Tracing stories of ink and identity with Dr. Matt Lodder

Dr Matt Lodder is an art historian, author and expert in tattooing and body modification, and a Senior Lecturer in Art History at the University of Essex. His research focuses on tattoo culture and material history, and the ways in which images on the body shape identity and storytelling.

In this episode, host Matt Moseley speaks with Dr. Lodder about his lifelong fascination with tattooing and how that interest developed into an academic career. 

Website: www.essex.ac.uk/matt-lodder

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Transcript

Matt Moseley: [00:00:00] Hello, and welcome back to a new series of the Teach Inspire Create podcast. I'm Matt Mosley, Chief Examiner for Art and Design at UAL Awarding Body. In this podcast, I [00:00:15] speak to a fascinating range of people who work all across the creative arts about how they have made their way into their current roles, their impactful teaching experiences, and the people and things that inspire them.

Matt Moseley: Through these conversations, we hope to show you that there are [00:00:30] endless ways to belong in the creative world. Today my guest is Dr. Matt. Lodder, Art Historian, author and expert in tattooing and body modification, and senior lecturer in art history at Essex University. In this [00:00:45] episode, I'm gonna be talking to Matt about his work as an academic and his exploration and research into tattoo culture, and we'll hear some fascinating stories of individuals and experiences within the tattoo community and how he uses this research to [00:01:00] inform his teaching of students within the university.

Matt Moseley: Hello, Matt.

Matt Lodder: Hello.

Matt Moseley: Thank you for making your way over to us today at UAL. It's great to have you here. We wondered if we could ask you if there was a particular moment or a memory where you remember seeing your first tattoo?

Matt Lodder: I was [00:01:15] obsessed with tattooing. I'd seen, like I grew up in the eighties and so I was obsessed with WWF, like all the wrestlers and with Guns N’ Roses and stuff in like the late eighties, mid eighties.

Matt Lodder: But my grandparents told me not to get tattoos. My great grandma had a tattoo turn of the century, about 1910, something like [00:01:30] that. Her brother came home one day with a tattoo machine and said, ‘can I tattoo you?’ She said, ‘will it come off?’ And he said, ‘yes’, apparently. So she apparently had a tattoo of her initials on her wrist and hated it.

Matt Lodder: And my granddad told me that he woke up one day, he was a submariner in the war [00:01:45] for the Dutch Navy. And he said he woke up one day in a tattooist chair in Jakarta in the Dutch East Indies. As they were about to tattoo a fly on the end of his nose and he woke up just in time and dodged that particular bullet.

Matt Lodder: Those were meant to be the cautionary tales, but it's like, [00:02:00] don't tell kids not to jump in puddles. It was, that was it for me. 

Matt Moseley: Sort of forbidden fruit. 

Matt Lodder: Hundred percent. Yeah. And I was so, you know, kids' tattoos are so magical. Can't rub 'em off. So that was it. You know, as soon as I realized it was possible, I remember having conversations in the, in my primary school [00:02:15] playground about what tattoos I was gonna get when I was older, you know.

Matt Moseley: Right. Okay. And what were you, do you remember what you were kind of aspiring to get?

Matt Lodder: Yeah, it always, yeah, it was always that old school stuff, man. I really wanted like roses and, you know…

Matt Moseley: Yeah.

Matt Lodder: Wanted to look like a pirate with earrings and gold teeth and rose tattoos. You know, I’m [00:02:30] halfway there.

Matt Moseley: It's a great look man. It's a great look. And so was there a first tattoo that you got? Do you remember that experience?

Matt Lodder: Yeah, so I was, I was going to London when I was like a teenager and I was buying magazines and records, import CDs from like tower records and stuff. [00:02:45] So I was buying like Outlaw Biker and Skin and Ink magazine stuff when I was like 15, 16 and they were full of incredible tattoos done in America. It's that era of Tattoo City.

Matt Lodder: I realized that I didn't wanna get tattooed by anyone local 'cause all my mates that were getting tattooed under [00:03:00] age had absolute dog BEEP and they didn't, didn't look anything like the tattoos I was seeing in these magazines. So I knew I wanted to wait. So I actually, my first tattoo I got done I was actually a bit older, I was 21 years old. I got done at a tattoo convention in France.

Matt Moseley: Wow.

Matt Lodder: Just by a guy 'cause he [00:03:15] happened to be American. It's a very interesting guy called Jack Mosher. But I got some black stars on my wrist. Anyone could have done them, they would've been fine getting them done down the end of the road.

Matt Moseley: Yeah and so was that at that stage where you then already starting to understand the relationship between [00:03:30] narrative and tattoo and story?

Matt Lodder: At school, sort of doing English literature and theater studies. And I was interested in politics and languages and stuff, but I didn't have a sort of sense of art to the capital A.

