// literary & arts //
Spring 2006
Our Bodies, Our Selves
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Bodies: The Exhibition
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So after all, it is on a Saturday afternoon at South Street Seaport that the curious living (and paying) might finally meet the dead. On view until the end of April at the South Street Seaport's Exhibition Centre is Bodies: The Exhibition. The queue for the human anatomical show, which opened in the fall, still continues outside the Centre and circles around its walls, whatever the weather or the wait. Each day, thousands of tourists, New Yorkers, families, and couples on dates, queue and pay the handsome entrance fee—$24.50 per adult ticket—to see twenty-two human cadavers. The bodies are of mostly Chinese men, and have been painstakingly preserved and dissected by body system, and the exibit also features over 260 additional body parts, organs, and even fetuses. Only in the all-important name of education could such an encounter be justified.
The 32,000 square foot, single-level exhibition space is darkly lit and colorscaped a sickly green. The walls are covered with cereal-box factoids and floral stylizations of microscopic cells, together coalescing into dreadfully kitsch, biologically-inspired decorative wallpaper. This clumsy vacillation between educational pretenses and aesthetic ambitions is emblematic of the exhibition as a whole, which aims to appear positively scientific. The show is systemically ordered, starting with the skeletal, moving to the muscular, nervous, respiratory, circulatory, digestive and reproductive systems, and ending with an optimistic, self-congratulatory ode to the technology of anatomy. The exhibition reads, cover to cover, image to caption, like an introductory level biology textbook.
In the exhibition media manual, the question is posed: "Why use real human specimens instead of constructed models?" The answer given is: "Unlike models that idealize the body through the eyes of an artist, the specimens in this exhibition will show you the body and its parts as they really exist." The exhibition organizers, whatever their false claims or misguided intentions, are not immune to the same problem of representation which has historically plagued all artists: that the real is often the most highly constructed. Ironically, in order to appear authentic, the exhibition must conform to our preconceptions and mimic the artifices of old. But bringing color-coded textbook figures to the third dimension is hardly education. Why won't those innocuous textbooks do? Colored red and alive, the cadavers are made to represent a living universal particular, a textbook type, which the exhibition organizers argue can help educate exhibition-goers about their own bodies and thus encourage them to improve their health. Health education is the ethical justification of the exhibition.
Upon entering the exhibition's first room, which is focused on the skeletal system, there hangs, much like the stick figure in the game "hangman," a sole skeleton by a hook, attached to a freestanding beam. Although the skeleton is made morbid by the exhibition's insistence that it is real, there seems to be no detectable difference between this specimen (as the exhibition refers to its cadavers) and the kind of model which would hang in a high-school classroom. We could, quite blamelessly, doubt its authenticity. After the hangman, the exhibition remarkably fleshes out (the puns are too tempting) in its transition toward the muscular system. In effect, the limp, stick-figured hangman introduces the exhibition by providing a stark contrast for the must-see cadavers to come. The ultimate goal of the installation is to underscore the exhibition's truth claim, which is that these cadavers, naturalistic and hyperactively animated, are incontrovertibly real—so real that they could be us.
The cadavers, from which most muscle groups have been removed, have been supplimented with cosmetically attached hairy eyebrows, perky eyelashes, blue eyeballs, and always yellowed, lacquered fingernails and toenails. Further, the muscles themselves are hand painted shades of red to enhance their look of "vitality," as one docent told me while wearing a white laboratory coat and a large blank badge, hanging like a stethoscope. In the next section on the circulatory system, the arteries and veins were injected with red and blue dyes, respectively, also to enhance their "vitality." The presence of these artifices—subliminal or topical, injected internally or costumed externally—paradoxically naturalize the exhibit. These artifices are the details, which silently, subconsciously naturalize the whole cadaver so that it appears to be the real derivation of a human. The terrible paradox of the exhibition is that in order to be proven "real," the cadavers, which are the attraction of the show, must be injected, costumed, and brought back from the dead, even animated.
