Anatomy as Art ...

[Dave Monroe]

Mary Ore, "Anatomy as Art, Unsettling but Drawing
Crowds," NY Times, Tuesday, July 9th, 2002 ...

LONDON — Forget the queen's tiaras. On display through
Sept. 29 in the Atlantis Gallery here is "Body
Worlds," an exhibition unlike any other: it consists
of human bodies that have been flayed, injected with a
siliconelike substance and posed running, swimming,
fencing and horseback riding. In spite of or because
of its morbid pretext, the show has been a hit here,
with more than 160,000 visitors in its first three
months. 

It has also drawn its share of controversy. In March,
a man, enraged after watching a father guide his
5-year-old daughter around the exhibition, pummeled
one of the specimens with a hammer and caused $45,000
in damage. Five years ago, protesters tried (and
failed) to ban the show in Austria. And German
anatomists have sought to expel Prof. Gunther von
Hagens, their countryman and the brain behind "Body
Worlds," from their profession.

In the exhibition, Mr. von Hagens uses a process
called plastination, which he invented in 1977 for
medical training and research. The labor-intensive
process (it costs about $1,500 and requires more than
1,000 hours to prepare each body) involves replacing
body fluids and fats with plastic polymers, which,
unlike formaldehyde, are dry and odorless. The process
is said to preserve organs in a rigid state for an
estimated 1,000 years. 

In his mid-50's, Mr. von Hagens is scientific director
at the Institute for Plastination in Heidelberg,
Germany, which he founded. He has a cadaverous pallor,
a broad smile and an Old World formality, and he is
rarely seen without his signature fashion accessory, a
broad-rimmed hat not dissimilar to the one worn by Dr.
Tulp in Rembrandt's great painting of the anatomy
lesson. 

Like Dr. Tulp, who did his dissecting in one of the
autopsy theaters popular in 17th-century Europe, Mr.
von Hagens is bringing anatomy from the exclusive
realm of the medical establishment into the public
eye. He sees himself in the tradition of the
pioneering Renaissance anatomists like Leonardo da
Vinci, who dissected human bodies to draw the
muscular, vascular and skeletal systems. By
solidifying soft tissue, Mr. von Hagens has taken the
skeleton to its natural conclusion, incorporating
muscle tissue, fat and organs. 

The effect is startling: a running skeleton, muscles
splayed, stride exaggerated, illustrates locomotion; a
chess player leans over a chess board, exposing his
finely dissected central and peripheral nervous
systems; a man holds up his skin like a jacket,
calling to mind the skin suit being sewn by the serial
killer in "The Silence of the Lambs." An incision in a
pregnant woman reveals a small fetus and the
tar-blackened lungs of a smoker. The identities of the
bodies, all left by bequest, have been stripped, with
the exception of a man with an image of a woman
tattooed on his bicep. He specified on his donor form
that he wanted it preserved.

Arranged around the full-body plastinates are long
glass cases that display a series of body parts. In
one, for instance, there's a healthy aorta, which
looks like a strip of bacon; beside it are others that
show hardening of the arteries, aneurysms and
intravascular prostheses. Detailed captions throughout
include health facts: "Goiters are usually caused by
too little iodine in the diet"; "The liver will begin
to recover from this diseased condition with more
temperate use of alcohol."

The exhibition has attracted 8.5 million visitors
since it began touring in Japan in 1996 (it has also
toured Austria, Switzerland and Belgium), and more
than 6,000 people have signed body donor forms,
available near the exit. The gift store sells watches
with faces showing the skin-holding man and mouse pads
decorated with the chess player plastinate leaning
over a computer.

"I want to re-democratize anatomy," said Mr. von
Hagens, whose first show in Japan introduced his early
plastinates, which had stiff, doll-like poses that
horrified some viewers. The reactions prompted him to
visit museums in Italy, where human bodies dehydrated,
injected with metal alloys and arranged in more
lifelike poses have survived some 200 years. He has
also studied the work of Honor Fragonard (cousin of
the rococo painter Jean Honoré Fragonard), whose
18th-century specimens at the national veterinary
school in Alfort, France, include a dramatic horse and
rider. Mr. von Hagens used what he learned to improve
his techniques.

"When I started doing this," he said of his
refinements, "I didn't get complaints from the
laypeople, the targets of my work, anymore, but I got
another criticism. A church in Germany said I was
degrading the human body to pieces of art."

He said that he uses glass eyes and puttylike lips to
convey expressions of surprise or pleasure, like that
on an organ donor who smiles and gamely holds out a
cancerous kidney in one hand and a gallbladder with
goiters in another. Though the humor can hit a raw
nerve with some spectators, it appears to ease the
apprehensions of most.

Mr. von Hagens said his mission was twofold: to
educate the public for health purposes ("If you see
healthy and diseased organs, you can decide if you
really want to smoke") and to counter the cultural
denial of death, which he blames for the modern
epidemic of stress. A more holistic view of life
includes facing up to our mortality, he said.

"Everything with the body is fixed by culture," Mr.
von Hagens said. "If showing anatomy is not done for
some time, it becomes taboo to see it. I'm accused of
being Frankenstein or Mengele, but to readjust our
picture of the human body, we need controversy. I'm
the centerpiece, the target of the aggression in
this."

There are now plastination centers in 34 countries and
plans for a plastination museum in Heidelberg. Though
Mr. von Hagens gladly exploits the controversy
surrounding "Body Worlds," he is a professor at heart,
he said. He plans to take the tour to the United
States, but "I must be careful to make sure the
spectacle doesn't overwhelm the educational value," he
said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/09/arts/09ARTS.html?todaysheadlines

And see as well ...

http://www.koerperwelten.com/index2.htm

http://www.koerperwelten.de/index2.htm

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