Today Maria wondered what Mr. Plastinator eats for breakfast.

Body Worlds, the exhibition of brilliantly preserved and plastinated humans (donated) and one horse, claims as its mission the democratization of human anatomy. It’s a mission underpinned by Dr.Gunther Von Hagens’ plan to resurrect “an age-old fascination of the human body, one that has become trivialised by modern associations of the body’s interior with death, mutilation, crime and horror.” The exhibition raises a few questions I’ve since tried to answer, not least of which is whether death can improve life for the living? Is Gunther Von Hagens’ strategy effective? Is it radical enough in a world where humans are discovering chemistry for the first time in the form of depleted uranium, its 4 million year toxicity, the way it fleeces the wind and could wind up here? Can re-situating the human anatomy in a place for all help us address the horrific way life is being treated? Can Gunther Von Hagens succeed where others have failed? …And can we take him seriously?

Last November, Dr. Gunther Von Hagens, scientist/showman and purveyor of public autopsy staged the first public and televised autopsy Britain had seen in 170 years. There were strong objections to both the autopsy and the exhibition but according to polls taken at Body Worlds only 6% of the 11 million visitors around the world claimed it offended their views on human dignity, whereas 80% apparently experienced “deep reverence and awe” for such a dispay of the human body. Those are some of the statistics. Nevertheless, before seeing it for myself, it all appeared deeply distasteful.

Well…it’s worth saying first off that though there’s some humour, the exhibition is mostly serious, and has to be really, to make the body, that which has been so thoroughly abstracted over time, as real as a Volkeswagen Bug, for instance. After all, there’s no question as to whether millions of Bugs would be allowed to rust into oblivion as the world watched on. That would be considered a terrible waste.

Until public exposure to Von Hagens’ plastination process, experience of the human body’s interior was more partial and fragmented and in the nature of say: sex, a pulse, a cut, menses, a diagram, an x–ray, a scan, a skeleton, a withered corpse or mummy, discrete organs pickled and jarred or strung over telephone wires, a sculpture, a Picasso, stigmata, an abstraction at best, requiring imagination and guesswork to inch a little closer to our inner workings. Through the miracle of plastinationVon Hagens manages to turn the body inside out so that his use of polymers, even to an ecological would-be-purist like myself, is almost forgiveable for so graphically capturing the way that our environment and our bodies are inside each other and inseparable and the nature too of the body’s elegant power and fragility.

I basked in the sheer loveliness of the cardiovascular system, no less than I would in a forest or in the sun going down on the sea. I marvelled as I read that the dense pillar-box-red network of blood vessels strung end to end could (in an unlikely event) twice circle the earth. ‘For sheer sophistication,’ my friend said, ‘no technology can compare.’ And of the sets of lungs on display: the perky pink ones versus the grim sooty inner city grey, I imagine just about everyone had a clear preference and couldn’t help but wonder at the state of their own. Yes, it was all very marvelous, reminding me in it’s very direct fashion that beauty and ugliness are no more skin deep than the ocean. And that like the ocean so much of the body still remains a mystery to the human being, a reality which has done little to protect either ocean or body from the excesses of corporate conceptualizing.

And on the subject of concepts, I’ll confess that it was the idea of death as horror and spectacle, that had something to do with my attraction and ambivalence on the road to the human “plastinates”. I had, once upon a time, gravitated to the Tate gallery to gape at Damien Hirst’s 14 foot tiger shark submerged in a tank of formaldehyde in much the same way. I found, as Hirst’s title, “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living” suggests, that seeing death is not necessarily believing in it; a concept which manages, I feel, to both defile a fish and sacrifice nature all in one go. Hagens, on the other hand, shows the human body stripped of concepts. The nature of the plastinates is not in question. I’m not required to suspend my disbelief here. This is not a matter of metaphor, believing, initiation or exclusivity. It is quite simply a provocation to find out about the body. It is tantalizing in this regard.

