Author: Eds: T Christine Jespersen, Alicita Rodríguez and Joseph Starr
Publisher: McFarland, 2009
Price: £37.50 (paperback)
Isbn: 9780786436569

If you have been initiated by attending one of Gunther von Hagens’s exhibits of plastinated bodies, you may be interested in this thorough overview of what the cultural critics have to say. Lucia Tanassi states that her essay is neither an indictment nor an endorsement of von Hagens or his exhibit of “real human bodies.” But many of the contributors counter the inventor of the technique word-for-word. While von Hagens calls Body Worlds “event anatomy”, Ara Osterweil and David Baumflek refer to the plastinates as “extreme bodies”, and Elizabeth Simon Ruchti likens them to “lifesized action figures”.

Don’t look to this book for photo­graphs of the preserved corpses, because Body Worlds would not allow the editors to include any photos of whole-body plastinates. If, however, you already know about von Hagens’s method of removing the liquid from donated bodies, replacing it with a polymer, and hardening the results in lively, skinless, and often dissected poses, do look within. Not only will you find thoughts about the European anatomical art (Vesalius, for instance) that von Hagens pays overt homage to, you will find provocative parallels with the mummies of Guanajuato, Mexico; the digitised body of the US National Library of Medicine’s ‘Visible Man’; the auto-icon of British philosopher Jeremy Bentham; the tableaux of Dutch embalmer Frederik Ruysch; the preparations of French anatomist Honoré Fragonard; the hijacked remains of Irish giant Charles O’Brien; and even the amputated leg of American Civil War Major-General Daniel E Sickles.

While von Hagens blames Holly­wood for associating anatomy with horror and the emotional distress of dying, Lisa Nevarez explains how Dr von Hagens has become equated with Dr Frankenstein, and Peter M McIsaac tackles the German reception of Body Worlds in reference to von Hagens as heir to Nazi science and his exhibit as echoing German horror films.

Expect scholarly references to Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Donna Haraway and Michel Foucault, but also look forward to some new and original observ­ations. Christian DuComb notes that the plastinates are “frozen outside of time.” Uli Linke character­ises them as synthetically sanitised, dehistoricised, dehumanised, unemotional and apolitical. And Patricia Pierson calls Body Worlds the display of the posed, preserved, manipulated, and narrativised human form.

Natalia Lizama points out that plastinates incongrously embody both life and death, since the two should be mutually exclusive. She sees them as condemned to endlessly re-enact their athletic gestures and concludes that plastin­ates are “the past alive in the present”. Nevarez summarises that von Hagens’s plastinates are on the boundary between art and science, celebration and exploit­ation, detachment and disgust.

There are the usual attacks on the source of the bodies and whether Body Worlds is art or science, but much of the criticism revolves around the exhibition’s goal of democratising anatomy.

Joseph Starr objects to its billing as a comprehensive experience of anatomy, because he finds it exclusively visual. He questions whether the plastinates are “real human bodies”, since the liquids which comprise 70 per cent of the body have been replaced, and the skin – 18 per cent of an adult’s weight – is also largely removed.

The exhibit offers a look at the disease processes to which we are heir, which, as Rebecca Onion observes, remind us of our vulnerability, but scolds smokers and overeaters, and omits examples that do not reinforce a narrative of control on the scientific and individual levels.

Uli Linke finds fault with the female plastinates, whose bodies are almost all pathologised, and Stephen Johnson complains that natural deformities were limited to the embryos and fœtuses – which are all ‘children’ to von Hagens, as stressed by Christian DuComb.

Johnson reads Body Worlds within the sideshow grotesque tradition, but Linke locates it among museum exhibits that have taken a corporeal turn in general, anatomically and sexually. In their comparison of the art of the body since the 1960s, Osterweil and Baumflek discuss the disturbing 1980 performance piece ‘Blind Date’, by John Duncan, who purchased a female corpse in Mexico, videotaped himself performing a necrophiliac act with it, had a vasectomy, and played the audio portion to an audience. Interesting in light of the (undiscussed) fact that von Hagens has now posed two of his plastinates having sex…