Controversial Bodies: Thoughts on the Public Display of Plastinated Corpses

12. Craft and Narrative in Body Worlds: An Aesthetic Consideration

115 chapter twelve Craft and Narrative in Body Worlds An Aesthetic Consideration neil A. ward, mfa Dr. von Hagens has not asked us to evaluate him as an artist. In fact, he has not asked us to evaluate him on any terms. Like Dr. Kevorkian, he seems offended by any inference that he may be courting our, or anyone’s, approval. Instead, he poses himself as a reality in the landscape that we must deal with, not pass judgment upon. He seems rather like a refugee from an Eastern Bloc state who cannot understand why democratic institutions dedicated to personal freedom are so determined to hamstring themselves—Ayn Rand, reborn and redux. He has outrun most of the allegations of his having neglected the legal details of body donors’ “informed consent.” Still, the idea of establishing a registry of donors—who would approach a pregnant women with an aneurysm about plastinating her and her fetus’s bodies in the event of complications?—defines insouciance beyond the common limits, even while it allows him to sneer at the hamfisted protocols of competing plastinators, the subpoenas of various countries’ attorneys general, and the hand-wringing of some bioethicists . This atmosphere of taunt seems to be daring us to evaluate him. The Body Worlds exhibit and other displays of plastinated bodies invite evaluation in aesthetic terms, beyond a more narrowly defined legal or moral framework. Aesthetics is ethics—concerned with decisions based on value judgments. An aesthetic critique is a crucial element of the bioethical response to von Hagens and his work. 116 neil A. ward Body Worlds: Is it Duchamp’s Urinal? In what sense should we understand Body Worlds as a work of art? For most people, including me, it is conceptual art. But conceptual art itself is the subject of definitional ambiguities. “In conceptual art,” writes Sol LeWitt, “the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.”1 Conceptual art, in LeWitt’s sense, cuts off the idea of “art” from its roots in “craft,” or technique. The usual assumption is that mastery of a craft liberates deeper visions or insights than could emerge lacking the rigor of such a mastery. Francisco Goya (for example) might neither have been able to record, nor to experience, the visions of his Desastres de la Guerra etchings of the Peninsular War but for his rigorous mastery and application of the aquatint process; the hand guides the eye. Conceptual art says, Not necessarily. The artist—the most authentic artist—bypasses the mere hand, generally shouting “look, Ma!” while doing so. The presumption of conceptual art is that the work will insult or outrage folks, or possibly just bewilder them, in a novel or interesting way and touch off some broader concatenation. Fountain, by Marcel Duchamp (1917), defines the genre. This work consisted of a mass-produced urinal, which the artist—known then as a pioneering cubist—purchased from its manufacturer,signed “R. Mutt,” inverted, and mounted at an exhibition in New York. I say “consisted” because Fountain is no longer extant; the gallery seems to have thrown it away afterward. Some doubt whether it was actually ever publicly viewed. Nonetheless, it was photographed, and several artists created facsimiles in porcelain (one is now in London’s Tate Modern museum), and the critical buzz has persisted to the present. A poll of “500 leading art critics” cited by the BBC in 2004 named Fountain the “most influential” piece of modern art ever, just ahead of Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon. Craft and Narrative in Body Worlds 117 The goal of creating and displaying such a piece is to release a narrative. This idea has not gotten old as fast as one might have supposed. Generations of artists since Duchamp have refined and expanded the genre. Von Hagens clearly belongs in this group, even though his work does not have the perfunctory execution that LeWitt identified as a stipulation. In that, von Hagens is not alone. Stravinsky labored at Le Sacre du Printemps, Beckett at En Attendant Godot, and Buñuel at his L’Âge d’Or, but all these works nonetheless caused the kind of bewilderment or riots characterizing true conceptual art. Similar...