Matt Lodder: Right. I didn't go to art galleries with my parents. [00:03:45] And my dad said to me when I was 16, 17, like, no will pay you to read books for a living. You know, go and get a job. What are you gonna do with yourself? And it wasn't until a bit later on really that I serendipitously cycled back to some of the things that I've been interested in as a teenager [00:04:00] and realized as I was getting tattooed and as I was getting pierced and it was kind of interesting. It turns out time in the humanities when all of a sudden there's always interest in embodiment and bodies that I was like, oh, actually there's something here that turns out you can get paid to read books for a living.

Matt Lodder: And it all kind of joined up for me. [00:04:15] I always say, I came to art history for the methods right, problem set to figure out the things I was interested in rather than what a lot of people do is they fall in love with art and then figure out what's going on afterwards. I didn't have any of that. I came to art [00:04:30] history as a way of figuring out stuff I was interested in.

Matt Moseley: So within that, were you always more interested in understanding and researching the cultural significance of things more than becoming a tattoo artist yourself?

Matt Lodder: Oh yeah. I'd never had any desire to be a tattoo artist. In fact, I kind of [00:04:45] figured that really early on that if I wanted to hang around tattoo shops and talk to people in the tattoo world, that would be the absolute wrong way to do it because people would think I was there trying to get something out of them or…

Matt Moseley: Sure.

Matt Lodder: Or learn and I, and can't draw a straight [00:05:00] line. You wouldn't wanna get a to by me. I never held a running tattoo machine in my life. Quite deliberately. A friend of mine does want to get the one and only Matt Lodder tattoo. He has asked me if I'd tattoo, I haven't been brave enough yet. I've got ADHD. And so I have a kind of interest in [00:05:15] asking questions and if I don't get answers, I just keep asking them.

Matt Lodder: And I think, 'cause I was so obsessed with tattooing really, really early on, I kept asking questions. And actually when I started looking at academic books or even non-academic books about tattooing and reading them, they didn't seem to actually match [00:05:30] up with what I was already starting to learn just from being around the culture a bit.

Matt Lodder: Those two stories of my grandparents, I think is really indicative. The sailor story I think is quite familiar, right? It's the cultural dominant one, but the story of my great-grandmother, [00:05:45] right? The laborers daughter grew up on a tenant farm in Kent, in the, you know, early Edwardian period. Where's her story in that, in the tattoo history of the sailors and tattoos used to be for prisoners and criminals and sex workers and stuff.

Matt Lodder: [00:06:00] That was really it for me. It was trying to kind of go, I wanna understand this. I'm still really working on what was the, in the proposal, the first chapter of my PhD that I started in 2005, my initial idea for my PhD was I wanted to [00:06:15] think about the ontology of the human artwork. Like if tattooing is an art form, like what does it mean to be an artwork walking around in the world.

Matt Lodder: And of course the first kind of prerequisite for that problem is like, is tattooing art? Or how is [00:06:30] tattooing art maybe, to put it better. And it turns out that's way more complicated than people realized. And so the thesis was methodological. It was like, but we all have this idea of art, you know, body art is a term that's been around since the 1920s at least, and the [00:06:45] metaphors of art for tattooing go back to the 14th, 13th century.

Matt Lodder: Even older than that probably. But no one had actually sat down and thought like, how does it actually work? So much of the work that had been done on tattoo history had been done by people who hadn't [00:07:00] been around tattooing. They'd been the kind of. Scholar that I wasn't. So there's

Matt Moseley:  So they were more sort of voyeuristic looking inwards, but not immersed into the culture.

Matt Lodder: That's exactly right, yeah. People who, people, not many art historians, but like sociologists, psychologists, had kind of gone, tattooing’s weird. What's that all about? I really came [00:07:15] at it from it inside out rather than outside in, and I continue to try and do that as much as I can.

Matt Lodder: So since the [00:07:30] PhD I've been really working pretty much exclusively on primary source, object based material culture of tattooing. So really try and go back to the objects, the drawings and the lives and the individual people involved and try and [00:07:45] go back to basics in a sort of quite straightforward, historical way.

Matt Lodder: I mean, what kind of weird, a lot of the time about the way I work, is actually very old school in a way like art historically. Many people who are working on more conventional art history are doing much more interesting things. They're [00:08:00] thinking about questions of race and gender and things. And I'm doing that too, but underneath it all I'm like, who was doing this?

Matt Lodder: Like who are the people? What's the stuff? Like it's very basic research and that's been a bit of an impediment. It was earlier in my career 'cause people [00:08:15] wanted me to do more elaborate stuff and I'm like, the elaborate stuff has to be based on some primary source. That primary stuff is completely missing.

Matt Lodder: I've gone through pretty much every single kind of primary source book that people have relied on and checked how much of it's true and yeah, gone [00:08:30] back to primary sources uncovered, all kinds of things.

Matt Moseley: So I guess trying to give some sort of solid foundation to a culture that has so organically grown in its own individual ways, in so many different pockets of culture.

Matt Lodder: And beautifully, you know, [00:08:45] surrounded and embedded with all kinds of myth and mythology, lies frankly, and tall tales and, and rumors and stuff. And that's all the magic of it. And I don't wanna deny or I take that away. Very early in my career I was giving a talk and this tattooer, who I saw recently, [00:09:00] actually reminded and her of it and she said, yeah, I still believe that she said, she came up to me, she said, ‘you should stop telling people that like at least two kings of England had tattoos 'cause’ she says, ‘my income relies on 18 year olds thinking it's badass. You can't…’

Matt Moseley: Hey look, they’re just the badass [00:09:15] kings.