Concepts, assumptions, superstitions can quite comfortably fill the vacuum left by knowledge and history. The idea that what I think and feel is more damning than what I eat, breathe and drink is one way in which concepts prescribed by popular psychology have blurred my relationship to real events and real power. I think I agree with W. A. Davis that, “The concrete must become a process in which every concept refers in its inner structure to the primacy of existence and experience.” (Deracination: Historicity, Hiroshima and the Tragic Imperative, 2001) Moving from what I don’t know towards the comfort of what might be true but can’t be proven, will often lead me away from the evidence.

The evidence of autopsy and anatomy in a world where truth has become so many relativist concepts, ironized moments, or transcendental absolutes further proves to me the matter of being human does matter. Or, as W. A. Davis puts it, “Positing an essential and always recoverable nature outside history is not the solution but part of the problem, the way we blind ourselves to our situation.” It’s strange to think that the importance of being human requires proof, but I guess it does…we’ve damaged the light so people can’t eat and the water so people can’t drink. How was it allowed to happen? All in all it seems this might be horror’s finest hour.

A profound sense of how we are all vulnerable through and beneath the skin to the same weapons, that exposure is a matter of proximity, as is death, near, far and here, is a useful kind of universal contingency that we can profit from now in these very dangerous times. But it’s difficult to dwell upon the fact that even without war there is still the localized, harder to see horror of the low intensity conflict of economic hegemony, that like sanctions and low level, long term chemical exposure, colonizes the mind and body.

In this corporate, post-nuclear society I’m still inclined to search for guarantees yet I find none. Though it does feel at times that making connections is somehow its own reward; which is just as well because solving the disneying fix we’re in will require making all the connections there are. To this end, autopsy is evidence of lives lived; authentic history is also recorded in the body. In order to stay connected with the facts of life I might again do worse than to understand Davis, that ‘Horror… brings with it the status of an imperative. For there is only one human reply to horror: a recovery of ones being as who/why.” (ibid.) I’d like to think Gunther Von Hagens would agree with him.

But whether he agrees or not, Body Worlds is currently facing a ban by the Munich Town Council on the grounds that it “infringes human dignity”. Britain tried to ban Body Worlds too but conceded that in British law The Anatomy Act does not frame the use of plastinates, so the exhibition went ahead. Body Worlds may yet be outlawed from ever returning to Britain if MPs vote in favour of the Department of Health’s “Draft Code on the Import and Export of Human Body Parts”. Of the 659 MPs invited to view the exhibition first hand only 2 actually attended.

The fact the British government has tried to censor Body Worlds seems all the more significant at a time when our access to nature, our own nature notwithstanding, becomes increasingly governed by private corporate interests. Because seeing our body is somehow about owning up to it. So that the privatized patenting of our DNA now appears more than ever a power-gone-mad attempt to create mail order humans, the body and soul consumed by corporatism. In this respect the exhibition serves as a timely reminder of our corporeal collateral. The value of a visit to Body Worlds is that it does offer enough collateral to change a life. In its statistics more than 30% of respondents claim they have consumed less tobacco and alcohol while 33% have since found a healthier diet. Which is nice, isn’t it? Nevertheless, I intend to write and tell Gunther that I think it could be so much nicer.

In terms of promoting our need for a less trivialising toxified environment, the exhibition is very tame. Perhaps Gunther is a little blinded by his own science, his own ideals. In fact, I was surprised to read that he’s currently exploring pathways to the genetical engineering of an anatomically improved human through the body sculpting of plastinates…Oh God Gunther!…

So in the final analysis I can’t help but feel that if only Gunther had made more daring connections… If only he’d offered up for public scrutiny some of that tell tale body fat, all of which gets sucked out and binned in the plastination process…then perhaps a substantial number of those visitors to his show would by now have made a collective dent in the petrochemical industry, the industry which pumps, with impunity, hundreds of billions of pounds of by-products into our vicinities and so into us, every year.

Other sciences need now take up the shortfall, in the spirit of making environments decent for human life! Clinical ecology, toxicology, epidemiology, biology, sociology etc. must now make populist spectacles of themselves! They must ban together to make the connections and present a sociology of pathology that tells the stories of humans living in their homelands. A massive orientation and democratization of this kind of knowledge would surely go some way towards bridging that chasm between what is hip, conventional, distracting and what is real in the one world.