I was in London a few weeks ago, and I was very impressed with the Tate Modern, London’s newest major art destination. But that was before I saw Body Worlds, an exhibit of plastinated dead humans currently showing in a converted brewery in London’s East End.
The abstract expressionists I had seen nary an hour earlier were beginning to feel rather flat by the time I saw the man with his skin draped over his arm like a wetsuit. And Damien Hirst’s cut-up cow proved no match for the man sliced up like so much mortadella.
To quote AbFab:
“It’s a dead body, Pats.”
“Patsy: Yeah, but is it art, Eddie?”
It’s a valid question. The exhibit is careful not to bill itself as an art show but as a scientific exploration of the human body. The first plastinated people encountered are indeed displayed in scientifically credible ways—smokers lungs are interspersed with metastasized organs and brains with strokes (“Ooh, that’s what it looks like inside Margaret Thatcher’s head,” I found myself thinking before I perished the thought.) Standard high school science lab fodder.
As the exhibit progresses, though, variations on a theme emerge: A man sitting down to play chess has his spinal cord is exposed; a man riding a plastinated horse holds his own brain in his right hand, the horse’s brain in his left; A pregnant female nude reclines, fetus exposed, striking a pose; and another man’s organs are stacked vertically in a manner reminiscent of Francis Bacon’s Triptychs.
In these cases it is clear to me that Professor Gunther von Hagen, the inventor of the preservation process and the creator of this exhibit, is making artistic claims, even if he is not claiming to be an artist. And here we can ask, how good is the art?
The British, whose modern artists have a fine infatuation with death, decay and the macabre, are flocking in droves to see it. But the reality of the exhibit is a lot more palatable than it sounds.
First off, the plastinated people are anonymous; their facial skin is stripped away, and underneath, it turns out, we all look rather similar. In this respect the exhibit is somewhat tamer than the Warhol images of accidents and suicides on show at the Tate, where the identities of the dead are clearly visible. If it is voyeurism, Body Worlds’ is a more innocent variety, akin to that of a documentary where the heads of the participants have been blurred out.
And for me, at least, Body Worlds fulfilled its role as art by forcing me to re-view the world around me; I began observing the live human visitors as much as the dead exhibits. That cute woman in the halter-top leaning over the chess player, how many chemical processes is she from being the art? How beautiful would she be if stripped down to her organs? Beauty seemed not so much skin deep as just skin, at times, but then near the end of the exhibit there was a complete set of human blood vessels suspended in clear liquid, and that too was undeniably beautiful, if not exactly in the you’re-cute-let’s-have-a-drink sense.
The impression that I am a walking collection of body parts—all of which have ample opportunities to fail—became rather inescapable. It’s a novel way to identify with the art, and it sets this exhibit apart from its freak show cousins. Circus sideshows endeavor to accentuate the strange and the abnormal for the sake of a cheap thrill—we try not to get too close, and are encouraged to recoil uneasily, guilty for feeling lucky. In Body Worlds, on the other hand, we are encouraged to take long, close, well-lit if not lingering looks, and the diseases on show are for the main part a checklist of all the banal ways we’ll die.
How to outdo this? Dead people have long been on show—witness the mummy Queens in the British Museum and Westminster Hall—but never, I think, has exhibitionism been taken so literally. I predict celebrity plastinations. Might Damien Hirst decide that the only thing more precocious than living for his art is to become it? Maybe plastination might not be Hirst’s preferred medium for conveying the transience of identity. All this recent toying with rotting animal carcasses will seem so bourgeois by the time he throws himself to the lions—literally, this time. Starving artists, anyone?
