Output details

Emblems of durability: Tattoos, preserves and photographs

Location and context: The article is part of a themed issue of the interdisciplinary journal Performance Research dedicated to “Transplantations” in a medical and metaphorical sense and edited by artist Phillip Warnell and performance-studies specialist Ric Allsopp. It takes the theme to look at a series of transformations, from body part via specimen to piece of forensic evidence, or from body via inscribed segment to art object. The location of publication is significant in so far as Fend’s article takes as its starting point a piece of tattooed skin from the second half of the nineteenth century and ends with a discussion of a contemporary performance work. The article is grounded in archival research, drawing on the pathological collections of Guy’s Hospital London, now classified in the Forensics section of the Gordon Museum, provoking a discussion of the workings and traps of the criminological and forensic production of evidence. The article indicates Fend’s cross-period concerns as well as her research into the relations between histories of art, medicine and science.