Matt Lodder: Well, exactly. That's my response. Exactly right. A lot of people that have done what I tried to do, what I do in the past, have said, well, I want to, don't worry guys, the art historians here, I'm here to tell you all that tattooing is art. Right.

Matt Moseley: Yeah.

Matt Lodder: And I never wanna say that. And in fact, again, ironically, art history as a method [00:09:30] set has helped me get there because the one set of people, academics who don't care what art is or art historians like, we don't care about the what is and isn't art. Because as soon as you come up with a definition, some artists will do something that that is, is not that in a way.

Matt Lodder: Right? Like I work with philosophers who are [00:09:45] very obsessed with the kind of ontology of the artwork and want to kind of figure out the difference. I'm like, stop telling my students that there's a difference between art and not art.

Matt Moseley: Well, that's the thing though, isn't it? Because I mean, it sort of feels like it's not our job, is it, to prove or [00:10:00] disprove the existence or create credibility if something is or isn't art, is it?

Matt Moseley: It's up to the individual to make that decision. 

Matt Lodder: That's right. 

Matt Moseley: We just offer the perspective and information…

Matt Lodder: And I'm interested in what a particular culture or a particular view, or even a particular artist thought was art. I don't wanna say tattooing is art, but I wanna say what happens if we [00:10:15] look at it using the same tools that we look at painting, photography, you know…

Matt Moseley: Yeah.

Matt Lodder: Theater, film, whatever, sculpture, whatever it might be. See what happens. Take that metaphor seriously. Let's get over the kind of ontological question of, is this art or is some of it art? Which [00:10:30] is also the question, you know, like, is tattooing art if it's big or beautiful or whatever?

Matt Lodder: And again, I use this quote a lot, but there's an art theorist called Nelson Goodman and he says, you know, being artistic does not preclude being artistically bad.

Matt Moseley: Yeah, right.

Matt Lodder: Like actually, ironically, [00:10:45] the tools of art history allow you to figure out the bad stuff as well as the good stuff, you know?

Matt Moseley: Sure. 

Matt Lodder:When I go into schools and stuff and talk about this, like method is a big word, right? Like methodology is a big scary set of words, but really what it means is what kind of questions are we asking of this stuff we're interested [00:11:00] in. How are we approaching the topics that we want questions to? And what kind of answers can the questions we're asking actually provide?

Matt Lodder: Again for me, it was, I almost feel like a bit of a walking into a bit of an open goal a lot of the time, because psychologists, for [00:11:15] example, will say, why do people get tattooed? I don't care. Or at least I'm not capable of answering that question. I guess I do care a bit, but I wanna know who got tattooed with what, in what context?

Matt Moseley: Yeah, what's the story?

Matt Lodder: Where did it come from beforehand, and what do people think of it  [00:11:30] when they saw her at the time. And what do those tattoos tell us about the life that person lived? You know, those are really different questions. They're really obvious questions for art historians and they're really obvious questions to, to tattoo artists actually, I think a lot of the time, but they hadn't been very [00:11:45] asked by other kinds of academics.

Matt Moseley: I mean, there's something really like boring about the idea of creating effectively some sort of cultural rubber stamp where you can just go around going art, not art, art. Exactly. You know, art, art, art.

Matt Moseley: Because then that just narrows down [00:12:00] the, one of the most exciting things about art, which is the scope, that it's arguable that anything is art. 

Matt Lodder: Yeah. 

Matt Moseley: And that, and that leaves us open to new things, to newness.

Matt Lodder: I'm interested in the questions that we ask of art, right? Like, who made it? [00:12:15] When was it made?

Matt Lodder: Why was it made? How was it viewed? How does it relate to other things that were made at the same time? What does it reveal about the context of its production? Like those questions are really interesting.

Matt Moseley: So early on, as you start to immerse yourself into the [00:12:30] culture and to start to try to unpack some of these stories and understand some of these ideas around why people get tattooed. I mean, were there any standout stories or individuals in that kind of early stage?

Matt Lodder: Well, I mean, I think it's a good example maybe as an illustration of some of [00:12:45] the… some of the problem, right? In the nineties for example, there was lots of kind of rehabilitation of tattooing and academic thinking, which was like this is the anchor of the postmodern self. Like tattoos tell who you really are, right? 

Matt Lodder: And I was like, do they [00:13:00] actually, isn't it a bit more complicated than that? Isn't there someone else involved in the tattoo? Like the person that made it, don't they have some kind of authorial stake? And then I sort of realized that that idea comes from, I think a pretty problematic place, which is like [00:13:15] colonialism and racism of the 19th century because even though that nineties version is more positive, the basic idea that tattoos tell you something about your internal, almost quite straightforward, quite uncomplicated about your internal character or your belief state, [00:13:30] actually comes from the birth of criminology. It comes from this guy called Cesare Lombroso who was really interested in figuring out what kind of head criminals had. Right. And to cut a very long story short, the basic idea that he had [00:13:45] was like, well good, nice white people - this is in the 1860s. Like good, nice white people don't have tattoos. You know, who does have tattoos like foreigners, you know, people of colour, indigenous people from all around the world.

