Comfortable Out of Their Own Skin

[xiinfaniin]

 

 

By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

 

A man and woman, stripped of skin, are balanced in a balletic embrace, but their skulls and thoracic and abdominal cavities are open from behind and their spines are pulled backward, with organs and muscles attached.

 

A woman stands erect, also skinless, a slightly melancholy expression emerging from her facial musculature, her belly sliced vertically so we can see her liver and intestines, along with a 5-month-old fetus in her womb.

 

Another flayed body welcomes us into this new exhibition, “Body Worlds: Pulse” at Discovery Times Square, holding aloft, with pride, the complete coat of skin that has been removed from his body.

 

These are not models (or allusions to “The Silence of the Lambs”) but actual people who, since 1983, have donated their bodies for such preservation and display. More than 13,200 of the living made such promises; 1,254 of them are deceased, and some of them (with organs from other sources) appear among the 200 specimens displayed here.

 

You might assume that sliced and pulled-apart human cadavers, preserved in all the freshness of death by infusions of plastics and resin, no longer have the power to shock or amaze. After all, since the German anatomist Gunther von Hagens invented the process he calls plastination in 1977, then started the donation program with his Institute of Plastination, and finally began mounting specimens in “Body Worlds” exhibitions in 1995, some 36 million people have seen the shows in nearly two dozen countries in 11 different incarnations. (This one, “Pulse,” was designed for New York.) A competitor arose, Premier Exhibitions, and opened a series of successful exhibitions in the United States (including one that has been closed at the South Street Seaport since Hurricane Sandy.

 

There have been scandals — including criticism of displays of human corpses deemed insufficiently respectful — and serious doubts have been raised about the provenance of the Chinese cadavers used in the Premier shows. (Dr. von Hagens’s exhibitions specify that bodies are all personally donated, though individual organs can come from hospital anatomy programs; since 2007, all plastination has taken place in Germany.) There have also been sensations and showmanship: in 2002, in London, Dr. von Hagens sold tickets to an autopsy he performed, defying British law; and two years ago he announced that after his death (he said he has Parkinson’s disease), he too would be plastinated and in that form would welcome visitors to continuing shows.

 

So after all this, you might expect to feel less shocked by the evidence of death’s handiwork or by the sense that one distinction after another is being plastinated into oblivion — the boundaries between life and death, between skin and muscle, between private and public. And in some ways familiarity has bred a certain amount of contentment; we can see some of these samples now in science museums and react just as medical school students do after they become comfortable with what happens beneath our bodies’ decorative exteriors.

 

And there are times in during this exhibition when you even feel a deep appreciation. This show is organized like a textbook; you survey the body, system by system. You are actually seeing the forces of life on display in this dead matter, and those forces are extraordinary. Every major organ is shown in isolation and in context.

 

When you see all of the digestive organs of the body (actually of a particular body) on display almost as a compressed jigsaw puzzle — the way they fit together within our hollow chests and bellies; when you see the profusion of vessels that gather in the kidneys or around the small intestine, ensuring that the blood leaves behind its detritus for later expulsion; when you see the vagaries of joints and bones and brain — how can you be less than amazed?

 

Another powerful impression here is that some specimens (they can’t really be called objects) are diseased, and we see, at least in a vague, somewhat impressionistic way, just how different parts of our body look when they are malfunctioning. A pockmarked arthritic knee joint is near a healthy one; an infarct in the apex of the heart is seen in the web of white scar tissue and the thinning of the walls; and the blackened lungs of a heavy smoker look like they’ve been dragged along the floors of a coal mine.

 

It was with these signs of malfunction in this strange mechanism we inhabit that I started becoming queasy. These failings become reminders of the vulnerability of the complex systems that preserve life — systems nearly invisible to us in health, though they eclipse the rest of the world during illness.

