Body Worlds
Gunther von Hagen's Body Worlds: The Anatomical Exhibition of Real Human Bodies, published in 2006, is the companion book to the Body Worlds exhibition which ran for several months from 2006-2007 at Science World in Vancouver.
Plastination is a technique invented by von Hagens in 1977 that preserves the body, or parts of it, by replacing fat and water with plastics or silicone. Human and animal specimens preserved with this technique are incredibly durable, do not decompose and can in fact last forever under the right conditions.
So, if you’re particularly squeamish, yes, this article is all about the art and science of human body preservation.
The stated goal of von Hagen’s technique is education and instruction, but his traveling exhibitions are also insanely popular all over the world. As soon as I saw that the show was coming to Vancouver, I knew Rodger and I had to go.
We ended up waiting until the last minute to get our tickets, in the final two weeks of its run, when they began booking 90-minute time slots 24 hours a day due to the show’s extreme popularity. We booked our visit for 1:00 a.m. and arrived to find Science World packed full of curiosity seekers of all ages eager to take in the controversial, world-famous exhibition.
Visible Women
My lifelong fascination with the human body owes a great deal to my mother, who was attending medical school while I was in elementary school. She brought home anatomy coloring books and gifted me with the Visible Woman, a roughly Barbie-sized, anatomically correct female model with transparent skin, that you assemble like a 3D puzzle.
The Visible Woman came with two sets of organs, one normal and one representing the body during pregnancy, complete with plastic fetus. I was mildly freaked out by the fact that in the pregnant version, all the organs surrounding the uterus are squished and flattened to accommodate the growing baby.
(If I hadn’t already been leaning towards a child-free lifestyle, that might have tipped the scales!)
I was also a fledgling artist from a very early age, inspired by my grandmother who was a portrait painter, a caricaturist and a sculptor, whose subject matter was almost exclusively the human body.
Body Worlds, Whole Body Plastinate
Abra Cadavers
Body Worlds was especially intriguing to me because about five years earlier I had read about the Musée Fragonard in Paris, which contains one of the most bizarre and fascinating collections of human and animal specimens in the world, ingeniously preserved and on display since the late 19th century.
One of the most famous of these is a full body horse and rider, made between 1766 and 1771 by the French anatomist Honoré Fragonard. Body Worlds upped the ante with a full horse and rider of its own, in which the horse is in a rearing pose and the human rider is arranged in segments to show the bones and musculature in exquisite detail.
You can see both below:
The Horseman of the Apocalypse, Honoré Fragonard
Body Worlds, Horseback Rider
Bodies of Knowledge
Preserving the human body after death has been a religious tradition in many different cultures throughout history, most famously the mummies of ancient Egypt and South America.
In Leonardo Da Vinci’s time, artists and medical students went to great (and very illegal) lengths to obtain human specimens for dissection and education. These efforts place them on the fringes of society, but what we gained in understanding the mechanics of our miraculous bodies was incalculable.
More recently, the Soviet revolutionary Vladimir Lenin's body was preserved after his death in 1924 and displayed so that tens of thousands of Russian citizens would have the chance to view and pay their respects to their great leader, over the course of many months, without his body decomposing.
In fact, to this day Lenin’s body is preserved on display, and the science of plastination owes a great deal to the innovative techniques developed by those Soviet scientists over a century ago.
Hannibal, Season 2, Episode 2 “Sakizuke”
Eye of the Beholder
One of my favorite shows of all time was Hannibal (2013-2015), in which multiple serial killers exhibit the bodies of their victims in truly artistic tableaus, each one more fantastical and elaborate then the last.
In one of the more outlandish episodes, a serial killer obsessed with skin tones created a kaleidoscope of bodies in every shade and hue, and displayed them like an eye, staring blindly up at their ostensible creator through an opening in the ceiling of the disused silo where they were arrayed like a melanin rainbow.
(I mean, if you absolutely have to be murdered, you could do worse than becoming part of an art exhibit with existential themes about beauty, impermanence, post-racialism and the transcendent yearning for immortality.)
