Quetzalcoatl

Afterwards I headed to the seemingly endless cocktail party that accompanied the event, looking for a drink, talking a bit with some of the other artists — and looking for some of the people I painted, looking to see what effect I’d had. I saw Mr. Feathered Serpent and asked him how his evening was going, how it felt being painted. He told me that he felt like a celebrity. Everyone was taking his picture and talking with him. Before that, he said, he was just a guy alone, walking around a party without being noticed.

Part of why I believe in what I do is my own understanding that masking and transformational face and body art give physical, tangible credence to a fundamental human belief in the mutability of form, that things are not limited to their appearance. That I may be more (and different) than I appear to be. The experience we gain when wearing a new, painted identity — the change in how people perceive us — gives us proof of this, hopefully an encouraging proof that lasts beyond the mask. There is no limit to who or what we can be.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,

Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Hamlet Act 1, scene 5

http://www.agostinoarts.com

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Mike Tyson’s Tattoo: what the…?

Mike Tyson’s tattoo

By Christopher Agostino 6/9/2012

First off, I invite you to add your own comments to this one, as I am sure there are aspects to this that I am missing, and I have as many questions as opinions here. So, woo-hoo!, Hangover 2 gets to open because a judge rules that even though Victor Witmill does own the copyright to the tattoo design he famously put on Mike Tyson that was then imitated in the film, the financial damage of keeping the film closed would effect too many people to be justified. I’d only followed this with amused interest until I heard an “On the Media” report about the possible ramifications of tattoo copyright — and now I have some questions. (On The Media: This Week “Can you Copyright the Human Body?)

Is it the norm for a tattoo artist to retain the rights to a design they put on someone else’s skin? Or did it only apply in this case because Tyson is a celebrity and the tattoo artist was seizing an opportunity? What a weird idea that somebody else might own something on your skin. (In a related opinion of mine, I think that the models we paint at conventions should be allowed to get copies of all the photographs taken of them…the person on whom the bodyart is created is as intrinsic to the result as the art is)

Secondly, how does a non-Maori tattoo artist get to claim intellectual property rites over an obviously traditionally styled design? When Tyson first appeared with this thing around his eye I remember how he talked about it’s traditional origins and significance, so what about it makes it something that some tattoo artist can claim as original? I mean, really?  (In doing a web search for a common use eligible image of the tattoo I did come across an article from Techdirt about an indignant Maori response to this claim — see the quoted portion below)

However, the larger point I want to make, is what’s up with Tyson’s tattoo in the first place?

From the first I saw it and heard his comments about it, I had to ask: what the….? He talked real big about it being the sign of the warrior and all that, and for a few years afterwards I had all sorts of guys asking me to give them a Tyson Warrior Tattoo. But, what the….?

From Robley’s book: photograph from the 1890’s of a “well chiseled” Maori tattoo design

I’m no expert, just a fascinated artist, but everything I’ve read abut Maori tattoo traditions  (“moko”) say that warriors tattooed their whole face, not just some little bit around the eye, and that a big part of the process is enduring the months of painful work required for the full face. I didn’t go back just now to fact-check this little bit but I distinctly remember reading that only priests wore partial tattoos by the eye. Not only did the warriors tattoo the full face, but the designs were incised so deep that the skin became ridged and grooved like a sculpture. In H. G. Robley’s book, Maori Tattooing, first published in 1896 when the tradition was still in general practice, there is not a single example of a man’s face without extensive tattooing.

On the final night at the 2011 Face And Body Art International Convention (FABAIC), sitting in the outdoor courtyard after the party, I met a gentlemen who was extensively tattooed. He was a soldier, recently back from service, and he was fascinated by the painted people walking through the hotel. We talked about what I did, but then I got him to tell me about his tattoos. The first two he showed me were Cherokee inspired designs on his shoulders. Then he showed me others on his arms and legs, each one marking a place he had been in the service — some, it seemed, for lessons learned and experiences to be cherished (like a samurai inspired mark down the back of his neck from time in Japan) and some for more painful memories. We talked for a while and at one point he asked me if I had any Native American blood in me, and I said no, but that I knew that he was Cherokee, for I had learned from our talk that he wouldn’t wear a mark unless he’d earned it.

Robley’s sketch from the 1890s

From Techdirt:

An illustration from 1800, from Karl Gröning’s book “Body Decoration”

Maori Angry About Mike Tyson’s Tattoo Artist Claiming To Own Maori …

Professor Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, author of Mau Moko: The World of Maori Tattoo, described Mr Whitmill’s claims of ownership as insufferable arrogance. “It is astounding that a Pakeha tattooist who inscribes an African American’s flesh with what he considers to be a Maori design has the gall to claim that design as his intellectual property,” she said. “The tattooist has never consulted with Maori, has never had experience of Maori and originally and obviously stole the design that he put on Tyson…. The tattooist has an incredible arrogance to assume he has the intellectual right to claim the design form of an indigenous culture that is not his.”