After the limp, lifeless hangman, each full-bodied specimen is artfully, provocatively positioned in order to demonstrate by arrested performance the functioning of a body system. In order to illustrate the creativity and body control of the muscular system, a specimen is installed as a conductor, complete with a baton in hand and inspired, upward-looking eyes sunken intelligently in their sockets. The muscular tissue of the conductor is left selectively intact so the abdominal and chest muscles form a streamlined set—cummerbund and conductor's jacket in pin-striped red. After the conductor come the iconic all-American types: the football, basketball and baseball players, clearly created out of the cadavers of all Chinese men, adorned, like stuffed animals, with blue glassy eyes, and positioned even more distastefully. Turned to one side, the football player, demonstrating balance and muscle strength, stands ready to launch the ball in his right hand behind him. The basketball player dribbles, exhibiting muscle control, while, in the respiratory room, the baseball player has batted and looks upward at a nonexistent ball, ready to run to a nonexistent first base. These are the jarring visions of a textbook diagram made three-dimensional and transposed onto the supremely functioning physique of an athlete or, vice-versa, a living, moving human turned inside out.
The exhibition's most impressive showcase of virtuosity is the single specimen dissected into two figures: his skeletal and muscular system, held intact by a nearly invisible metal substructure. In tandem, the figures look like playfully dancing, spinning children, suspended under a spotlight, on a plinth, as if in a theatrically staged photograph. According to the adjacent text, this unthinkable splitting, splicing, balancing act demonstrates the skill of the muscles and how the skeletal muscles and skeleton are of use to each other. Of course, except maybe figuratively, the entirely artificial aesthetic arrangement demonstrates nothing of the sort. Rather, it displays, by its audacity, the exhibition's sadistic pride and delight in its technical prowess.
This audacious, animating installation of cadavers is reverse, perverse taxidermy. No conservationist impulse, however deranged, is operating here. The impulse is fundamentally sadistic, even cannibalistic. Not the skins, but instead the insides of human cadavers are meticulously prepared and exhibited for the entertainment (obviously not for education) of other humans. The hunter-taxidermist kills his animal, preserves its skin, eats its meat, and displays it stuffed (on the inside) and life-like (on the outside). But this exhibition is no proud, nature-loving hunter's lodge, bear prostrate on the floor, moose head mounted on the wall. Posted on the wall, the last words of the exhibition are: "The specimens in this exhibition have been treated with the dignity and respect they so richly deserve." The exhibition organizers have legally obtained voluntarily donated bodies from Dalian Medical University in Dalian, Liaoning, China, skinned their cadavers, stripped them of identity, preserved them and now serve them for our consumption, if not gustatory then visual. On display is human flesh as if it were bear or moose meat.
Body parts and individual limbs looked like stringy meat, chicken to me and beef to my friend. More remarkably, the body parts made spectators hungry. It was precisely around these cases (and around lunchtime) that I heard several exclamations from children and women: "I'm hungry. Can we eat after this?" None realized aloud the connection between the human flesh on display and their hunger, except my friend, who whispered naughtily, "I want to eat a human, just to see how it tastes, just to say that I've done it." The exhibition's awakening of our appetites is no accident. We are not cannibals. But we are shamelessly ravenous spectators, and we were unleashed and allowed, even encouraged by the exhibition, to devour. By far the busiest room of the exhibition was the reproductive system installation, where there were healthy and cancerous penises, vaginas and breasts. Spectators pushed, crouched in front and tip-toed near the back, in order to near the glass cases and squint, point, examine the human parts inside. However enticing the installations were, it did not taste good to look. The exhibition was disgusting, and, I suppose, that disgust was the cheap thrill.
After health education, the second mediating condition of this cannibalistic encounter is aesthetic installation. From the extraordinary to the prototypically American, the exhibition even comments on the art historical, installing specimens in the iconic positions of Rodin's Thinker, which predictably serves as the centerpiece of the nervous system display, and the Discobolus of Myron, which is installed in the final room, in praise of technology. The final room, like an overdue epiphany, explains plastination, the anatomical technique developed in the seventies by the German anatomist Gunther von Hagens, which prevents natural decay by replacing lipids and water with liquid silicon rubber and thus preserves bodies indefinitely. Plastination makes the exhibition possible, and, if its challenges to modern and classical sculpture are to be taken seriously as art, plastination presents powerful challenges to sculpture. First, different from carving, welding or modeling, plastination is a new, objective technique of processing. Second, rather than using rock materials, plastination relies on human materials, which, in many cases, closes the problematic gap between means and end. Third, plastination is not creative but preservative, which offers an alternate conception of art. Fourth, to compare the exhibition's Thinker with Rodin's, the plastinated sculpture actually thought in its lifetime whereas the bronze never did, never could have; in effect, plastinated sculpture is potentially no longer imitative art.
