Inking Wartime: Military Tattoos and the Temporalities of the War Experience

Abstract

Military tattoos have recently become the latest genre of war art deployed by museums to make war tangible to their visitors. These new war objects give rise to important temporal inconsistencies: as individual soldiers relate different understandings of wartime, exhibitions mediate them monolithically, reproducing a notion of wartime as exceptional, finite, and temporary. To grasp this inconsistency, this article introduces a conceptual distinction between chronic and chronological embodied temporalities of war experience. In the four exhibitions of military tattoos under analysis, different veterans locate war's end at different junctures or moments. In these experiences, the issue of war's ending is a matter of chronology. In contrast, other veterans find war to be never-ending. In this case, war is akin to a chronic condition, whose very essence is a sense of temporal lingering that puts the idea of war's ending into question. I show that sticking to univocal understanding of wartime, exhibitions of military tattoos efface chronic and chronologically discrepant war experiences, contributing to the (re)production of a war/peace(time) binary that has been repeatedly deemed to be problematic and violent.