Want to be part of a living work of art for the rest of your life? New York author Shelley Jackson plans to ”publish” her short story Skin by having each word tattooed on a different person.
Volunteers are pouring in from all over the world — bookshop assistants from London, mothers and daughters from Nebraska, artists from Brazil, a man in Bangkok. There will be ifs, buts, ands and other words inscribed on heads, arms, legs and backs from Birmingham, England to Birmingham, Alabama.
”One of my ‘Words’ [as the author calls her volunteers once they have been branded] had ‘in’ tattooed on his butt,” said Jackson, who had the story title, Skin, etched on her own wrist.
The 40-year-old Californian already has a book of stories published — on paper — called The Melancholy of Anatomy, a mix of narrative and fantasy. But Skin will never be shown in its entirety to the general public — not unless one of Jackson’s ”Words” breaks the contract he or she has signed with the author and releases the tale on the internet, which Jackson acknowledges is a risk.
She already has more than 1 000 volunteers for her 2 095-word story, and only when one has been tattooed does one get a copy of the complete story on paper.
Volunteers cannot choose their word — Jackson allocates each one in the strict order of the story and receiving applications — but they can choose where to have the tattoo.
Jackson says: ”There is something wonderfully melancholic about a piece of writing that’s living flesh and finally dies and is grieved over. It is a revolution in literature.”
She promises to try to attend all her Words’ funerals but admits: ”Most of my Words are in their mid- to late twenties so I will probably die before a lot of them. Maybe I will send everyone a vial of my ashes. Can you imagine if they turned up to my funeral — an author mourned by her words?”
Those worried that signing up ”blind” may mean finding themselves in a story they don’t like get no reassurance other than that Jackson says it is similar in style to her existing work.
She is a funky Californian who now resides in Brooklyn and likes to explore the ideas of Kafka, Beckett, gender politics and science fiction, so volunteers are unlikely to find themselves in a fascist tract but, equally, will not be part of anything tame or ordinary.
Jackson jokes: ”People have written to me saying that if two Words met, fell in love and had a baby, would that offspring be a footnote?
”I’m wondering whether a kind of caste system is going to arise, where the common ‘ands’ and ‘thes’ will be looked down upon by fancier words — or maybe the prepositions and indefinite articles will gang up on the effete adjectives. There really should be an ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ party.”
Mothers and daughters have written to Jackson wanting to become Words together as a bonding experience, and groups of friends have requested words in sequence so that they can become a sentence.
Jackson plans to stage an art exhibition featuring photographs of the faces of her volunteers arranged in the order of the story and in paragraphs, but not displaying their tattoos because that would reveal the story.
Her paper book The Melancholy of Anatomy is a 21st-century echo of the 17th-century work on the body, spirit and emotions by Robert Burton. It contains words such as ”masturbate” and ”dildo”, but in writing Skin Jackson says she kept the words ”safer”.
She originally had the idea of travelling around the United States, scratching each word in the dust or on fenceposts and publishing photographs of the locations along with driving directions.
She was partly inspired by British artist/nature sculptor Andrew Goldsworthy, whose ephemeral works in leaves, earth or snow often last for mere seconds before being obliterated.
”Finally it hit me that there was a way of publishing my story on bodies and I just thought that was amazing,” she said. — Guardian Unlimited Â