However, when von Hagens developed plastination, he was not thinking of the sculptural tradition. The self-mythologizing artist had loftier ambitions. Von Hagens imagines himself still to be a scientist and an artist, working in the Renaissance tradition of anatomy, and cites Leonardo da Vinci and Honoré Fragonard as predecessors. These scientists, however, were working for the humanistic advancement of scientific knowledge, and their anatomical drawings were records of their experiments, which only became works of art themselves in retrospect. By contrast, von Hagens is a showman who wears a trademark black fedora. Besides being the creator of plastination, von Hagens also first realized its exhibition value in 1995, opening the show Body Worlds in Tokyo, which went on to tour mostly Japan, Germany and Austria and most recently the United States.
Body Worlds and its successor show Body Worlds 2 have attracted more than 17 million visitors worldwide, according the exhibition's website. Von Hagens's show is the original, as he rightly claims, and Bodies: The Exhibition is one among many "copycat exhibitions." Although the explicit goal of the Body Worlds exhibitions is also health education, von Hagens's exhibitions differ because he himself is personally invested in their creation, promotion and appeal. He once stirred publicity for his work by administering and televising, despite police threats, the first public autopsy in nearly two hundred years to a sell-out crowd of five hundred at London's Atlantis Gallery in 2002, all for the sake of the "democratization of anatomy." Here, Von Hagens gloriously reenacted Rembrandt's "The Anatomy Lecture of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp" of 1632, managing to politicize, aestheticize, and sensationalize the gruesome means to the end of the human anatomical exhibition—dissection-—which within the Bodies exhibition is strategically downplayed by naturalizing artifice.
Von Hagens might even be compared to the infamous Der Metzgermeister (The Master Butcher), Armin Meiwes, who, used the Internet to locate a willing victim, whom he consumed, first eating the man's penis, in his home in Germany in 2001. I can see a connection between the proud human butcher, who smiled at his sentencing, and the exhibitionist von Hagens. In private or in public, illegally or despite the law, does not one cannibalistic meal legitimate another? Do they not cater to that common, sadistic appetite? Is health education, a sort of popular science, an adequate justification for the exhibition of the dead as an entertainment for the living?
The 32,000 square foot, single-level exhibition space is darkly lit and colorscaped a sickly green. The walls are covered with cereal-box factoids and floral stylizations of microscopic cells, together coalescing into dreadfully kitsch, biologically-inspired decorative wallpaper. This clumsy vacillation between educational pretenses and aesthetic ambitions is emblematic of the exhibition as a whole, which aims to appear positively scientific. The show is systemically ordered, starting with the skeletal, moving to the muscular, nervous, respiratory, circulatory, digestive and reproductive systems, and ending with an optimistic, self-congratulatory ode to the technology of anatomy. The exhibition reads, cover to cover, image to caption, like an introductory level biology textbook.
In the exhibition media manual, the question is posed: "Why use real human specimens instead of constructed models?" The answer given is: "Unlike models that idealize the body through the eyes of an artist, the specimens in this exhibition will show you the body and its parts as they really exist." The exhibition organizers, whatever their false claims or misguided intentions, are not immune to the same problem of representation which has historically plagued all artists: that the real is often the most highly constructed. Ironically, in order to appear authentic, the exhibition must conform to our preconceptions and mimic the artifices of old. But bringing color-coded textbook figures to the third dimension is hardly education. Why won't those innocuous textbooks do? Colored red and alive, the cadavers are made to represent a living universal particular, a textbook type, which the exhibition organizers argue can help educate exhibition-goers about their own bodies and thus encourage them to improve their health. Health education is the ethical justification of the exhibition.
