thedrifter
11-02-07, 02:31 PM
Iraq war stays under the skin of Marines
Los Angeles Times
Friday November 02, 2007
LOS ANGELES -- It's a canvas of sorts, one threaded with blue veins, bruises, and hatch-marks that, upon closer inspection, turn out to be scars. It's skin -- but that's just one layer of a story.
Across the spread of a back is an elaborate tattoo: A gun sunk into earth, a helmet resting on top, empty boots alongside. Dog tags dangle from the sides, spelling out "Never forget. "
Lining the bottom of the image, the lower back, still red from the artist's needles, are 10 empty ammunition casings with surnames -- Martinez, Stevens, Watson -- drifting out from the top, like spirits, or smoke.
It's easy to wince at the rawness. But it engraves itself on your mind, especially when you learn that the tattoo is just one of many coming out of the tattoo parlors in Twentynine Palms, memorials to lost friends and family members often done before a second tour in Iraq or a third.
Artist Mary Beth Heffernan spent three months in Twentynine Palms photographing the Marines and their homage to the dead.
She haunted tattoo parlors, gaining the trust of tattoo artists first and then the Marines who would be back in Iraq before the ink was dry.
"It was a very intense, physically close experience," she says, "like a cross between being in the exam room during a doctor's visit or a close moment between two friends."
Before he shipped out, Owen McNamara, the Marine with "Never forget" on his back, had it inked around shrapnel from the blast that killed his 10 friends but not him. McNamara says he began thinking about the tattoo from the moment his friends were killed. He designed it the next day.
"I was close with all of them," he says. "I'd spent the previous 2 1/2 years, day in, day out, with them. The main reason I got it done was respect for what they did. I was close to not making it home. These were the ones that didn't."
A selection of Heffernan's photographs -- 10 images of freshly etched memorial tattoos -- is collected in an exhibit, "The Soldier's Skin: An Endless Edition," currently on view at Pasadena City College Art Gallery.
From simple to ornate, the tattoos pay tribute to fallen comrades from the current Iraq war or wars past. Heffernan's work is an unexpected prism through which to view the "soldier's story."
The red, raw patches of distressed skin under ink, blood that mixes with the red and white of the Stars and Stripes, create blunt, new narratives on skin. Making Heffernan's photolithographs that much more immediate is that the bulk of them are not displayed behind glass, nor do they hang on the wall. Copies of them lie, arranged in nearly 2-foot-tall stacks on the floor, and viewers are invited to take one.
Heffernan never saw her project as a "war memorial," a term that suggests something static and removed.
"Rather than universalizing" the experience of war, she says, "this is about the particular."
"The Soldier's Skin" is the fruit of Heffernan's three-month tour of duty in Twentynine Palms. It started as a smaller project for High Desert Test Sites based in Joshua Tree, an annual arts festival with the objective of creating better understanding of the desert through site-specific artworks.
When Heffernan proposed this project, her idea was to make "site-specific" work focused on "the bodies of these young Marines coming back from the war. It would be an understanding of land but not disassociated with the people who use it" -- the military community, the tattoo artists, the desert inhabitants in general.
Over three months, she broke down barriers and got to know the land and the people. She pitched her tent in the desert because she couldn't afford to stay in a hotel for such a protracted period. But she knew being a constant presence was the only way that she could build rapport with the tattoo artists and, ultimately, the Marines.
In time, she was able to form close relationships with about 10 of the parlors and the artists who worked in them, on or just off California State Route 62 -- Twentynine Palms Highway.
Instead of her usual camera, she decided to use a small-format digital one that would appear less intimidating.
Often she was struck by her subjects' silence .
"I think they are really conscious of the fact that this was painful, but it was being offered up as a spiritual sacrifice in honor of a dead friend. So they saw it as a small sacrifice."
Marine Brandon Johnson had been carrying the idea in his head after eight friends were killed from 2003 to 2005. He'd taken a photo of a soldier's memorial -- the gun, helmet, boots. He sketched in a shadow of a cross.
"People ask about it," Johnson says. Often he just gives a shorthand version. "A lot of people, really, they don't want details. You can tell." For him, the tattoo's meaning is layered. "Just the memory of them. Just something I want to have for when I'm older."
Seeing her work reproduced larger than life, the skin's abrasions, the messages themselves, "put me in a place that caused discomfort," Heffernan says.
And if those who view her art shudder or squirm, she hopes that those reactions are productive -- that they lead to empathy. "I've been interested in skin as an intensified site between self and other, between nature and culture," Heffernan says, "the place that culture writes itself upon. But when we see the welted skin or the tissue fluid oozing to the surface of the skin, there's the message: The body is almost writing back."
