Body Worlds 2
Body Worlds 2
The Denver Museum of Nature and Science (www.dmns.org) has a show now called Body Worlds 2. These are human cadavers which have been “plastinated”: essentially, filleted in artsy ways and preserved in plastic. The filleting is to show underlying structure.. nerves, muscles, tendons, bones, organs, etc. There were a dozen or so full-sized bodies that had been skinned, filleted to some extent, then posed in interesting positions. Most of the examples were of males. Many of the exhibits (I don’t even know what to call them: people? bodies? cadavers?) included genitals. I’d never really considered much how testicls are attached, but I have a much better idea now than I did. There was one display of a pregnant woman who had been cut open to reveal the unborn child inside. This was in a separate wing: you could avoid seeing it if you wanted to, in the same way you can avoid seeing the pornography at an independent video rental store: you still know what’s being portrayed there (there’s a big sign “the wonders of reproduction” or something leading to it) but you can pretend you dont want to look at it. The full-sized bodies were around the outside, and depicted bones, then muscles, then nerves (these had the organs removed), then there were sections for the various organs. In the middle of the room, there were display cases showing lungs, hearts, livers, etc, in various states of disease such as lung cancer, cirrhosis of the liver, hardening of the arteries (here’s a good aorta, here’s a diseased one. The diseased one looked a lot like some iron pipe that was recently cut out of my house’s plumbing) I’ve never been so ambivalent about a museum show before. I have mixed feelings about the egyptian mummy exhibits, too, but for different reasons. When I hear of a newly discovered, previously undisturbed Egyptian tomb that has been robbed by college-degreed ghouls and put on traveling display, I think to myself “one more pharoah that isnt gonna make it to his immortality”. This was more subtle. The humans whose bodies are on display gave permission for their body to be used to teach others. They didn’t think that this would bestow immortality on them, but I’m not sure they were thinking of having their bodies chopped up in such a way as to resemble a surrealist painting (there was one guy, called “the drawer man” who resembled the Salvador Dali painting which has a human body converted into a chest of drawers) and displayed in a museum. When I described this to my friend Warren, he said something about dogs instinctively knowing to be uncomfortable in a place where dogs are being cut up in mean ways. It’s that level of discomfort that this exhibit elicits. In the middle ages, cutting up dead humans was considered blasphemy. I understand a little bit of the hormonal basis of this superstition. Go see this, it’s unique, but don’t eat right before you go in, and be prepared to have thoughts you can’t find any rational basis for.