Exhibit is extremely graphic, wildly popular

Exhibit is extremely graphic, wildly popular

Kerry Lengel
The Arizona Republic
Jan. 14, 2007 12:00 AM

VANCOUVER, British Columbia - As many as 5,000 curious procrastinators will line up outside the silvery geodesic dome of this city's Science World museum today for their last chance to see "Body Worlds 3," the blockbuster exhibition of artfully arranged human remains.

The painstaking process of packing up the exhibit - more than 200 specimens preserved by a process called plastination, including two dozen whole-body dissections - begins Monday. The show will be trucked to Phoenix, where a record-setting 400,000 visitors are expected at the Arizona Science Center from Jan. 26 to May 28.

The brainchild of German-born anatomist Gunther von Hagens, the provocative, sometimes controversial "Body Worlds" has caused a sensation in every city it has visited in the past 10 years. With three versions now touring North America, it has been seen by more than 20 million people worldwide and inspired a copycat, "Bodies . . . The Exhibition," with shows in four U.S. cities.

"We decided to bring it because of the educational benefit, because we really wanted to have visitors encounter the resilience and fragility of the human body," said Chevy Humphrey, president of the Arizona Science Center.

"Body Worlds" is more than merely educational, however, and it's not just another blockbuster museum show like the "Treasures of Tutankhamun." The whole-body figures, or "plastinates," are extremely graphic and at the same time strikingly sculptural. They can be difficult to look at, and the various displays of human organs can evoke powerful emotions.

When Humphrey first saw a "Body Worlds" exhibit, she said, she saw a preserved lung with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which her mother was suffering from.

"I saw a healthy lung, and I saw my mother's lung, and I had to sit down for 15, 20 minutes to gather myself," she said. "That's when it really hit me that my mother was ill, and it had a huge impact. It was therapeutic."

Phoenix psychotherapist Wendy Boorn suggests that you might not want to visit an exhibit this powerful alone.

"I always believe in naming things," she said. "If you can name what you're feeling and share it with someone, that will take some of the punch out of it. I think it would be helpful to go with someone else to this exhibit so people can share or process their reaction."

Embarrassment
"It's a very sexual exhibit," noted one visitor. "It makes me laugh because I've been a widow for eight years - all I see are penises."

She quickly asked not to have her name published; it would be too embarrassing. And it's not just the multiple male genitals that might induce nervous tittering. There are fewer female plastinates, but they are presented with just as little deference to our taboos about the body. There is a cross section of a female pelvic bone and even one that preserves a constipated rectum, packed to the bursting point with black stool.

These words alone can be embarrassing in our culture, but "Body Worlds" blasts through our euphemisms and niceties about basic bodily functions, something parents will have to think about when considering whether to bring their children.

"I don't think the kids will be embarrassed at all if the parents aren't," said Boorn, the psychotherapist. "So the parents need to get past seeing it as something sensationalistic and look at it more as a fascinating peek inside the human body, more of a scientific experience."

Disgust
Some visitors may find the exhibit offensive. The plastinates are not just models of muscle and bone, after all. They are human bodies that have been carefully and creatively dissected to reveal every details of a complex anatomy.

Take The Javelin Thrower. His chest has been hollowed out to reveal the spinal column from the inside, ribs sawed down to stumps. The torso looks like the aftermath of an explosion, reshaped and enlarged to offer multiple viewing angles on the muscular structure - a cadaver as Cubism, perhaps.

Another shudder-inducing image is The Skin Man, whose right hand holds his own hide, all in a piece. He stands as a demonstration that the skin is actually an organ - the largest in the body, in fact - but it's hard to see more than a hunk of untreated leather, with a few lonely hairs sticking out. It's enough to make your own skin crawl.

Men in particular might blanch at what has been done to The Hurdler's penis - cut into thirds, with a mushroom of head and urethra flanked by two halves of the shaft, looking for all the world like a sliced banana. The intent may be educational, but "Body Worlds" packs a visceral punch.

On the other hand, people who would find the exhibit truly horrifying probably know to stay away. If you are curious enough to come, the gross-out factor fades.

