I See Dead People

National Review Online, May 2, 2002

When the dead are art, then art is dead. Corpses belong on the battlefield, in the morgue or underground, but not in an art gallery. Images of dead bodies, paintings, drawings, even photographs, are a different matter, but that is death at one remove, extinction at a decent distance. At the Atlantis Gallery, a loft-like exhibition space in London's East End, there is no such discretion. There they have the real ex-McCoy: Genuine corpses and the bits and pieces that once belonged inside them, all on view for the price of £10 ($14 U.S.) a ticket (discounts for children!). This is a cadaver circus, the best exhibit of the ex to the west of Lenin's mausoleum, and, judging by the long line that snaked down Brick Lane, quite a lot more popular.

The gallery's new show, Body Worlds, is dedicated to the work of the "Plastinator," a fedora-wearing German doctor with the vaguely sinister name of Gunther von Hagens. Over the last 25 years grisly Gunther has been working with "plastination," his patented technique for preserving the dead. Basically, it involves the doctor saturating the deceased's tissue with special plastics while cackling madly in a castle somewhere in Transylvania (OK, I made up the last part). Results will vary depending on the resin used: A plastinated lung was soft to the touch, a squishy gray sponge for a bath time in Hell, but a thin cross-section from the chest cavity was hard and rather shiny, translucent, red and white, a little like prosciutto left out in the sun for slightly too long, and then, for some mysterious reason, laminated.

These small samples were only a foretaste, a mere snack for Hannibal Lecter before the exhibition's full-bodied main course. For the show's real novelty is that plastination allows entire corpses to be displayed in "upright, life-like poses". The process solidifies what it preserves, but before the tissue finally sets, it can be posed in interesting ways. It's a bit like molding a Barbie doll except that the ingredients include human as well as plastic. What's more, there is another advantage: "preserved muscles can take over supportive functions." In other words, when plastination is complete, von Hagens's "specimens" (that's what he calls them) can stand on what is left of their own two feet.

But there's a catch. The Plastinator's definition of a "life-like" pose is, well, not exactly mainstream. The specimens do not look like anybody you would ever, ever hope to meet. They have been "anatomically prepared." I'll say. Von Hagens is a man who is comfortable in other people's skin. This jolliest of ghouls (he seems always to be smiling) is a slicer and a chopper, a Silly Putty vampire who treats the dead like Play-Doh. When plastination's promoters claim that the process allows "entirely new forms of anatomical display" they are not kidding. Body Worlds is more Doctor Phibes than House of Wax and so before I go any further, can we agree that those remaining readers of a sensitive disposition should now abandon this article and do something more cheerful with the rest of their day?

Now that the wimps have gone, let's cut to the chase, for that is what von Hagens likes to do. By the time that he has finished with them, his "anatomically prepared whole bodies" are nothing of the sort. If there is one thing that these bodies are not, it is "whole." To start with, most have been skinned. The idea is to reveal what lies beneath. To emphasize this point one luckless individual is shown holding up the bundle that was once his skin. It is complete, all in one piece, right down to the limp glove-shaped flesh that must have once encased its owner's hands. The skin's former occupant, meanwhile, is reduced to a red-brown-white mass of sinew and bone, politely proffering his discarded epidermis as if it were a garment being passed to a coat-check girl. Other delights include the filleted Muscleman and a startled-looking fellow who has been bisected absolutely everywhere, a posthumous worse-than-Bobbit for all to see.

It is difficult to believe that these displays add much to scientific knowledge, or would even be particularly innovative in an anatomy lesson. We live in hypocritical times, however, and attempts are made to portray the show as serving some sort of educational purpose. These are the didactic dead, complete with surgeon-general moments: A blackened lung or two (those wicked smokers) and a wizened liver (those naughty drinkers). Von Hagens also likes to talk grandly about "the democratization of anatomy." Everyone has a right to peek.