Matt Lodder: And so if you see a white person with a tattoo, they're more like [00:14:00] a foreigner, more like a quote unquote savage, quote, unquote primitive than they are like the rest of us. And so tattoos are the stigma of the criminal man, he called them. And you know, dropping to the present day, that idea that the tattoo is some marker of your true intention is [00:14:15] still being used by the FBI, ICE and CBP in America to arrest Venezuelans who they accused of being gang members.

Matt Moseley: Right.

Matt Lodder: I have a few sort of catchphrases these days. One of them is like, tattooing is a medium not a phenomenon, and tattooing is so often treated as a phenomenon that there's [00:14:30] something iIntrinsic that links all acts of marking the skin by breaking it and putting ink in it. But actually, of course, like if you think about tattooing as an artist historian, you understand tattooing is just a way of making marks and it's actually the marks you make.

Matt Lodder: There's obviously some [00:14:45] kind of component of meaning produced by medium, but like the most important thing is the marks themselves. Not… iit would be like saying, people that study, you know, Leonard da Vinci's frescoes are the same people that study cave painting or toilet wall graffiti, just [00:15:00] 'cause they're vertical surfaces.

Matt Lodder: And so the idea that we actually focus on what the tattoo is in this case, you know, looking at the descriptions and seeing that sometimes it's across, sometimes dots. Sometimes it's rather than going, well, they've all got tattoos, therefore they must be [00:15:15] criminal because it says something about their, either their inherent bad character or even if you're not going down that route, their associations with each other. Asking different questions, you get different answers about the same phenomenon. About the same thing.

Matt Moseley: Yeah.

Matt Lodder: [00:15:30] Try and kind of embed lessons like that really early on when I'm teaching. Think about the kind of questions you're asking and what evidence you have to marshal them, because that's not often a way that people are taught to think when they're younger. And certainly I wasn't.

Matt Moseley: Yeah. Do you still get [00:15:45] tattoos?

Matt Lodder: Yeah. Well, I'm sort of rapidly running out of room, but I got my back piece finished actually last weekend.

Matt Lodder: So if I'm itching, I'm scratching. It's not 'cause I got fleas, it's 'cause I just got my back piece finished.

Matt Moseley: Yeah.

Matt Lodder: I didn't get tattooed for quite a while actually 'cause I was frankly had no money. I, being a [00:16:00] PhD student and an early career academic meant I couldn't afford to get.

Matt Moseley: Yeah, yeah.

Matt Lodder: And now, thankfully, I am very blessed to sometimes at least get some, get some nice deals from people who give me tattoos in exchange for helping 'em out with things.

Matt Lodder: So, but I'm, I'm rapidly running out of [00:16:15] room.

Matt Moseley: So how do you make your decisions about what you have tattooed?

Matt Lodder: There's a sociologist called Michael Atkinson who wrote a book called Agenesis of a Body Art, and he pointed out something really interesting that it seems to be that a lot of people who have real [00:16:30] narrative, meaning for tattoos have them because they think that's necessary.

Matt Lodder: So they decide they want to get a cool tattoo, and then they kind of retrofit a story to it. You see that a lot on those TV shows, like Miami Ink. You know, ‘my dad died, my dog died and my mom died so I want [00:16:45] three skulls on fire’. Right. You know, this is what we want. Obviously that's not always true.

Matt Lodder: For me, the tattoos I fell in love with in images were, were that people like the tattooist called Dan Higgs who was working in the California in the mid nineties, who was obsessed with kind of a [00:17:00] new twist on what we now call kind of old school or American traditional tattooing. All the stuff that he was interested in and so I got really obsessed just looking at photos of like tattooed sailors from the 1930s and forties basically, and thinking it was the coolest [00:17:15] stuff I'd ever seen. And so that's the kind of aesthetic that I've been really interested in. I've sought out artists whose work I really like and, and I, I sort of treat it like a collection in a way.

Matt Lodder: Yeah. Getting, getting work from, from artists…

Matt Moseley:It's a gallery space, isn't it?

Matt Lodder: A hundred percent. Yeah.

Matt Moseley: You can curate your own, you [00:17:30] know, permanent exhibition.

Matt Lodder: That's right. Yeah. And I, you know, I've described tattooing as kind of almost inherently a collaborative art right. Unless you're tattooing yourself, every other kind of mode of tattooing is always gonna be some collaborative action.

Matt Lodder: So I don't ever want to kind of [00:17:45] take complete kind of authorial agency over the tattoos on my body, like, the people who've tattooed me also have designed them and have had their inputs in them and what they look like.

Matt Moseley: When you're speaking as well about the power of those early images just is making me think a lot [00:18:00] about kind of how much those things that you see as a child stay with you.

