Touch: Taboos & Tattoos

By -

Taboos

          Touch taboos were described as socially unacceptable places to touch a person on their body. Different cultures have different ideas of what is acceptable to touch, some allow hair to be touched, some consider touching hair to be on the same plane as molestation. However, there are other ways in which touching is considered taboo. As I was mulling over the text, trying to decide what to create, I was eating chips and dip. I reached for the napkin to clean off my dirty hands, when an idea struck me. It's taboo to touch things with dirty hands, because you shouldn't leave a mess everywhere. But human hands are covered in germs, oils, and accumulated nasty things that we don't see normally, yet it is not unacceptable to say, shake someone's hand without first having them wipe it off. So for this image, I finished eating my chips, no longer concerned for what little bits of dip and seasoning were getting on them, and allowed them to accumulate, so I could create this image. It's a visual representation of the mark we all leave when we touch things on a daily basis. 


Tattoos

          Tattoos are also sometimes considered taboo in certain sects of cultures, especially facial tattoos. Face tattoos often convey an edgy appearance. People with many face tattoos would unlikely be able to work for a daycare or as a bank teller. They're sometimes seen as untrustworthy, scary, and even lacking in intelligence. However, tattoos are just markings, and while they express a persons' personality, there is nothing innately untrustworthy, scary, or unintelligent about tattoos. To illustrate, I sketched an image of someone many consider to be a well respected genius with simple, nonspecific tattoos on his face. I did this to illustrate the prejudice against ink on skin, and to showcase the flaws with that logic.  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Movement as Mark

By -
Image
Movement as Mark Battery Oil paint on paper                 For this assignment, the class was tasked with creating marks using nontraditional methods. Instead of using a brush, pen, etc., we were to use a movement that created a mark which could not traditionally replicated. In this case, a pen could hypothetically be used, for example by fastening it to your wrist and snapping your fingers near the paper, thereby creating flicks with the ink that would be hard to reproduce any other way.           In the case of my project, I opted for a more violent approach, so to speak. When presented with the assignment, the first thing that came to my mind was punching. What sort of mark would that leave? Originally, I toyed with the idea of coating my hands in charcoal and punching the paper. However, I decided this choice would likely leave very soft, dusty marks, and I wanted to make sure the marks created were hard and so...
Read more

Walk the Line

By -
Walk the Line College Town Video           For this project, I walked very slowly down St. George Street, then sped up the footage to make it appear as if I am moving at a normal rate, while everyone around me is moving quickly. I wore a Flagler College sweater to signify that I am a student. This is an idea I had had earlier and considered doing for the One Mark Against Many project, but decided it did not neatly fit the criteria, and scrapped it. I was thankful this assignment happened, because I really enjoyed this concept.           As a college student, or perhaps, as a person who has only recently been thrust into the throngs of adulthood, I am left with an ever-present consciousness of time and its constant passing. I am nearly halfway through my undergraduate education, yet it feels like I just started this year. It's difficult to wrap my mind around the idea that everything I currently know will be gone before I have ...
Read more

Post #3

By -
Image
Reading Response I have often wondered what it would be like to lose a sense. Having had all of them for as long as I've been alive, I imagine losing one is much harder than having started without one in the first place. There is a certain understanding and sensation which comes with each sense that can only be truly described through experience. It's something like a brief moment of scent which suddenly reminds you of a feeling you had when you were little, which is gone just as quickly as it arrived, leaving you wondering how to possibly describe that scent or feeling. Senses are personal experiences that the user is exclusively privy to. Taste is unique, that we know for sure. No one has the exact same palate as another (although they all tend to generalize out as we grow older). Who's to say all other experiences of senses are universally shared? Who's to say the experience I call "redness" is even the same as yours? What if my experience of the world i...
Read more