Ellie
Los Angeles Times
Friday November 02, 2007
LOS ANGELES -- It's a canvas of sorts, one threaded with blue veins, bruises, and hatch-marks that, upon closer inspection, turn out to be scars. It's skin -- but that's just one layer of a story.
Across the spread of a back is an elaborate tattoo: A gun sunk into earth, a helmet resting on top, empty boots alongside. Dog tags dangle from the sides, spelling out "Never forget. "
Lining the bottom of the image, the lower back, still red from the artist's needles, are 10 empty ammunition casings with surnames -- Martinez, Stevens, Watson -- drifting out from the top, like spirits, or smoke.
It's easy to wince at the rawness. But it engraves itself on your mind, especially when you learn that the tattoo is just one of many coming out of the tattoo parlors in Twentynine Palms, memorials to lost friends and family members often done before a second tour in Iraq or a third.
Artist Mary Beth Heffernan spent three months in Twentynine Palms photographing the Marines and their homage to the dead.
She haunted tattoo parlors, gaining the trust of tattoo artists first and then the Marines who would be back in Iraq before the ink was dry.
"It was a very intense, physically close experience," she says, "like a cross between being in the exam room during a doctor's visit or a close moment between two friends."
Before he shipped out, Owen McNamara, the Marine with "Never forget" on his back, had it inked around shrapnel from the blast that killed his 10 friends but not him. McNamara says he began thinking about the tattoo from the moment his friends were killed. He designed it the next day.
"I was close with all of them," he says. "I'd spent the previous 2 1/2 years, day in, day out, with them. The main reason I got it done was respect for what they did. I was close to not making it home. These were the ones that didn't."
A selection of Heffernan's photographs -- 10 images of freshly etched memorial tattoos -- is collected in an exhibit, "The Soldier's Skin: An Endless Edition," currently on view at Pasadena City College Art Gallery.
From simple to ornate, the tattoos pay tribute to fallen comrades from the current Iraq war or wars past. Heffernan's work is an unexpected prism through which to view the "soldier's story."
The red, raw patches of distressed skin under ink, blood that mixes with the red and white of the Stars and Stripes, create blunt, new narratives on skin. Making Heffernan's photolithographs that much more immediate is that the bulk of them are not displayed behind glass, nor do they hang on the wall. Copies of them lie, arranged in nearly 2-foot-tall stacks on the floor, and viewers are invited to take one.
Heffernan never saw her project as a "war memorial," a term that suggests something static and removed.
"Rather than universalizing" the experience of war, she says, "this is about the particular."
"The Soldier's Skin" is the fruit of Heffernan's three-month tour of duty in Twentynine Palms. It started as a smaller project for High Desert Test Sites based in Joshua Tree, an annual arts festival with the objective of creating better understanding of the desert through site-specific artworks.
When Heffernan proposed this project, her idea was to make "site-specific" work focused on "the bodies of these young Marines coming back from the war. It would be an understanding of land but not disassociated with the people who use it" -- the military community, the tattoo artists, the desert inhabitants in general.
Over three months, she broke down barriers and got to know the land and the people. She pitched her tent in the desert because she couldn't afford to stay in a hotel for such a protracted period. But she knew being a constant presence was the only way that she could build rapport with the tattoo artists and, ultimately, the Marines.
In time, she was able to form close relationships with about 10 of the parlors and the artists who worked in them, on or just off California State Route 62 -- Twentynine Palms Highway.
Instead of her usual camera, she decided to use a small-format digital one that would appear less intimidating.
Often she was struck by her subjects' silence .
"I think they are really conscious of the fact that this was painful, but it was being offered up as a spiritual sacrifice in honor of a dead friend. So they saw it as a small sacrifice."
Marine Brandon Johnson had been carrying the idea in his head after eight friends were killed from 2003 to 2005. He'd taken a photo of a soldier's memorial -- the gun, helmet, boots. He sketched in a shadow of a cross.
"People ask about it," Johnson says. Often he just gives a shorthand version. "A lot of people, really, they don't want details. You can tell." For him, the tattoo's meaning is layered. "Just the memory of them. Just something I want to have for when I'm older."
Seeing her work reproduced larger than life, the skin's abrasions, the messages themselves, "put me in a place that caused discomfort," Heffernan says.
And if those who view her art shudder or squirm, she hopes that those reactions are productive -- that they lead to empathy. "I've been interested in skin as an intensified site between self and other, between nature and culture," Heffernan says, "the place that culture writes itself upon. But when we see the welted skin or the tissue fluid oozing to the surface of the skin, there's the message: The body is almost writing back."
Ellie