Matt Moseley: Yeah, I mean, I, I was a child around a similar time and a lot of those kind of big American sort of things, the things that I'm still drawn to, have some sort of connection or [00:18:15] relationship with because America just seemed like this other world didn't it?

Matt Lodder: A hundred percent, yeah. And it's super interesting to me that tattoo images in the 19th century, for example, when professional tattooing started in London and New York, the people who were like spending money on big tattoos in the [00:18:30] first sort of generation of professional tattooing were getting two types of things. They were either getting like Japanese style stuff, or they were getting stuff based on their favorite paintings, which was basically hunting and shooting and fishing scenes or salon [00:18:45] paintings.

Matt Lodder: So basically allegorical paintings of goddesses and nymphs and stuff. No one's getting like impressionist tattoos, right? Or like surrealist tattoos at the time, it is basically kind of eagles and dogs and [00:19:00] pairs or it's like plausibly naked women. It's okay if she's naked 'cause it's like goddess, whoever.

Matt Lodder: Right. And tattooing, especially in the Western context is not very, iconographically or technically hasn't traditionally been at least very [00:19:15] complicated. It communicates a very kind of narrow range of quite shared human emotional conditions. So I always say, the things people tattoo on their bodies in the Western context is things they love, things they hate, things they wanna BEEP.

Matt Lodder: And maybe the third one, [00:19:30] a combination of the previous two. 

Matt Moseley: Yeah, yeah. 

Matt Lodder: Right. That's religious imagery, that's patriotic imagery, it's like sexualized imagery. It's the things that, it's their hobbies, it's things that they're angry about, things they're afraid of. [00:19:45] Because of the medium of tattooing and on the body and the way that the body in this western context is communicating.

Matt Lodder: You don't have a lot of space for kind of a lot of iconographical complexity or subtlety. It just sort of works in a way that's quite kind of blunt. [00:20:00] 

Matt Moseley: Well, it's interesting, it draws a lot of parallels with painting from Renaissances periods where it was portrait, landscape, religious painting were the things that were essentially patronized or funded, weren't they?

Matt Moseley: Yeah. And so artists then had to try to find [00:20:15] ways to subtly integrate some sense of identity into their work, whilst also just meeting these quite narrow parameters and…

Matt Lodder: Paying the bills. Yeah. And, and things that sort of speak to a huge range of people. You know that, that kind of makes sense if you like to [00:20:30] people across a huge range of cultural context.

Matt Moseley: You mentioned sort of around 30 [00:20:45] years of kind of intensely learning about and observing and immersing yourself within the tattoo culture. How have you seen things change in that period of time?

Matt Lodder: I think, you know, the rhythm of tattooing in the West has been the rhythm of [00:21:00] fashion more generally, actually, which is also, I think, an important thing that people miss.

Matt Lodder: Like people don't want to get their dad's trousers, but they'll wear their granddad's ones kind of thing. Or their dad's haircuts, right? True. Yeah. And it's the same with tattooing, and that's spit up a bit of course in recent years with the Internet stuff. But [00:21:15] basically the case, we have these kind of rhythms of fashion and I think I grew up in era, all of the cultural context that I was existing in was very heavily tattooed.

Matt Lodder: And then just people younger than me just wanting do something else. And then we had that awful period, which [00:21:30] was called at the time Norm Core. Do you remember Norm Core? Right? 

Matt Lodder: Yeah. Remember Norm? Like early? 

Matt Moseley: Yeah, yeah. 

Matt Lodder: Well, not even early. Kinda like the second generation of people that were on the internet who realized basically that culture is flat.

Matt Lodder: So we're into everything. So and it's still sort of the case today, [00:21:45] but you know, subculture went away for 10 years between 2008 and 2018 maybe, where like all your music you want is on Spotify. Every… whatever kind of films you're into, they're in the

Matt Moseley: You reach a [00:22:00] saturation point of, of access to everything all of the time.

Matt Lodder: And everything's the same shape and everything's accessed through the same device and it's all very flattened.

Matt Lodder: And so what happened with tattooing is like, actually, more and more people got tattooed, but fewer and fewer people were interested in [00:22:15] tattooing.

Matt Moseley: Yeah.

Matt Lodder: The number of people that got tattooed got massive. Even though the tattooing itself got less popular in a way, you'd see less people with sleeves, lots of people who could have one or two tattoos.

Matt Lodder: And actually, what I've noticed since the pandemic, and this would be a sociological question that I'm not [00:22:30] exactly qualified to answer. But certainly since the pandemic subculture's back again, I'm seeing young people come to my talks again, people listening to my podcast, people buying my books.

Matt Moseley: Yeah.

Matt Lodder: And I see on campus young people in their late teens, early twenties, who are into [00:22:45] specific things who have subculture again, like Norm Core is gone away.

Matt Lodder: Even at tattoo conventions, you see that. And I think in a way what's been interesting for the tattoo industry is that's actually meant bizarrely less business for tattooers, but the people that are [00:23:00] really busy are still busy, are people that are doing stuff that's very specific and it's appealing to people who are quite niche or people that are still doing the kind of small things.