Body Worlds, The Archer
We made the most of our 90 minute visit to the Body Worlds show, enthralled by the horseback rider, the skateboarder, the basketball player, the swimmer, and especially the archer, a modern day Amazon stripped of her skin to display every muscle and sinew, poised in a moment of tension and focus, a human symphony of grace, strength, agility and power.
No Smoking Ever Again
Another memory that stands out is the exhibit where they show you the nicotine-ravaged heart and lungs of a lifelong smoker. It's as horrific as you might imagine, the healthy pink tissue of a non-smoker juxtaposed against the shrivelled, blackened, diseased organs brought to you by Marlboro et al.
Right next to the exhibit, they had installed a plexiglas case with a slot at the top where smokers could deposit their last pack of cigarettes. European optimism at its finest!
The case was overflowing with packs, apparently discarded by people who never quite got the mssage until they saw the effects "in the flesh." The irrefutable evidence of smoking's destructive effects on the human body, once theoretical, could no longer be ignored.
Plastinated roller girl, anyone?
AI gets the anatomy more correct than the number of wheels! LOL
Rodger and I left the Body Worlds show with the gorgeous full-color exhibition coffee table book and permission forms in hand, all set to donate our bodies postmortem for the future of science and art.
In the end, I don't think we ever completed the application process, but it is kind of the ultimate question...
Where do you want to spend eternity?
I am 100% in favor of donating one's organs after death, to save the lives of others in need. But the idea of becoming a plastinated exhibit, on display in perpetuity for educational and entertainment purposes, is also very compelling.
Fantastic Plastic
I love the idea of being reborn as a gloriously plastinated roller girl, but the thing about whole body plastination is that it’s a young corpse’s game. And ideally, one would like to live to a ripe old age and die of natural causes, peacefully, in one's sleep, at the exact same moment as one's life partner.
If you can't leave a good looking corpse, maybe it's better to leave no trace at all. Donate everything of value to someone who needs it and return the rest to the earth in a natural burial, becoming one with the ecosystem again. Stardust to dust.
Body Worlds, Arteries of the Head and Brain
Then again, there are many body parts that can be gorgeously preserved at any age, provided you leave the world relatively healthy, like the circulatory system of the head and brain captured in the photo above.
One thing we can all agree on
Nobody really wants to die, much less be reduced to the body part that killed us… a diseased lung, an enlarged heart, a plaque-riddled brain, demonstrating the error of our ways or the faults in our genes for future generations. No one really wants to be the cautionary tale on display to frighten smokers and school children into living cleaner, healthier lives. I’m incredibly grateful to those who did, though.
Many of us never get to choose, and maybe that’s a good thing.
But if you could choose, would you prefer to decompose in a padded coffin, be reduced to ashes and scattered somewhere meaningful or transformed into something entirely new and different, an elevated reinvention with the potential to educate and enthral onlookers long after you’re gone?
Mannequin Makeover
Maddie, manning the front desk at Relish, our local pub, for Halloween
So this is a weird comparison, but I had a mannequin for about ten years. I bought her from a street artist in Gastown while shopping at a thrift store, refurbished her from head to toe, and displayed her in our apartment in a variety of costumes that changed with every season.
I documented her transformation on my old web site here and here.
But after a decade, it was time to find her a new home. She was seated on a dresser in our bedroom in such a way that made it hard for Rodger to open his side of the closet, which he tolerated longer than most men would. (Love you, baby!).
So I put an ad on craigslist and FB Marketplace (that was a whole other shit show because I photographed her “nude” at first and the ad was immediately flagged by their stupid AI as being pornographic, so I had to put a dress on her for fucking FaceBook).
Anyway, an artist named Christine Elizabeth eventually responded with interest, telling me she creates “Disco Belles” by covering mannequins in mirrors. Perfect! I immediately agreed to the sale and followed her on Instagram so I could see the next incarnation of Maddie (of course my mannequin had a name). And here she is in all her mirrored glory!
Maddie, reimagined as a “Disco Belle” by Christine Elizabeth
So… What do you think? Where do you see your body in five, 10, 100 years after your inevitable passing?
Tell me in the comments!
In the meantime…
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