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Underground > Art, Fashion & Design >

Corpses! Coming soon!

The Return Of Rothkoid

21:49 / 12.03.02

I know it's been linked before - I can't find it - but the Body Worlds exhibit using preserved corpses is opening at the Atlantis gallery in about ten days. However, it's being examined to see if it contravenes the Anatomy Act.

What's the thoughts - will the show go on, or get banned? I'm quite tempted to check it out, meself...

19:54 / 13.03.02

my predicition: um, a lot of initial hoo-hah, but it will die down and the show will go on. i saw a fairly long piece about this on tv quite a while back and i feel quite intrigued. would seem to offer a different perspective on death, which could be helpful to a lot of us.

14:16 / 14.03.02

so it's taken this long for the show to make it. Wish I lived closer.

I don't think it'll get too much more hype than anything else since you got to want to go if you're going to see it and all of the "specimens" were lawful given over by right of the donors. So no hard feelings...no one's being dishonored here.

06:09 / 15.03.02

the front page of this week's 'east london advertiser' (the local paper for the gallery) has a huge headline about how revolting the exhibition is. apparently 'no east ender will want to go and see it' (the east end's obsession with the violent kray twins seems to have been overlooked by these delicate blooms), and angry locals will be storming the place with flaming torches when it opens.

oh, and the paper is so horrified it's published as many photographs as it can squeeze in.

11:22 / 15.03.02

Anyone see the accompanying documentary on channel four? Quite an interesting history of the anatomist and its link with spectacle and showmanship. Concluding part next week, which I suspect will cover Burke & Hare, the Anatomy Act 1984 and hopefully a little more about Von Hagens, who up to now has only seemed to have had superficial write-ups about him.

[ 21-03-2002: Message edited by: Fra Dolcino ]

05:36 / 21.03.02

Well its passed the law:

BBC News

16:13 / 22.03.02

And it's open:

BBC news

It's fine by me - although criticising this show is really flogging a dead horse. (sorry)

06:41 / 27.03.02

did i say hoo-ha? people are attacking the exhibits. wonderful to note that only in england has there been this reaction.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/entertainment/arts/newsid_1895000/1895049.stm

09:15 / 27.03.02

Well, on the C4 documentary last night it was claimed that a number of the bodies have been procured from Russia and China, where they were 'unwanted'. Relatives of the deceased not informed, wishes of the deceased themselves not taken into consideration. Von Hagens justification of this boiled down to "what I've done is lawful in those countries."

I'm in a slight dilemma about this now. Common sense tells me that, well, the people who occupied these shells are dead anyway so probably don't give a rats arse. On the other hand, I have a problem with someone who's prepared to overlook any sort of moral concerns about where the bodies came from or how they ended up as dead in the first place in favour of his art.

11:41 / 27.03.02

i've only recently heard the dodgy stuff, and part of the reason i was so into the idea of this exhibition was the fact that the exhibits had given their consent, as it were. so i'm a bit uneasy about it now - surely exploitation of mentally ill people is wrong, whether they are alive or dead?

but the protestors are not against the exhibition because of this, as far as i know. children had to make a run for it when one bloke attacked a exhibit with a hammer and someone threw a blanket over the pregnant woman/foetus exhibit. people are afraid of death and they shouldn't be.

12:52 / 27.03.02

I'm not so sure that it's a fear response. The fear of death goes hand in hand with the fascination that it holds over us, and is probably the reason why people are going to the exhibition.

The main voices of dissent are coming from those who claim that there's no dignity in the displaying of the bodies, that it's "disrespectful" of the dead and that it somehow cheapens death (that last one confuses the hell out of me).

Also on the prog last night was a comment from (I think) Brian Sewell about Von Hagens. "He may be a genius, he may be totally original, but he's definitely quite mad." Said comment was preceded by Von Hagens showing off some of the merchandise available from the exhibition (atrociously cheap watches that, apparently, "show us how life is fleeting" and cuddly toys with guts that you can pull out. Actually, the cuddly toys were quite cool) and followed with footage of the plasticisation of a camel.

12:05 / 28.03.02

Just got back from work, and a massive argument about the validity of this one with a colleague who wrote a column on it for an Italian broadsheet- he hated it, and attacked its claims to be art while admitting grudgingly that he admired the fact that the UK allowed the exhibition to go ahead.

Certainly does kick new life into the 'is it art? debate.

Personally I don't have a problem with this one, but I did with the Damien Hurst dead cow thing. And I think the guy is barking mad, but I'll stand up for his right to insanity.