Matt Lodder: People in the middle who's, most of them, I guess by definition, they are not, they're not [00:23:15] as busy anymore because there's not that kind of general audience.

Matt Moseley: Yeah.

Matt Lodder: For tattooing anymore, even though it's bigger than ever. Paradoxically. Sutherland Macdonald, who was the first kind of like big professional tattooer in England, the man who claimed to have coined the word tattooist [00:23:30] in the 1880s, like he said in about 1885, like four or five years after he started like basically tattooing's too popular now. I liked it when it was old school. Yeah. You know, there's all these Johnny-come-latelys getting into it 'cause it's trendy.

Matt Lodder: That paradox is super interesting and again, a question that I [00:23:45] think the art historical method is better to answer than the sociological one because the sociologists are kind of like, well, tattooing used to be for sailors and criminals, and now it's for like housewives. And you know, and that sentiment has been kind of repeated and repeated and [00:24:00] repeated to the point where it doesn't make any sense, right?

Matt Lodder: Like that idea goes back every decade since the 1880s, and you've got this kind of idea that the tattoos are doing something paradoxical. They're dividing you hierarchically, but they're connecting you horizontally. It's [00:24:15] one of the reasons I think that tattooing is so popular and has been so popular in like uniformed context prisons, militaries, football teams.

Matt Lodder: You get to be in a uniform, you get to be an individual, you get to be kind of unique. But you get to be different from the [00:24:30] system.

Matt Moseley: Yeah.

Matt Lodder: But you get to be like, you're thrown together with people that you have nothing in common with other than the fact you're in the same circumstance. You're all of a sudden in the same regiment, in the same school, in the same football team.

Matt Lodder: You have nothing in common. So tattoos can connect you if you like, sub culturally. Even [00:24:45] while, well all good if everyone's got a tattoo, how can you be an individual? You know? Like that makes sense if you don't think about tattooing as some kind of inherent desire to mark your individualities. 

Matt Moseley: Yeah, exactly.

Matt Lodder: You know, those were the kind of questions that really made me, just straight away when I [00:25:00] was, even when I was, before I even knew academia was, go that doesn't make any sense to me. Then the other one, of course is like, what would it be like when you're older? Right? Which has, at the heart of it a paradox too, which is like, oh, you idiot.

Matt Lodder: You care so much about fashion. You've got tattooed now, but you [00:25:15] regret it when you're older. But also, how dare you not care about fashions in the future? Where tattoo's not gonna be fashioned anymore. You should care about fashion. What, what are you saying? Yeah. Yeah. Like that, it makes no sense,

Matt Moseley: I'm supposed to, I'm supposed to live in the moment and in, you know, and in the future [00:25:30] simultaneously.

Matt Lodder:  Exactly. 

Matt Moseley: Yeah. To equal levels.

Matt Lodder: Yeah. I've read countless kind of psychology papers and sociology papers that try and rationalize that problem, and I'm like, it's not really a problem. It doesn't make… like you're just asking the wrong questions.

Matt Moseley: Yeah. [00:25:45] Human expression is one of the most essential, most basic kind of human facets and, and requirement assets, isn't it?

Matt Moseley: And when it becomes over contrived and overthought out, the require… part of the requirement it feels like for human expression is spontaneity, [00:26:00] isn't it? 

Matt Lodder: Yeah. 

Matt Moseley: And a sort of sense of kind of free will.

Matt Lodder: Yeah. I mean, again, that kind of cliche, that gets leveled at tattooed people. Tattoos are a permanent reminder of a temporary feeling. It's like, well, yeah, that's what, that's what art is.

Matt Moseley: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You could put the brush to canvas and do the same thing. [00:26:15] 

Matt Lodder: My pal, Nicky Sullivan, who's a academic from Australia, but basically it was a guy who had his knuckles tattooed with hate. HATE on his knuckles, and he came outta prison and was a reformed character and was lovely and kind and looked [00:26:30] after old ladies and whatever.

Matt Lodder: And people said to him like, why do you have hate on your knuckles? I was such a nice guy. He said, oh, it stands for happiness all through eternity.

Matt Moseley: Nice.

Matt Lodder: Right?

Matt Moseley: Yeah.

Matt Lodder: And of course, again, like the idea that an image can change, what it means is something that, again, art history is very [00:26:45] comfortable with.

Matt Lodder: Because we don't really care about intention. Art history doesn't have an intentional theory contemporary what artists think they're doing. You know, as Mark Kermode, the film critic said, Steven Spielberg thinks Jaws is about a shark. Right? What you think you're doing and saying [00:27:00] with your tattoo may not be actually what it means at all, or certainly not how it's received.

Matt Moseley: Yeah.

Matt Lodder: You see this a lot online, you know, oh my God, this secret meaning. Years ago, on Tumblr that tells you how long ago it was, I got a DM on Tumblr from somebody [00:27:15] going, oh, these are the tattoos that Harry Styles has got. Like, does it mean he's in a secret relationship with Liam? And I was like, no. Like, what a weird question.

