Miracolo Attacked by Little People

Lucie Tatarová is a Czech artist and designer living in Prague in the Czech Republic. Themes of identity and ornamentation or patterning are central to her work. In this piece of artwork, entitled “Miracolo attacked by little people,” the patterns on the male body are not tattoos! Using her boyfriend as both muse and material, Tatarova created a piece of body art.  She reveals her inspiration: „It started on a beach in Israel. People did not dawdle in the sand but they hung around in clusters and talked. They were quite far away from me and all the details faded, only the substance remained… I draw and print images of other people´s bodies on the real bodies. I am fascinated by the principles of isomorphism in fractals.” Such body art ornamentation can be understood as the re-introduction of a contemporary “primitivism” into the daily life of western society. Tattoos, piercings, and radical hairdos stalk the streets, gather in clubs and affirm kinships in school hallways. The public space for being “different” or the “other” is currently being played out in real life situations and in social cyberspace. The difference between “you and me” erodes with the increasingly ambiguously gendering of bodies. Likewise, media-informed characterizations of desirability, fantastic and mythical identifications with beauty, now inhabit the psyche. As Marcel Duchamp remarked when appropriating and performing a gendered persona, that of a beauty woman he named Rrose Sélavy “Call it a little game between »I« and »me«. How does the minute difference between »I« and »me«” feel? It is hard to say until we try.” This place of trying on the skin of the “other” is the realm of Tatarova’s work.