15:48 / 28.03.02

people are attacking the exhibits? doesn't the damage of one of these pieces "cheapen and disrespect" the dead also? i just don't understand it. if the protesters don't like it they are free to stand outside with signs and yell at passersby, they can not go and even tell everyone that will listen their views on the matter but the whole attacking and damaging of the work is hypocritical to say the least.

there are similar museums/displays in other countries...Thailand has one with cross-sectioned remains and the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia has all sorts of preserved medical oddities and implements...hell you can even have a party there if you like. i guess the difference here is that Body World is being touted as 'art' while the others are medical museums..?

here's a wierd one - the first day that i read about the exhibit coming to england (last week sometime) i visited the website to take a look. later that night i came home to find the hubby watching a german film called 'Anatomy' with the girl from 'Run, Lola, Run' in it. this film uses the Body Worlds pieces in the sets and the storyline revolves around the preservation of various murder victims to become part of anatomy displays. the film won Germany's best film award in 99 (i think). it was pretty good for a horror/mystery/conspiracy film but i think something of the story was lost in the english dubbing as it got pretty confusing and hoaky...in any case, it's a good gross-out popcorn flick

20:17 / 29.03.02

The Mutter Museum is quite an interesting visit and I recommend it to anyone who can make it there. You can check out lots of bizarre things there including various skulls of those who passed from different means..a 27 foot colon (I think it's that big).. and last I went, they had a special exhibit on strange things that people swallowed.

I guess it never got as much backlash due to the "medical" moniker placed upon it yet it has enough disturbing things there to get a few people whoosy. They even have a calendar that's put out every year showing fetal anomolies in jars and such.

Find it strange that so many people would be upset about the body being subject to art...it's been going on since art's been around. Here's just a different example from the rest...possibly a little more obvious than other iterations but still worthy.

07:25 / 02.04.02

Naked Flame:

"...[a colleague] hated it, and attacked its claims to be art...

Certainly does kick new life into the 'is it art? debate"

I could be wrong, but I don't think Von Hagens himself has ever claimed that it is art. In the newspaper and TV interviews I've seen he calls it "edutainment", which is not a label that someone with artistic pretentions would readily apply to their work, given that it's normally used in an entirely dismissive way by yer 'serious' critics and broadsheet commentators. So, not art then, but who cares? It's a show, no further categorising required; 'is it art?' debate redundant. That said, I'm glad that Von Hagens and his exhibition are being examined by the art crowd, as his open, enthusiastic approach and willingness to talk about what he's doing might learn 'em something.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

06:22 / 03.04.02

I'm still in two minds on the whole ethics thing- however, curiosity is a powerful thing, and I wanna SEE this shit, goddamnit! So I'll be going at some point anyway.
And yes, whatever the ethics of the whole thing, smashing fuck out of it with a hammer is DEFINITELY wrong. On SO many levels.

19:12 / 03.04.02

I've seen it.

Go.

This is the opposite of Cronenberg's 'Body Horror' - a chance to reclaim the interior landscapes of the body which are demonised by popular culture, from Alien to ER.

It's not a new perspective on death but on life. It offers a chance to see the beauty of the body in cross-section, rather than merely as a sack of skin.

Go.

09:09 / 04.04.02

what he said. fascinating.

00:12 / 26.11.02

"You will be...plastinated. That is the only word for it." Dutch TV shows this stuff for free, on live people. It's medicine, so we get the gory details and the moral bump. It's ongoing, and compiled from the U.S., U.K., Australia and other places as well as the Netherlands, all given a Dutch voiceover. There must be large market for this stuff, and I saw an extremely interesting exhibit of medical/SM art above a Brussels tattoo parlor. Better get used to it now before Videodrome starts showing carve-ups of brainless clones. Besides, if we're all to be transparent to scrutiny, but semi-opacity is shameful?

The Anthropological and Ethnographic Museum Named For Tsar Peter, in St. Petersburg has an excellent collection of deformed fetuses. You can take non-flash photos for a little extra. Bring your own highspeed film from out of the country, because the stuff available locally is crap.

00:42 / 26.11.02

This is the opposite of Cronenberg's 'Body Horror' - a chance to reclaim the interior landscapes of the body which are demonised by popular culture, from Alien to ER.

It's not a new perspective on death but on life. It offers a chance to see the beauty of the body in cross-section, rather than merely as a sack of skin.

I haven't seen this, though I would desperately like to. Part of the reason is that it seems this is another facet of what someone like Cronenberg has been on about for years - his ideas, at the very least are also about an affirmation of life, rather than death, only life as a ceaselessly mutating matrix. Cronenberg doesn't demonize anything to do with the body. Viewers do, in their reactions to the idea that our 'sack of skin' may have notions of its own.

15:41 / 01.12.02

I didn't particularly like dissection when I was a medical student (unpleasantly grey stewed-roast-beef muscle, stringy tendons, perma-grins, incongruously starey eyeballs) and I don't like it now - brings to mind hours of formaldehyde smelly tedium interspersed with brief exam humiliation ("No, this indistinguishable piece of yellow fascia!"). I won't be going.