 

And in some ways dissecting the whole and revealing its parts with such clarity lets us see just how tenuous that vitality is: the processes of life are revealed through an extravagantly processed death. The free-standing displays of blood vessels in the head or leg are both marvelous and unsettling: unsettling because we learn that they are created here by hardening those vessels with the preserving plastic and then dissolving the rest of the head or leg; marvelous because these intricate webs of blood seem to dramatize the power of the human pulse.

 

These sensations may also be a reason that the most difficult part of this exhibition is concerned with birth. There are cases displaying fetuses of different ages. Within eight weeks a trivial clump of cells already has differentiated organs. We follow this development nearly to birth, but realize along the way that we are not looking at diagrams or at a single organism developing, but at different fetuses, each of which died at a different age and a different time and place. The contrast between the incipient freshness of new life and the ruthless finality of preserved death is jarring.

 

The discomfort may be universal. Dr. von Hagens points out that these fetuses were originally preserved in formaldehyde in museum collections and morphological institutes. They are thus distanced from his enterprise. This approach may partly reflect a sensitivity about abortion and provenance. But I think it is also meant to prevent an instinctive human recoil at seeing our origins so profoundly undermined.

 

In all this I am describing what might be an anatomy exhibition. But that is only one aspect of the whole, and on its own it would not lure crowds. So we come to the show’s more extravagant sensations — the posing of entire bodies — and to its intellectual shape. And here I found myself resisting the artifice.

 

It is amazing to see the interiors of our bodies so finely articulated and displayed. But most of these bodies are given titles and posed as if in the midst of athletic activity or dance. A “Limber Gymnast,” for example, is meant to show the interactions of muscles as he balances.

 

But like 17th-century anatomical drawings doubling as allegories, these bodies are also posed to teach contemporary morality lessons, which tend to focus on health. The gymnast, we read, knows that “our lives are juggling acts.” Using his legs and an arm, he balances on three balls. The “Jumping Dancer” poses in front of hectic video cityscapes intended to demonstrate something about the effects of stress.

 

These figures are also meant to be startling, provoking. The back of the dancer is literally pulled down, hanging from his pelvis, showing his internal organs. And the gymnast holds aloft all the internal organs of his body as if putting them in balance. The exhibition is not a simple exploration of life and health; it also means to shock with its aestheticized grotesqueries.

 

And in the framework of contemporary health-related morality, who is the most shocking? “The Smoker.” He demonically holds a cigarette. Half his body is an image of skeletal death, with his organs barely staying in his rib cage; the musculature of his other half is slack, Satanically disturbing.

 

The way the exhibition mollifies those who might be overly dismayed at some bodily displays is to cloak everything with sweeping homilies about keeping healthy. I was prepared to accept some of this (we are, after all, seeing effects of illnesses), but lessons about the importance of exercise, the need to control stress and the importance of a balanced diet wore thin when compared with the uncanny evocations of life and death latent in these specimens.

 

“Death illuminates, clarifies, and crystallizes the meaning of our lives,” we read. And it does, but I also wanted the life to speak more for itself.

 

Follow Edward Rothstein on Twitter; twitter.com/EdRothstein.

 

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/10/arts/design/body-worlds-pulse-at-discovery-times-square.html?pagewanted=1&ref=arts&pagewanted=all&pagewanted=print

[xiinfaniin]

“And in the framework of contemporary health-related morality, who is the most shocking? ‘The Smoker.’ He demonically holds a cigarette.”

 

[Safferz]

I saw this exhibit when it was at the Ontario Science Centre in Toronto years ago, it was SO cool.

[Carafaat]

Its discusting and beyond any form of morality. Human bodies stuffed and displayed for admiration. This what fircoonis used to do.

[Safferz]

Carafaat;948471 wrote:

Its discusting and beyond any form of morality. Human bodies stuffed and displayed for admiration. This what fircoonis used to do.

lol calm down, these are people who donated their bodies to science. It's educational, not only do you learn about human anatomy and physiology, you can see the effects of diseases and harmful practices like smoking on the human body.