Exhibit Essay Review: "Faux Reality" Show? The Body Worlds Phenomenon and Its Reinvention of Anatomical Spectacle
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUPIt is safe, arms-length, faux reality, very much like the plastinated corpses. . . . We call it art or "history"—anything but reality.
Thomas Lynch, essayist, poet, and funeral director1
The human body and its history have become "fashionable to the point of ubiquity."2 Undoubtedly, the boldest example of this "body trend" is the oeuvre of Gunther von Hagens, who is neither a historian nor a scholar of the humanities but a medical doctor-cum-artist. Born in 1945 near Posen as Gunther Liebchen, [End Page 848] von Hagens (the name originates from his first wife) began medical studies in 1965 at Friedrich-Schiller University in Jena; a decade later he obtained his license after additional medical training at the University of Lübeck. Using an anatomical preservation process that he patented in 1977 while at the University of Heidelberg, he has turned the human body into a form of medical technology/material culture and/or art. The process is referred to as "plastination," with the resultant silicone-impregnated preserved specimens called "plastinates." Von Hagens has laboratory operations located in Kyrgyzstan and Dalian, China, but his Institute for Plastination (an organization apparently at arm's length from his exhibition business) is based in Heidelberg.3
Earlier representations of the human body produced in print, wax, stone, or papier maché were "only" artistic depictions, no matter how lifelike. Precursors to von Hagens's more realistic work, perhaps, are the prepared tableaux and "wet" specimens of Frederik Ruysch (1638–1731) and his student Bernhard Siegfried Albinus (1697–1770): these Dutch anatomists posed fetal skeletons and severed babies' limbs to create, in the words of Rosamond Purcell and Stephen Jay Gould, an "alien aesthetic."4 Similarly, the specimens of Honoré Fragonard (1732–99) included an anatomized rider with horse, and a dancing baby.5 But the preparations of von Hagens fuse real flesh and bones, art, and high technology into a hybrid form that in many ways transcends the work of his predecessors. His labors have produced a seemingly unending stream of fully anatomized, posed "action" figures, including a chess player, a basketball player, a pole vaulter, a gymnast, an archer, a hurdler, a figure skater, and a teacher.6 [End Page 849]
Von Hagens's traveling exhibit, entitled Body Worlds or Körperwelten,7 is probably the first "blockbuster" exhibition that the non-art-museum world is likely to encounter. Since its opening in 1995, twenty million people in Asia, continental Europe, the United Kingdom, and, most recently, the United States and Canada have paid admission fees to view this biomedical spectacle. Yet von Hagens's declarations that his specimens are science and not art have confounded some commentators as well as triggering a flood of criticism that is both engaged and emotional; so, too, have his comments that he wishes to breach societal taboos through his works and their exhibition. He certainly achieved this last goal when he recently extended his activities in London by augmenting his displays with a public dissection performed and televised in the boiler house of London's Old Truman Brewery. Such an act, announced his promotional literature (which also featured the frontispiece from Vesalius's De Fabrica), was "last performed" in 1830; it gave rise to another flood of popular and professional commentary (and lots of publicity). The descriptors, epithets, and sobriquets that have been applied to von Hagens by the public and popular media—such as "Frankenstein," "Josef Mengele," and the "Disney of Death"—indicate their unease.8 Body Worlds has also attracted the attention and ire of many others, including professional medical organizations that take exception to the public display of, and apparent disrespect for, human remains. In short, von Hagens has brought cadavers from behind closed stainless steel doors and put...
