Illicit Ink
by Carlo Mcormick. Paper Magazine, Senior Editor.
I first met JonathanShaw back in the dark ages. It was a time not too unlike our own, when ignorance, superstition and arrogance ruled the land, but substantively different for the remaining threads of subcultural resistance still yet casting their increasingly indistinct shadows in the waning meaning of individualism’s mortal gloaming. I believe Robert Williams made the introduction, a man whose creative integrity was so fierce that it bordered on psychosis.
If such memories bear any truth, this fortuitous and cursed life-long friendship would have thus been forged in that most unlikely vacuum of context, Los Angeles.
Perhaps as one of Shaw’s rock star friends once told me, LA was the place to go to really hit bottom, and we were if nothing else a mutual measure of our shared desperation. But that’s the stuff of which casual acquaintances are made.
It would take a tenure of some pretty nasty decades in New York City before we’d earn anything approaching that sense of being there to cover one’s back, or in your face if you deserved a beat-down.
I recall the darkness most of all. Not that Southern California would turn off it’s interminable sunshine for one moment, but a dark room, maybe sunglasses, a discretion just out of sight, and blacker than all the rest, a pit of rage and resentment stewing where the heart is supposed to be. That is, what was different between the moment at hand and those “good” old days was that for some of us the purest, most profound expression of the fucked up the world we lived in was to be even more fucked up than the lowest measure of consensus reality. For some, nihilism came more easily than others, but none was quite its master as Jonathan Shaw. I believe the man was presented to me as a tattoo artist of some repute, and clearly he was- you didn’t need to be shived in the back by a dockside prostitute tramping off a steamer to smell the sea salt coming off paws that had inked their share of anchors on Popeye’s biceps. But the more I’ve gotten to know Jonathan through the decades since, the more I’ve come to understand the nature of that front. He was a tattoo artist in medium only, because before and beyond all that he was (and will always be) an artist pure and simple. Thinking of him along with all those fabulous kids punting around with tattoo guns today, this bit of identity suited him about as well as a conceptual artist printing ‘mercenary killer’ on his business card.
JS played the cards life dealt him, and if he’s had to bluff more than once he has always kept at least one ace up his sleeve. So, coming from where he did, he mastered the trade best suited to his aesthetic temperament. But, as is the case of for many artists, the medium suited the lifestyle, and for Shaw the life was implicitly connected to the mythologies and realities of criminality. That’s the bit about tattoo art that I’m afraid has been lost in the generational passing of the craft. When the world famous Shaw Fun City studios opened in New York City, this relatively arcane practice was not simply taboo, it was illegal. By citing the mythologies of criminality as relates to Shaw is to understand a very particular creative lineage of social outsiders. Artists have an Other history of identification with criminality, from Genet, Rimbaud and Artaud through the Beats, that is riddled with all manner of radical gestures throughout the avant-garde which presuppose some manner of trespass. Jonathan Shaw, in the great tradition of cultural criminals, constructs an aesthetically complex language of social abnegation that is itself part of a broader historical context of life-as-art.
Before it was fashionable and sanctioned, Jonathan Shaw maintained the significance of tattoo art’s signification. He was early on and very good at reading its meanings, and more than some mere repository for the oral history of its primary iconography, what Shaw brought to the mind of many who did not know better was that- contrary to the hierarchical determinations of fine art- committing one’s flesh to this visual language was a level of investment that made all the grand capital of the art market, in relative comparison, pretty much chump change. JS did this not as so many lemmings in our commodity culture for whom shopping is a transitional exercise of youth in which one purchases identity through style but as an artist and collector seeking very much to honor that work which exists in defiance of material fetish. As a dealer in the forbidden, and esoteric material that finds its audience outside mainstream channels of distribution, chance and desire brought me to this man’s door many times over the years to see the kinds of wares that never quite make media gloss or mall merchandise. Unfortunately our society is such that it is still unwise for us to talk about the nature of such transactions, but it was always the information conveyed by the art and artifacts that was paramount over whatever functionality or novelty they possessed. A purveyor of myriad misprisions, his material was fundamentally about re-reading our culture, and this demanded a context that was highly selective as much towards the goods at hand and to the clientele. Within this specialized sphere, JS slung banter and bargain, at time with the huckster hullabaloo of his old comrade Spider Web, but most often with a vitriolic veneration of those totems, taboos and transgressions that cursed the orthodoxy of institutional morality.
As a patron and provocateur, the point of impact most resoundingly felt where the rubber hit the road was Jonathan’s social practice- those years when his misanthropic relation to the culture at large was held in balance by his concurrent commitment to its antithetical subculture. For the duration of his dramatic engagement with the scene, a lot of us (and New York City in particular) were exceptionally fortunate. Exhibiting his own work as well as old tattoo flash dating back into the 19th Century in galleries, including the seminal underground exhibition space Psychedelic Solution, Shaw was always confident that his art form could hold up to any other being championed in the art world. That may seem pretty obvious to many today, but at the time it was rather more radical and it took another full generation to realize the scope of this value system. Hard-working in a cash business and always scheming with his sundry side-projects also allowed JS to support the artists he believed in to a capacity that few would match, and his early support of painters like Robert Williams and Joe Coleman (to name but a few) should not be underestimated. But ultimately, when I think of Jonathan Shaw’s immense contribution to the psyche of our collective disenfranchisement, it has to do with the ways he was able to weave together the expressions and identities of iconoclastically unique personae into the fabric of a broader and more durable worldview. If it seems impossible now that Johnny Depp, Iggy Pop, the Hells Angels, Jim Jarmush, Hubert Selby Jr., lowlifes of every form and even more suspect characters like an art critic (that would be me), could so easily share the same space, it’s only because the irrational geometry of Shaw’s universe is now anachronistic to a present in which the empathetic conspiracy between art and criminality has been all but lost. The ink fades as the flesh passes, but the signs remain, and like all good pictures their greatest virtue is that they point beyond.
By Carlo McCormick. Paper Magazine, Senior Editor