Matt Moseley: I think you've become some sort of tattoo whisperer as well that you…

Matt Lodder: Exactly. Now, yeah. It's like there's like the da Vinci kind

Matt Moseley: …can see into the head [00:27:30] of all tattooed individuals.

Matt Moseley: Matt, could you tell us about your role as a senior lecturer in [00:27:45] art history?

Matt Lodder: What the hell do I do all day?

Matt Moseley: Yes. Essentially.

Matt Lodder: So actually I teach a first year class called writing and researching Art History, which is kinda an introduction to university level art, historical thinking. And the first lecture is called What the BEEP are we doing all day? [00:28:00]

Matt Lodder: Right? Because I think a lot of people imagine that universe, well this is fair enough, but a lot of people come in and imagine that universities are like big school, I'm just like a teacher and I'm gonna be teaching 'em stuff and they need to remember what I've told them and write it down [00:28:15] and then there’ll be exam at the end.

Matt Lodder: And if they remember what I told them, then that's fine. And I actually want to kind of go, no, no, no. Like what we're doing here is discovering, right? We're figuring stuff out. I'm giving you the tools, methods, to learn stuff [00:28:30] yourself. Most stuff I'm gonna tell you factually is probably more or less correct, but that's not the job. 

Matt Lodder: As a university academic, a third of my time, roughly, is teaching over the course of the year. A third  is admin stuff. So, I do a lot of various admin roles around the university. [00:28:45] And then a third is research. And research is kind of the key thing which is like figuring stuff out, asking questions. A lot of students come into university, to life, being very concerned about not knowing anything.

Matt Lodder: And I wanna say not knowing something is [00:29:00] brilliant 'cause all you have to do is

Matt Moseley: It's a gateway to knowing things. 

Matt Lodder: … you have to ask the questions. Yeah. I might worry if you didn't know anything at the end of your degree, but like day one, if you dunno anything, that's perfect. I'm gonna show you how to answer any question you have.

Matt Lodder: And if you can't find an answer, if you keep looking and can't find an answer, well [00:29:15] congratulations. You're now an academic, right?

Matt Moseley: Yeah.

Matt Lodder: So for me, what does research look like? Well, I spend a lot of time with private collectors who have stuff in their lofts, tattooers, and families of tattooers who have things that have been kept away.

Matt Lodder: And individual bits of paper can like [00:29:30] completely change how we think about whole histories. So as an example, this one collector who I know had a catalog from a department store in London, GAMAGES again on the corner actually up here [00:29:45] selling tattoo machines over the counter in like 1911. And like if you have this idea of tattooing being underground and you couldn't buy tattoo machines and it was all you're going, this is a shop that sold like Christmas cards…

Matt Moseley: You can pop to a department store down the road and you can get one. [00:30:00]

Matt Lodder: Yeah. And, but I went looking for these catalogs in libraries where academics normally look for things and there weren't any. I've only ever seen five in my entire life, and I own three of them 'cause I bought them when they came up at auction.

Matt Lodder: But those kinda things, you know, individual bits of paper because the [00:30:15] stories of tattooing haven't traditionally been the kind of stories that Museums and archives have kept. I'm a trustee at this place called the Bishops Gate Institute, which is an archive of London vernacular life, and I'm trying to help them acquire material, but those stories about normal people's lives [00:30:30] just haven't been collected.

Matt Lodder: So I have to find ways to work with that. So I've worked with collectors all over the world. I then write down what I've done and publish them. I give talks. I curate exhibitions, so I did a big exhibition in [00:30:45] 2017 at the National Maritime Museum in Cornwall, which toured around the country. I'm doing another big exhibition next year in Wales.

Matt Lodder: It's funny where this stuff takes me. I also had a very, very small role to play in keeping tattooing legal in Japan. [00:31:00] I have to really make clear it was very, very small. I was invited out to Japan in 2018 when there was a case before the Supreme Court of Japan about basically whether the question really was whether tattooing was a medical practice and therefore illegal or an artistic one, and [00:31:15] therefore not illegal.

Matt Lodder: And so the lawyers, basically paid for me to do some talks around the main cities of Southern Japan and used a very small part of that argument in their case. A lot of people imagine, even students, parents, politicians, gen, [00:31:30] imagine art history is people sitting around going, I like that one. I don't like that one.

Matt Lodder: I like, I like, it's all it. It was described once actually at the time when Prince William was getting engaged to Catherine Middleton who did art history, that it was finishing school for posh kids. And [00:31:45] actually for me, it's really important to point out that art history is actually a way of thinking about the world and thinking about the visual world.

Matt Lodder: And of course, like what images do, how they work, like how they perpetuate ideologies, how they interrelate with [00:32:00] law, with sexuality, with politics, with belief, with religion, like all of those things. That's one of the things that art historians do. We're not sitting around going, oh, that one's nice. 

Matt Moseley: Yeah, it has a function, has a purpose, doesn't it? In terms of explaining and understanding stuff.