"It's kind of freaky but kind of cool," said visitor Celena Campbell, 31, of Pitt Meadows, British Columbia. "The more I see, the more impressed I am."

Amusement
One of the most striking pieces might tickle your funny bone. It's The Limber Gymnast, bent over with two legs and one arm stretched into a tripod. Completing the pyramid, his other arm points to the sky, and in his hand he holds aloft . . . his internal organs, stacked like a trophy from intestines to lungs. He inspired comments of "That's disgusting" and "This is so well done."

Some of the athletic poses, such as the hand-standing skateboarder, are oddly exuberant considering they are made of skinless flesh, while the skeletons pondering and praying also might elicit a chuckle.

The multifarious poses concocted by Gunther von Hagens' Institute for Plastination transcend the educational mission. There is an aesthetic element and one of entertainment.

"It's obviously a form of art," said Elaine Liddell, 82, of Livonia, Mich.

The most stunning example is The On Point Dancer. Arms stretched and chest bowed outward, his torso has been sliced open on either side of the sternum and pulled slightly apart to show the organs underneath. His enlarged dimensions make him seem superhuman, and the pose is almost angelic.

Fascination
For Nancy Thompson, 43, the fact that the bodies were once breathing beings was kept at a distance.

"It's very secondary to me," said the Michigan-born Thompson, who was visiting from Germany. "You get lost in the detail of the science."

Indeed, beyond the riveting spectacle of the plastinates, it is the accumulation of detail that explains the success of "Body Worlds." You will see the human brain, for example, variously reconfigured to show all its layers and connections, and later you will see the structure of the arteries that feed that brain.

"It really hits you in the face with the sheer complexity of the human body, and it's really positive for people to see that," Thompson said. "Maybe it will help them respect the machine that is their body."

For Vancouver resident Beth Bradley, 51, contemplating the complexity of the body had a very personal meaning. Diagnosed with polycystic kidney disease - just one of the diseases demonstrated in the exhibit - she has been on dialysis for six years.

"I'm waiting for a transplant, so I just want to become more familiar with what goes on in my body," she said. "I find it's quite beautiful. And inside, once you take the skin off and the hair, you see we're all the same."

Ambivalence
In the end, you may leave "Body Worlds" not knowing exactly how you should feel. And it's this aestheticization of the dissections that creates confusion and ambivalence.

For Russell, the 18-year-old from Port Coquitlam, the sculptural quality of the plastinates helps her draw the connection between the bodies on display and her own.

"It's not clinical," she said. "It's in an artistic form, so you can relate to it on a more lifelike level."

On the other hand, some of the poses can seem downright vulgar. They bring an element of humanity to the plastinates, but it's the humanity of the sculptor, superimposed on a body whose original identity has been stripped away with the skin.

Seventeen-year-old Marc Audette of Port Coquitlam said the show was both educational and awe-inspiring. But those were not his only responses.

"I felt a little bit nauseous," he said, "not because it disgusts me but that these were once actual people."

There is nothing wrong with ambivalence, the psychotherapist Boorn said - if you find "Body Worlds" both beautiful and disgusting, both disrespectful and spiritually inspiring.

"One of the things that separates human beings from other species is that we can hold conflicting emotions about many things at the same time," she said. "I think you can just hold them all as valid."

Anxiety
In Vancouver, British Columbia, "Body Worlds 3" was the talk of the town, and 18-year-old Amy Russell of Port Coquitlam said she was nervous about seeing it, even though she had dissected animals in high school.

"I was very anxious, like I wasn't ready for it all," she said during a visit to Science World at Telus World of Science late last month.

But her anxiety quickly melted into curiosity. The first items she saw were bones - joints and skulls in a display case, a free-standing skeleton - images familiar from the classroom. Then came the first whole-body figure, The Hurdler, posed to reveal the relationship of muscles, sinew and bone when a body is in motion.

"It didn't bother me at all," Russell said. "I thought, 'Wow, that's what I look like when I'm doing that.' Everything here you can kind of relate to."

The plastinates of human bodies are definitely graphic, but just remember that the anticipation of a frightening experience is usually worse than the real thing.

URL http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0114bodyworlds0114intro.html#
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