And then there is that last defense of the intellectually indefensible, the claim that the exhibition is "art." Von Hagens himself is carefully ambiguous on this subject. At times he will say that there is nothing artistic about his specimens. Their poses are, he explains, merely a teaching device. But then his vanity begins to seep in. He concedes that he is, perhaps, "a skilled laborer in the field of art." Reference is made to creativity, Renaissance traditions and "aesthetic-instructive presentations." Even his fedora is more than a hat. Von Hagens muses that it "symbolizes… internalized individualism…born of the conviction that an unusual outward appearance fosters non-conformist thinking." A mini-Mengele? Maybe, but there is also a touch of Dieter from Saturday Night Live.

The clearest evidence of von Hagens's artistic pretensions can be seen in his most "aesthetically" displayed specimens. The Chess Player contemplates the board, his exposed brain a reminder that this is someone long past checkmate. Nearby, a pregnant woman reclines in a ghastly parody of a provocative pose, womb cut open to reveal the eight-month fetus within. The skeleton of The Runner is suspended in motion, tendon and sinew flowing out behind him in an impression of speed. Rearing Horse With Rider features the husk of a stallion mounted by the remains of his rider, a man with a brain in each hand, one human, and the other equine. Art? No, just a savage form of carney kitsch.

This sense of the freak show increases in the section devoted to the unborn. The smallest are tiny, just wisps of life in a jar. Others, deformed and misshapen, are deeply disturbing, none more so than a pair of Siamese twins, two awkwardly joined gray homunculi, discomfort still visible on their pinched, twisted faces, good value, I suppose, for £10 a ticket.

The dead, of course, will never discover what happens to the bodies they left behind. What they don't know won't hurt them, but will it hurt us? Mankind is an inquisitive species: It is part of our genius. The exhibition was interesting, if morbid. And I am not alone in thinking so. Over eight million people have seen this show in different venues across Europe, but that large a number somehow makes the phenomenon more troubling. Societies that lose all sense of reverence for the dead will lose it also for the living. There is a small memorial slab (plastic, naturally) "to the body donors" at the entrance to the exhibition, but the show's cheerful, inquisitive visitors were clearly there for recreation, not a requiem.

And there's cash in these carcasses. Body Worlds is big business. According to the London Sunday Times, since its European debut the show has netted around $70 million. There are souvenirs for sale, no, not what you might think, but DVDs, mouse pads, posters, even a tee shirt featuring a plastinated rabbit, a Thumper beyond Uncle Walt's worst nightmares.

Plastination makes this all possible, and it provides the essential alibi. It sanitizes death. Von Hagens describes his "beautiful specimens" as "a sensuous experience…frozen at a point between death and decay." Well, what is the case is that the very strangeness of Von Hagens's grotesque tableaux eliminates almost any empathy that the spectator might feel. These dismembered and rearranged beings lose their humanity at the same time as they expose it. They are alien, almost literally so: Without much in the way of faces, their heads bear more than a passing resemblance to the invaders in Mars Attacks. There are some occasional traces of a lost exterior, a scrap of hair, perhaps, or a yellowing fingernail, but, for the most part (the fetuses are a striking exception), Von Hagens transforms "his" people into creatures of such peculiarity that it is easy to forget what they came from. That this is necessary for the show's visitors (and it seems to be) should come as a relief: It would suggest that we have not yet completed our descent into cultural barbarism.

Can the same be said for Von Hagens himself? I'm no psychiatrist, but he goes about his business with a gusto that is not altogether wholesome. To the extent that his work involves consenting cadavers (donor forms are available at the exhibition), it is difficult to object other than on the grounds of good taste. No one, after all, was made to go to the show, or to be in the show. Or were they? There are troubling stories (mostly denied), reports of bodies being bought, of a consignment of corpses shipped in from Siberia. To the extent that these tales are true, they are deeply disquieting (the fact that the Plastinator now works mainly out of China is not reassuring), but even if the rumors are false, their mere existence reveals unease about this exhibition that it will take more than resin to resolve.

As for me, I won't be eating prosciutto for a while.