Matt Lodder: Yeah, so [00:32:15] what I try and get across in my teaching in my life is that, yeah, the academic practice of art history is about thinking about the world and the visual world, we inhabit a different ways, Because I think students, I think need to know that I'm not just reading [00:32:30] textbooks to them, but that I like as with pretty much everyone who works at university is engaged in an active process of finding new stuff out.

Matt Lodder: You know, I've saved collections from rural Switzerland. I've worked with [00:32:45] like pathologists with preserved human remains to try and figure out how old they are. Like all kinds of strange places that this kind of nerdy interest in tattooing has taken me. I'm sort of constantly surprised that I get to do it, but you know, as I said, turns out you can read books for living.

Matt Moseley: We usually sort [00:33:00] of wrap things up by asking our interviewee if there is something that they could offer to the listeners in terms of an action or a call to arms or a provocation, if they're interested in some of the stuff that you've been [00:33:15] talking about today, how they can get up and get started.

Matt Lodder: Well, I think, you know, so the thing I think is really missing a lot in contemporary culture and discourse in education is not like, what do you think or what do you know?

Matt Lodder: But like, why do you know it? [00:33:30] How do you know it? Right, asking why and how questions rather than just what questions, again for me that that has been so foundational to go, and I'll give you another example, right? Like tattooing, you'd read a lot was discovered in the Pacific with Captain [00:33:45] Cook and that was written in lots of books and stuff.

Matt Lodder: And you'd go, well, how do you know that? Why? Like, what evidence is there for that? And then you go looking to try and disprove it. Can I find evidence of tattooing earlier than [00:34:00] the 1760s? And then it sounds like you can, and that's not my discovery. That was the work of a colleague of mine, a friend of mine called Anna Friedman. But actually asking like all the time, skeptically, how do I know that? If you read something in a [00:34:15] book, how do they know that?

Matt Lodder: Can I check? I mean, I spend a lot of time with my students. They all learn how to do footnotes and they do bibliographies and references, and a lot of the time they're taught how to do that to quote unquote not plagiarize. And actually, I wanna go look, the reason we do [00:34:30] footnotes is so I can check, because for me, my whole career has been built on looking at people's footnotes and figuring out if what they say those things say, are actually true.

Matt Lodder: And the whole edifice of academic work, science and humanities pretty much [00:34:45] is just figuring out not just what we know, but how we know it. I want to try and if I could click my fingers and inculcate that way of thinking into earlier than university, that would make my life a lot easier as an [00:35:00] educator, frankly.

Matt Lodder: But I think it'd also make the world a better place. And at the heart of it, in a very pure sense, that's really what academic risk scholarship should be like, not just what do you know, but how do you know it? And that this is what comes back to this methodological [00:35:15] question again, you know?

Matt Moseley: I think that's perfect. The idea, the curiosity is essential, isn't it? It is really fundamental.

Matt Lodder: It’s hard for art students, I think. The reason art history exists as a university subject in the UK is because of this thing called the Cold Stream Report. And the cold stream [00:35:30] report basically said that art schools were getting bigger, but kids weren't learning art history or art theory, and the powers that be thought that they should

Matt Lodder: And then there was a kinda move away from that, and I talked to people in art schools and kids doing art younger than that. And then they're like, well, I don't wanna be [00:35:45] encumbered by what other people have done, I wanna kinda do my own thing. And it oscillates back and forth between those two poles.

Matt Lodder: And I think it's difficult for art students and art historians and humanities in general to think about things in that more scientifically-coded way. You know, this [00:36:00] image projects fear or lust or terror or whatever to go, why does it do that? But I think we still need to do that, we need to inculcate that kind of, almost like scientific thinking, methodologically thinking into art students to [00:36:15] go.

Matt Lodder: You say you want your art to do this, you want, you think your art does this, you think someone else. Why do you think that? Even if it's not kind of psychologically grounded, even if it's just, I've seen similar things and this is how I like just to think about why we think the way we think, [00:36:30] why we react the way we react.

Matt Lodder: Skepticism in a kind of technical sense, I think is really important and missing a lot. So that would be what I'd encourage people to try and foreground in their own lives, ask as many why questions as you do what questions.

Matt Moseley: Great. [00:36:45] A massive thank you to Matt for your time today. 

Matt Lodder: No my pleasure, thank you. 

Matt Moseley: Mind blowing stuff. I'm asking myself a lot of why questions internally. I look forward to asking a lot more why questions externally as a result.

Matt Lodder: You’ll be thrashing on your pillow tonight. Why? Why?

Matt Moseley: No. [00:37:00] But thank you ever so much. Thanks. It's so interesting. Brilliant. Cheers. 

Matt Moseley: Thanks again to Matt for his time today. Humorous expert, interesting, fantastic stories about tattooing. I'm gonna ask myself lots of [00:37:15] questions about why. If you want to know more about Matt's work, we'll include links to his website and social media in the podcast episode description. Thanks again for listening, we really hope you've enjoyed this episode, and if you did, recommend it to someone else. [00:37:30]

Matt Moseley: Take care. Bye-bye.