Body Worlds 3 at Science World: Does Art Belong in a Science Museum?
By Richard Eriksson on September 27, 2006 - 7:24pm
[Cross-posted from my personal weblog.]
A couple of weeks ago, along with Darren and Heather, I went to see Body Worlds 3 at Science World. The exhibition shows human bodies, stripped of their skin, and plastinated by Gunther von Hagens and set in positions, such as a male doing a handstand with a skateboard, or a female archer extending her bow. The tour very stereotypically ends with a Body Worlds gift shop. But at least there was no gift shop annex to the gift shop.) The exhibition's Wikipedia page and The Guardian have photos, but they don't do it justice, as there are slices and cross-sections and individual plastinated innards in the show as well.
Body Worlds did not seem like something kids would enjoy a whole lot—there were maybe one or two kids there on a lazy Friday afternoon, one disinterested girl with a knowledgeable adult explaining to her the functions of the various parts shown. The exhibits themselves were not only disturbing (the last set of 'parts', which I won't spoil, even rose some ethical questions for at least one of my co-attendees), but designed to be disturbing. Science World, if anything, exists as a venue for making science fun. Body Worlds 3 has great shock value: it's what we look like not only inside but dead, doing things we would if we werre alive.
The exhibition there raised, for me, a couple of questions but not so much about the human body. Was it appropriate to have a table where one could get more information on pledging their body after death to plastination? Does art, something that disturbs or provokes, belong in a museum of science, generally considered something that educates and enlightens? Was it art, science, neither or both? Or, as I mundanely wondered aloud at the beginning: was the ticket price something I could claim on my taxes as an cost of doing business?
Richard, I really appreciated your post, and as you will see, it rose up a number of responses in me:
I personally cannot even look at the photographs of the BodyWorld exhibit without feeling a shudder up my spine. I do not consider myself a squeamish guy, but this IMHO goes over the line from education and into the realm of spectacle, or freak show.
If I were still in art school, and needed to study anatomy for drawing, or of I were a medical student or a bio-medical illustrator, I would fimd this exhibit to be an absolute godsend of useful models and reference material. I think I would snap a thousand digital photos and fill my sketchbook... There is indeed a place for art in Science World, as the two realms can overlap each other in beautiful and creative ways. This kind of study of the human body has gone on since Leonardo, and represents the merging of art and science. In fact, the International Jouranal of Art, Science and Technology is titled "Leonardo".
However, on a personal level, I cannot watch an animal in great physical pain, much less see them die, and this feels like what I am looking at, albeit after the fact, and in a very undignified way... Plastination (plastic pertification, I think) seems to have given us license to consider these cadavers like full-size action figures, and this, to me, seems to trivialize human life.
It's weird: 15 or 16 years ago, an Emily Carr student put a dead cat that was found at the roadside into a glass case as part of a graduation art exhibition, and it caused a lot of controversy. I had a hard time looking at the dead, slightly rotten cat. It was fascinating and disgusting, but mostly the latter. Perhaps if the cat had given it's consent, been infused with synthetic materials, and placed in a whimsical pose (like catching a little petrified mouse), that student might have been called a pioneer.
Anyway, a dead body is still a dead body.
E. John Love
"Polluting the Web since 1997"
Blog: http://ejohnlove.blogspot.com
Site: http://www.ejohnlove.com