Under our skin

I have been impressed with how much impassioned discussion has come in reaction to Jackson's "Skin" project. My initial reaction was positive, but reading the fire that has come down on this piece from thenewblack and tophat1 caused me to question the validity of my own response. Hopefully I am going to quality and break down some of what I am thinking, but there is a distinct chance that I will just step into the middle of this.

Honestly, I think that there is real art and interesting thought in what Shelley Jackson is doing here. Walker's piece on distributed narrative raised interesting ideas on what exactly a narrative is and how much unity must factor into the equation. In a modern or postmodern world, we have to respect that any writing is radically compositional by its very nature. We must accept the fact that we or any output we produce is more complex than we can consciously account for. Knowing that, the convention of reproducible narratives with a regular form and single location seems constructed. Our ideas aren't rational, so why should the products of those ideas pretend to be? An attempt to look finished or insulated can be almost pretentious in an era where we are beginning to now better.

I tend to agree with Frabby in saying that Skin does some interesting work for bending our idea of narrative into a form that is more in line with a modern notion of reality. I see the argument for this project being pretentious in that only those who participate in it receive the "complete" story. However, I think that this puts too much importance on a single, linear form as the meaning of narrative. Indeed, those who participate in the project do not know the other "words" (and again, I acknowledge the problematic nature of Jackson's use of this term and will address it later) any more than those who visit the website do, and so they lack the insight into the many lives which the tattoos link together. By printing her story on human beings, Jackson quite literally sends it out into the world, admitting a limitless web of associations and creating a mortality to the written story itself. This interconnects an otherwise "dead" narrative form with living beings in a way that rehumanizes the story for me. I'm still figuring out exactly how to express this part, though.

The last thing that I want to address here (the more I write, the more I realize that this is going to take a second round of thought for me) is the issue of the "words." Jackson's "contract" says that "participants will be known as 'words'. They are not understood as carriers or agents of the words they bear, but as their embodiments." I do not think that "embodiment" here is necessarily reductive to the sense that it has been taken. I did not understand that becoming a word necessarily erased any identity before the project, but that it added a layer. Particularly given Jackson's desire to put her story in conversation with the world, I think that overwriting her media would be counterproductive. Instead, a person becomes a part of the art, even more than a recipient of type. This humanizes the art in a unique way, and I think it must leave the person intact in order to do this.