Some poses shock because the body has been torn limb from limb. A woman posed as if she were diving into a pool is split so that her head and chest lean forward, her back and brain lean backward, and her organs are piled upright in between. A standing man’s insides are pulled out like drawers, and his hand holds open a door of flesh revealing his stomach. The effect is most stunning in his face, which is slid out like four staggered puzzle blocks. We can appreciate corpses skinned and disassembled for anatomical study even though we may be more comfortable with those made up to resemble what the deceased looked like in life. But audacious dissections like these defy any effort to be cool and scientific, to ignore your gut reaction that it’s a desecration to splay open someone’s innards.
The longer I stayed, the more everything started to look like bacon or beef jerky, but with eyes. I found myself kind of half averting my gaze. And that’s when I reached two corpses in the last room that I can’t stop thinking about: The Ballet Dancer, whose belly and buttocks are curled out to create a meat tutu, and The Angel, whose back is sliced and curled up to resemble wings. I thought The Angel was standing on her toes, but then I realized that the soles of her feet are peeled back to become high heels. It’s one of the most bizarre takes on women’s fashion that I’ve ever seen. And utterly tasteless.
The good doctor had lots to say about the show at the press preview: “Here we face our mortality, and ‘Body Worlds’ gives us the power to reflect because we are in an environment where we cross the boundary of death. We fear death because we don’t know what’s coming. . . . Only when we overcome our fear of death, when we embrace death, do we understand life.”
He explained that he and his staff have enlisted 6800 body donors since he began seeking volunteers in Germany in 1979, including 142 from North America over the past two years. “The most respect you can give to other people is after death if you are willing to follow their wishes. I’m coming from East Germany, and there was no democracy, there was no democracy of free speech, there was no democracy of free decision, there was no democracy of even moving out of the country. So it is rooted in my biography that I want to bring a little more democratization to society, democratization beyond death.” Hooray for democracy!
I inquired about the flesh skirt and the high heels, what to me were failed attempts at humor. “I believe that humor is a way to conquer our mortality,” he acknowledged. “And I think I owe it to the [humorous] spirit of the body donors.” His idea is that entertainment keeps people looking long enough to be educated. But if the balance between entertaining and informing falters, that’s when it becomes a freak show. His response: “The plastinates are shown in everyday activities. So it’s not necessarily freaky.”