Upon entering the exhibition's first room, which is focused on the skeletal system, there hangs, much like the stick figure in the game "hangman," a sole skeleton by a hook, attached to a freestanding beam. Although the skeleton is made morbid by the exhibition's insistence that it is real, there seems to be no detectable difference between this specimen (as the exhibition refers to its cadavers) and the kind of model which would hang in a high-school classroom. We could, quite blamelessly, doubt its authenticity. After the hangman, the exhibition remarkably fleshes out (the puns are too tempting) in its transition toward the muscular system. In effect, the limp, stick-figured hangman introduces the exhibition by providing a stark contrast for the must-see cadavers to come. The ultimate goal of the installation is to underscore the exhibition's truth claim, which is that these cadavers, naturalistic and hyperactively animated, are incontrovertibly real—so real that they could be us.
The cadavers, from which most muscle groups have been removed, have been supplimented with cosmetically attached hairy eyebrows, perky eyelashes, blue eyeballs, and always yellowed, lacquered fingernails and toenails. Further, the muscles themselves are hand painted shades of red to enhance their look of "vitality," as one docent told me while wearing a white laboratory coat and a large blank badge, hanging like a stethoscope. In the next section on the circulatory system, the arteries and veins were injected with red and blue dyes, respectively, also to enhance their "vitality." The presence of these artifices—subliminal or topical, injected internally or costumed externally—paradoxically naturalize the exhibit. These artifices are the details, which silently, subconsciously naturalize the whole cadaver so that it appears to be the real derivation of a human. The terrible paradox of the exhibition is that in order to be proven "real," the cadavers, which are the attraction of the show, must be injected, costumed, and brought back from the dead, even animated.
After the limp, lifeless hangman, each full-bodied specimen is artfully, provocatively positioned in order to demonstrate by arrested performance the functioning of a body system. In order to illustrate the creativity and body control of the muscular system, a specimen is installed as a conductor, complete with a baton in hand and inspired, upward-looking eyes sunken intelligently in their sockets. The muscular tissue of the conductor is left selectively intact so the abdominal and chest muscles form a streamlined set—cummerbund and conductor's jacket in pin-striped red. After the conductor come the iconic all-American types: the football, basketball and baseball players, clearly created out of the cadavers of all Chinese men, adorned, like stuffed animals, with blue glassy eyes, and positioned even more distastefully. Turned to one side, the football player, demonstrating balance and muscle strength, stands ready to launch the ball in his right hand behind him. The basketball player dribbles, exhibiting muscle control, while, in the respiratory room, the baseball player has batted and looks upward at a nonexistent ball, ready to run to a nonexistent first base. These are the jarring visions of a textbook diagram made three-dimensional and transposed onto the supremely functioning physique of an athlete or, vice-versa, a living, moving human turned inside out.
The exhibition's most impressive showcase of virtuosity is the single specimen dissected into two figures: his skeletal and muscular system, held intact by a nearly invisible metal substructure. In tandem, the figures look like playfully dancing, spinning children, suspended under a spotlight, on a plinth, as if in a theatrically staged photograph. According to the adjacent text, this unthinkable splitting, splicing, balancing act demonstrates the skill of the muscles and how the skeletal muscles and skeleton are of use to each other. Of course, except maybe figuratively, the entirely artificial aesthetic arrangement demonstrates nothing of the sort. Rather, it displays, by its audacity, the exhibition's sadistic pride and delight in its technical prowess.
This audacious, animating installation of cadavers is reverse, perverse taxidermy. No conservationist impulse, however deranged, is operating here. The impulse is fundamentally sadistic, even cannibalistic. Not the skins, but instead the insides of human cadavers are meticulously prepared and exhibited for the entertainment (obviously not for education) of other humans. The hunter-taxidermist kills his animal, preserves its skin, eats its meat, and displays it stuffed (on the inside) and life-like (on the outside). But this exhibition is no proud, nature-loving hunter's lodge, bear prostrate on the floor, moose head mounted on the wall. Posted on the wall, the last words of the exhibition are: "The specimens in this exhibition have been treated with the dignity and respect they so richly deserve." The exhibition organizers have legally obtained voluntarily donated bodies from Dalian Medical University in Dalian, Liaoning, China, skinned their cadavers, stripped them of identity, preserved them and now serve them for our consumption, if not gustatory then visual. On display is human flesh as if it were bear or moose meat.
