CURIOSITY WITHOUT WONDER, VOYEURISM WITHOUT TRANSGRESSION:
THE BODY WORLDS EXHIBITION
He whose Gates are
open'd in those Regions of the Body
Can from those Gates view all these wondrous Imaginations.
Can from those Gates view all these wondrous Imaginations.
-
William Blake
Art criticism is not for me as a rule. I lack the knowledge.
However I am interested in the intersections between art and other things, such
as science and politics and activism. And I do enjoy things that make me feel
uneasy, if it is for the right reasons.
This was all the wrong reasons.
The Body Worlds exhibition is famous and has travelled the
world. It consists of several real human
bodies which have been donated by their previous owners, and which have
undergone a process of plastiination. Doctors have preserved and sterilised
them so that their inner workings are in full and detailed view. You can see
one in a swimming pose, cut lengthwise in half, so that some organs are on one
side and some on the other. Another is
the body of an elderly man, showing how his body parts have weakened and
slackened over time. There are also on display many real body parts such as
bones, organs and systems displayed in order to show the processes of disease
and decay. An example which intrigued the crowds was the cross section of a
blackened and cancerous lung.
All of this sounds somewhat confronting and this is my
point. It’s not. Not at all. The exhibition was held at a hotel, and it was
crowded. There was a wait list to get in. There were many families and children.
It was a much more varied crowd than you would get at an exhibition at an art
gallery, a ‘proper’ art exhibition.
Everyone was intrigued and thoughtful. People read the information and
discussed it among themselves. Children asked questions. Nobody was
disrespectful or rude. The plastinated
bodies were vivid with colour, which was slightly ironic. They were posed in
glass cases where you could move right around them, to be drawn in by the
details of tendon and nerve and the elaborate plait of muscle. Around the walls and in other display cases,
were videos and posters about health and disease. Adjacent to the displays of
brains, there was a well-produced film about dementia. A large wall poster
illustrated the dangers of sugar in the diet. The message was clear; this was
an exhortation to health and physical wellbeing.. This was made more obvious by
the fact that the exhibition was sponsored by a life insurance company. And -
at the end we were invited to drop a token into a container to symbolise a pledge
to a particular lifestyle change such as cutting down on alcohol or exercising
more.
I didn’t like it at all. I left early. I did not want to
drop my token into a container and make a pledge. I did not do it.
The new friend I was with asked if I was a bit squeamish.
Actually, I thought at the time, I am not squeamish enough. I could not fathom
my discomfort.
Now I can, a bit.
Here are some analogous exhibitions, in that they are
populist works that straddle art and science. As examples they may generate
more heat than light, but that is my intent.
The first ever neonatal unit was at Coney Island, and it was
essentially a freakshow. Tiny premature babies were displayed for the public to
gaze at and wonder. The doctor who ran this, invented the incubator. He would
hear of a preemie baby, and take his big black car and go and get it. He
employed only the strictest of standards of hygiene and only the strictest of
nurses, whose moral behaviour was monitored. It was a seriously innovative business,
and the babies survived and thrived from a state of prematurity that has not
really been surpassed. It was also, as I said, a freakshow. The public got to
look at the tiny little hands and marvel and learn. In its day it was considered
slightly tasteless, as freakshows are of course, and it would never happen now.
But this was how the first ever neonatal unit funded itself in the land of the
free. In the few accounts I have read about it, the public were invited not to
participate or interact or study, but frankly, to gawk. To wonder.
Above is a link to one of many fairly thoughtful articles
about the Anatomical Venus. She is an exquisite example of eighteenth century aestheticized
science. This is from a time when people
were fascinated by anatomy and artists captured the wary eroticism of it with
paintings of old male doctors spending too much time on their own with young
female cadavers. Its piquancy comes from what I call High Transgression. It is
not just being naughty. Anyone can break laws and norms unthinkingly and
selfishly. The purpose here is lofty and
serous and knowing. And yet it is as dodgy as fuck and you just know that
intuitively. It is in the space of
tension between lofty scientific endeavour and Baudelaisian smut that High
Transgression flourishes.
This transgressive space is necessarily difficult, but even
more intuitively so when it comes to the body. The Body Worlds exhibition has
been criticised by indigenous people and I can see why. It is not that it is
disrespectful exactly. Its fault is that
it simply makes no account of what we know to be true – that the body is the
site of the sacred and the profane all at once. Things that are inside the body
should stay inside the body. Body fluids particularly are both sacred and
profane once they leave the body; they are unclean and magical and curative and
just plain dangerous. Things that are outside the body should be dealt with
carefully before they go inside the body. We must not eat unclean food or take
body fluids inside us once they have left someone’s insides.
At Body Worlds, the bodies are beautiful, sanitised and
somehow unreal. In the past, when body parts have been preserved, there has been
the incipient threat of decay. Kick the jar over or make the solution too weak
and nature takes its course. Plastination not only preserves, it perfects and
perpetuates. Thus we are distanced from the real human bodies on display. We
are voyeurs, we look and become curious and then we get to consider our health
and our life styles and the take home message is something as specious as ‘Well
I saw that black lung and I think I will quit smoking’. A message I can receive
passively many times a day if I smoked. We
are never invited to wonder or to become passionate or shocked. Despite all the
dire health warnings, we are never invited to see our bodies as the stinking,
appalling, wonderful, ridiculous , exquisite, sensuous, dignified, changeable
things they might be.
Your thoughts on the Body Worlds exhibition is absolutely brilliant. It expresses precisely my own distaste, although I don’t think I could have pinpointed it so well. I too find it interesting that the spiritual enormity of what’s on display is reduced to health messages, as if these were simply a 3D version of the icky pics on cigarette packs. It is difficult to imagine the consent process for this sort of PT Barnum display … there was once a rumour that the corpses used were of executed Chinese prisoners, of which there is a plentiful supply … but who knows.
ReplyDeleteAs regards female 18th century anatomical models – I hadn’t seen these photos before, but I have to confess I find this scientific aestheticism terribly seductive – the beautiful finesse of the construction matches the beautiful finesse of the female model. Sex and death, the perfect couple. And how could the deathly personage be other than a beautiful (and intrinsically passive and sexually receptive) woman? Those youthful male med students (and they would have all been male in those days) would have found it disturbingly homo-erotic to root around in their own insides: they are the active delvers, after all; the woman must be she who is passively delved into.
There’s a nineteenth-century equivalent in the story of Resusci Annie, a doll supposedly based on the death mask of a Parisienne suicide (needless to say, a young and lovely woman) and used ever since for CPR practice
https://www.pri.org/stories/2013-10-21/heres-story-behind-most-kissed-face-world
Well, who would want to practice CPR on an old and ugly man? Would you? Sex and death …
Terrific blog. Thank you.
Thanks for posting. Our course attended an exhibition in Manchester during the second year of our Podiatric Medicine degree. We were mostly interested in the lower limbs and spine (obviously), but I too was struck by the freak show aspects of the show. However, the information that we picked up from the exhibition was worth far more than the entry fee, so if that's what it takes to fund learning then I approve. Also thanks for the comment by unknown. I didn't know the story behind Resusci Annie despite having kissed her regularly every year :-)
ReplyDeleteRegards, Chris.