I looked it up, from Wikipedia: Pākehā is a Māori term for New Zealanders who are not of Māori blood lines

There are a lot of intersting little articles about this whole issue, and the legal ramifications of tattoo copyright, here’s one: Copyright Yo Face!. Copyfight: the politics of IP

http://www.agostinoarts.com

Check out my Body Painting Page https://thestorybehindthefaces.com/body-painting/

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Modern Primitive: Why Look Back? – Part 1: To see their eyes…

Inspired by the photographs of Hans Silvester of the new styles of face art from the peoples of the Omo River area of Africa

by Christopher Agostino

While doing research yesterday for a new bodypainting project I read a passage that struck a chord, giving me a sharper insight into a theme that runs through my work. “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art is a “comprehensive scholarly treatment” published in 1984 to accompany an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art which broke new ground by exhibiting Modern Art masterpieces side-by-side with the tribal art from Africa and Oceania that was a significant source of inspiration for those early modern artists, presenting the art objects of both the “primitive” and the “modern” on equal footing. At the culmination of his opening essay in the book, exhibit director William Rubin makes this statement of his most profound, or personal, goal for the exhibit:

“In the realm of my hopes, however, there is something less explicit, more difficult to verbalize. It is that the particular confrontation involved in our exhibition [between tribal objects and modern masterpieces] will not only help us better to understand our art, but in a very unique way, our humanity — if that is not saying the same thing. The vestiges of a discredited evolutionary myth still live in the recesses of our psyches. The vanguard modernists told us decades ago that the tribal peoples produced an art that often distilled great complexity into seemingly simple solutions. We should not therefore be surprised that anthropology has revealed a comparable complexity in their cultures. I hope our effort will demonstrate that at least insofar as it pertains to works of the human spirit, the evolutionary prejudice is clearly absurd.”

My visual and performing arts have become increasingly connected to cultures distant in time, space and tradition. This research into other cultures is fascinating to me, rich in ideas and images for the artist sponge in me to absorb, but that isn’t what drives this process.

When I tell an audience a 2,000 year old tale from China of a heroic young girl as I did this afternoon, modern white guy that I am I still feel a resonance of the common humanity at the heart of the story. I feel it… and will judge my performance in large part on my perception of how well I have been able to let my audience feel it. I’ve come to see how it is the qualities in a story that touch upon the universal question of what it means to be human that make some stories survive.

The juxtaposition of the very tribal Papua New Guinea design with the New York street scene and a bag of potato chips makes this a favorite foto of mine.

When I paint a New Yorker’s face in a design from some exotic culture, that also makes a connection to our common humanity. As I have grown more aware of this, with kids I’ll talk about a more concrete, though metaphoric, connection to their unusual new face — for example, that the Kabuki Samurai design they’re wearing is like becoming a superhero; or that the wildly colorful face from Papua New Guinea is like being painted for a birthday party, it just happens to be a party on the other side of the world. This is an understanding of the effect of my work that has grown gradually, and not a political or “new age” sensibility that led me to my explorations of the primitive. I started “looking backward” to the tribal and the ancient to become a better facepainter, as a way to understand the possibilities for painting a face that had already been discovered by cultures that have done it for generations.

Now, it seems that the lesson of a couple hundred thousand painted faces over 30 years is unavoidable, for whatever culturally alien or bizarre design I paint on someone, once I am finished I always see a pair of human eyes looking back at me from within the mask. This is my visceral understanding of the common humanity we share.

Writing as he was about famous artists and art objects with a power to change perception far beyond anything I could approach, William Rubin’s statement is a stronger, more militant sentiment about the necessity and potential of this joining of the primitive and the modern to open our world view, but I can’t be the first facepainter to wonder what effect it would have on cultural/racial prejudices if we all wore painted faces, and all we could see was each other’s eyes?

Picasso's revolutionary sculpture, Guitar 1912, and a Grebo mask (Ivory Coast, Africa) that he owned. Picasso stated that in creating this sculpture he studied the mask for its use of projections for eyes, nose and mouth from a flat plane, for how those projections implied another invisible plane ( a device he used for creating the sound hole of the guitar via a cylinder) and especially the quality in such tribal art that it is not illustrating a face but "re-presenting" it — a concept that concurs with a pivotal change between the art of the 19th century and the new art of the early modernists, i.e. their use of symbols and imagery to represent subject matter and thereby add greater conceptual depth.

http://www.agostinoarts.com

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