more on Skin

So I've been thinking a lot lately about Skin and the one-word tattoos and people's postings. Here's where I'm getting tripped up...ok she could have potentially asked that volunteers get sentences, paragraphs, pages, or even the whole text, I suppose, tattooed on their body. If someone copied one of the volunteer's tattoos, their tattoo would be seen as a copy, a reprinting of Jackson's work. But words are different...if someone copied someone's tattoo of a word you would not even necessarily assume that they were "copying" someone, and that word would not be seen as a reprinting of Jackson's work. Single words can't be claimed by single authors (although I guess you can make up a new word and take credit for it).

I know in the posts and the comments there has been a lot of discussion about how the words take on new meanings for the individual and can come to signify things the author has no control over. I guess the part I'm not quite getting is...a person who is participating in the project and who tattooed a designated a word on their body...that word is a part of Jackson's story, but it's also a part of millions of other stories--novels, articles, song lyrics, etc. Is it that she can't claim individual words as hers, but she can claim the creation of a community of individuals, (of "words") as hers, as her creation? But, like marmalade brought up earlier, saying Jackson is the author of the text doesn't really seem to work. And, going along with what crashingintowalls mentioned about the text defying readibility, if you had a copy of the text in your hands and could read it, each word you read, would, as it is embodied by a person, contain many different meanings that you would not have access to in your comprehension of the text.

I'm realizing all of this is a lot of musings and questions that have been discussed, but I guess I'm just trying to work it out in my head, trying to go over the idea of taking something that you can claim ownership of and publishing it in such a way so that your claim of ownership sort of disintegrates, as she has no ownership of the individual (textual) words or the human "words"...