Body parts and individual limbs looked like stringy meat, chicken to me and beef to my friend. More remarkably, the body parts made spectators hungry. It was precisely around these cases (and around lunchtime) that I heard several exclamations from children and women: "I'm hungry. Can we eat after this?" None realized aloud the connection between the human flesh on display and their hunger, except my friend, who whispered naughtily, "I want to eat a human, just to see how it tastes, just to say that I've done it." The exhibition's awakening of our appetites is no accident. We are not cannibals. But we are shamelessly ravenous spectators, and we were unleashed and allowed, even encouraged by the exhibition, to devour. By far the busiest room of the exhibition was the reproductive system installation, where there were healthy and cancerous penises, vaginas and breasts. Spectators pushed, crouched in front and tip-toed near the back, in order to near the glass cases and squint, point, examine the human parts inside. However enticing the installations were, it did not taste good to look. The exhibition was disgusting, and, I suppose, that disgust was the cheap thrill.
After health education, the second mediating condition of this cannibalistic encounter is aesthetic installation. From the extraordinary to the prototypically American, the exhibition even comments on the art historical, installing specimens in the iconic positions of Rodin's Thinker, which predictably serves as the centerpiece of the nervous system display, and the Discobolus of Myron, which is installed in the final room, in praise of technology. The final room, like an overdue epiphany, explains plastination, the anatomical technique developed in the seventies by the German anatomist Gunther von Hagens, which prevents natural decay by replacing lipids and water with liquid silicon rubber and thus preserves bodies indefinitely. Plastination makes the exhibition possible, and, if its challenges to modern and classical sculpture are to be taken seriously as art, plastination presents powerful challenges to sculpture. First, different from carving, welding or modeling, plastination is a new, objective technique of processing. Second, rather than using rock materials, plastination relies on human materials, which, in many cases, closes the problematic gap between means and end. Third, plastination is not creative but preservative, which offers an alternate conception of art. Fourth, to compare the exhibition's Thinker with Rodin's, the plastinated sculpture actually thought in its lifetime whereas the bronze never did, never could have; in effect, plastinated sculpture is potentially no longer imitative art.
However, when von Hagens developed plastination, he was not thinking of the sculptural tradition. The self-mythologizing artist had loftier ambitions. Von Hagens imagines himself still to be a scientist and an artist, working in the Renaissance tradition of anatomy, and cites Leonardo da Vinci and Honoré Fragonard as predecessors. These scientists, however, were working for the humanistic advancement of scientific knowledge, and their anatomical drawings were records of their experiments, which only became works of art themselves in retrospect. By contrast, von Hagens is a showman who wears a trademark black fedora. Besides being the creator of plastination, von Hagens also first realized its exhibition value in 1995, opening the show Body Worlds in Tokyo, which went on to tour mostly Japan, Germany and Austria and most recently the United States.
Body Worlds and its successor show Body Worlds 2 have attracted more than 17 million visitors worldwide, according the exhibition's website. Von Hagens's show is the original, as he rightly claims, and Bodies: The Exhibition is one among many "copycat exhibitions." Although the explicit goal of the Body Worlds exhibitions is also health education, von Hagens's exhibitions differ because he himself is personally invested in their creation, promotion and appeal. He once stirred publicity for his work by administering and televising, despite police threats, the first public autopsy in nearly two hundred years to a sell-out crowd of five hundred at London's Atlantis Gallery in 2002, all for the sake of the "democratization of anatomy." Here, Von Hagens gloriously reenacted Rembrandt's "The Anatomy Lecture of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp" of 1632, managing to politicize, aestheticize, and sensationalize the gruesome means to the end of the human anatomical exhibition—dissection-—which within the Bodies exhibition is strategically downplayed by naturalizing artifice.
Von Hagens might even be compared to the infamous Der Metzgermeister (The Master Butcher), Armin Meiwes, who, used the Internet to locate a willing victim, whom he consumed, first eating the man's penis, in his home in Germany in 2001. I can see a connection between the proud human butcher, who smiled at his sentencing, and the exhibitionist von Hagens. In private or in public, illegally or despite the law, does not one cannibalistic meal legitimate another? Do they not cater to that common, sadistic appetite? Is health education, a sort of popular science, an adequate justification for the exhibition of the dead as an entertainment for the living?
// ANNMARIE PERL is a senior majoring in Art History and concentrating in Modern European History. She's most interested in the politics of art.