Ewww. That’s A Head Cut In Half | Another lucky donor gets his 15 minutes of fleshless fame at Body Worlds.
Step back all the way a second, staring at the skeletons covered in veins and muscle, posed playing zombie football or lounging late in pregnancy, and I think you can see where this whole thing is going: Old-fashioned freakshow. Hear me.
Of all the major criticisms of Body Worlds (on display until October 13 at Telus World of Science)—sacrilegious, questionable educational value, too gross—the one I can just barely feel cultivating in the background is “not extreme enough.”
“Do they at least have a couple of them having sex?” one friend asked over reggae records. No. Not in this batch, anyway—no boning bones amid the chess player, the smoker with tarred lungs, the thinly-sliced fat people on light tables, creating an effect somewhere between intricate art and deli section.
Actually, it’s sexless in more ways than one. With just a few memorable exceptions, women are very noticeably underplayed in these Christian-terrifying dioramas. It’s almost entirely men—white ones. You can tell by their pasty lips, noses and eyebrows, left on like Gumby’s face, almost cartoonish. Can you anthropomorphize a human? Body Worlds has figured out a way.
The display, understandably enough, borders on an evolving self-obsession. Not just of body, but of the place Body Worlds itself occupies in our heads. We are pushed gently, McReminded of the 25 million already served by the organization. How more of us, polled afterwards, would also like to be lab specimens, the luckiest ones displayed in public. Over and over, the parameters of discussion are lovingly laid down at the ol’ planetarium: that life is both totally, spiritually sacred, yet also overvalued in western society’s shivering fear of death. Look at what Leonardo da Vinci’s graveyard treasure hunts brought us in terms of both art and science, we’re validly reminded. Why, in the Middle Ages, autopsies were done in public so everyone could see!
That’s all well and good academically, but then you’re standing there facing the jazz-hands cadaver, face peeled back under a silly hat, wondering if this German body-fixation isn’t opening a door that maybe should have opaque windows. That the mutilation is the star; not, as they stress, the miracle of evolution. Can you actually walk through the Hall of Embryos without being at least a bit freaked out, and seriously, are the curators actually arguing that there isn’t at least a little carnival appeal at work? That feeling weird is fun? And that, taken to its logical conclusion, wouldn’t it be completely fucking cool if a bunch of these naked, skinned humans were posed fighting a giant bear skeleton? Or used as building blocks in some H.R. Giger mountain-of-flesh nightmare?
Look up at the former journalist riding his horse, both beings exploded outward schematically, fractally, and tell me I’m being disrespectful by wanting a little more action here. The dude. Is holding. His own brain. Who decides that?
I’m only playing devil’s advocate, of course—I utterly love this stuff, and it’s worth every penny. For the blood birds alone, man: plastinated red vein ducks shooting skyward into the light. They’re simply beautiful. Also, I must say I’ve never stared at anuses this long or this intently—like my scat fixation needed this. We are, each of us, completely gross. Gumby faces or no.
In short, as art, Body Worlds is brilliantly perfect. As science... well, they do make an argument. Over and over. But as a freakshow it’s unparalleled. The thinly-sliced man with the Roman centurion arm tattoo, the arthritic knee and table dinks. Like you, I’ll be talking about it for years to come.
