Stillness re-animated: experiencing Body Worlds and the work of art

Abstract

In this chapter I want to address a particular technique of stillness that haunts the science-art exhibition Body Worlds. For those readers who might have missed out on this ‘blockbuster exhibition,’2 Body Worlds is an ambulant science and art exhibition that presents its visitor with ‘real human bodies’. It has toured the world since 1995 and, according to the website, has attracted more than 28 million visitors.3 The exhibition has also provoked both ethical and religious controversy and created an increased interest in anatomy, health and the human body.4 One of the problems that occupy most of the scholarly work and public debates around the exhibition is whether Body Worlds is an art or a science exhibition. This debate often circles around the question as to whether these ‘real human bodies’ – or plastinates as they are called – are to be treated as exactly that, i.e. as real bodies, or whether they – in being plastinates rather than ‘real bodies’ – have become transformed into works of art. On the one hand religious leaders and prominent ethicists alike have criticized the exhibition for not respecting the sanctity of the human body and for disregarding human dignity.5 And on the other hand, humanities scholars and art historians argue that the exhibition is merely the continuation of a long tradition in anatomy drawing and science that thrives on an aesthetics of true-to-nature realism. This aesthetics produces abstract, ordered and perfectly legible representations that are far from the messy, smelly and dense living body that we all have.6 To cut a long story short, Body Worlds might be difficult to place on the art-science continuum, which is perhaps why it is defined as being neither good art nor good science: rather, it is construed as ‘sensationalist,’ a ‘circus freak show,’ and a ‘voyeuristic’ spectacle.7 This ambiguity is deployed by the creator, the German anatomist Gunther von Hagens, to legitimize the exhibition.