viz.

(Image Credit: Wim Delvoye)

It's pretty easy to understand (and probably join in) the outrage surrounding Wim Delvoye's work with pigs. Tattoos aren't exactly taboo in any real fashion anymore, but even as commonplace as they've become they still seem to provoke discussions about the use of bodies as writing platforms. In casual conversation clothes don't have nearly the same effect; though, it could be argued that they write on the body just as much as any tattoo. Clothes, though, seem to be commonly taken up as transient while tattoos are (mostly) permanent. I doubt there would be nearly as strong a reaction to these pigs if they were just dressed up on a daily basis.

I'm not quite sure how to write about this for Viz., but when I found out about it, I thought it was important to think about in terms of the limits, possibilities, and intimacies of visual rhetoric.

A tattoo artist in NYC recently wrote to Mod Blog about her first job drawing in the nipple and areola for a mastectomy patient. The entry, titled "Rx Tattoo," describes how a surgeon contacted the artist to supplement the work of reconstructive surgery.

Following our earlier discussions about the intersection of science, art, and rhetoric, I bring you the o-chem tattoo. I think the tattoo not only promotes science as a field of visual representation but is also among a growing corpus of "geek" tattoos. These tattoos frustrate the long standing assumption that body art and body modification is an unintellectual enterprise, one in which you tear at, pervert or destroy the body. In this way, these tattoos also work against the mind/body split, demonstrating how thought is not separate from but also occurs on and through the body.

Check out the following link to see a group of geek tattoos at ModBlog