Biomedicine on Display

Alive
I carry a picture of a dead woman’s head in my memory. My encounter with her took place in King’s College’s Gordon Museum in London on a sunny afternoon last spring. I don’t exaggerate if I say she had an enormous impact on me. She has forever burned an impression of herself onto my retina.

This dead woman (she was red-haired) stares at me from her jar with formaldehyde filled to the brim. To me, she differs from all other specimens with whom she nevertheless shares the fate of being preserved, and being part of a huge collection made for educational purposes. Oddly enough she keeps staring at me, even though, because of some malformation, one of her eyes is missing and the other is closed. It looks like she is staring through her one and only eyelid and this is, for me, the most frightening aspect about her.

It is hard to say if her intense staring appearance is due to the condition of the skin of the eyelid, which has turned almost transparent and thereby, because of the skin’s semi-transparency, unveils a shadow of an eyeball underneath, or, and this is the second possibility, if her insisting attitude derives from her overall realistic look with wrinkles, toothless gums hidden behind her hollowed lips, and some beard-like hair that sticks out here and there from her chins, cheeks and forehead.

She is so damn real. What makes her presence obscure is probably that her lifelessness is so alive. By being so lively present, she seems to unveil her mortality. She touches me extraordinarily.

Dead
In the following, my story shall take a sharp turn, in contrast with the experience described above. My recent visit to Günther von Hagens’s exhibition Bodyworlds at Experimentarium, a science center in Copenhagen, is going to be my point of departure in describing how my experiences unfolded as I encountered the plastinated bodies in the exhibition.

Just to keep the record straight, my intention is not a critique of Experimentarium. I acknowledge their activities as a science center and a legitimate amusement park for, especially younger, visitors. My interest is rather in the seductive presence effects produced by anatomical specimens. Here von Hagens’s bodies deserve some critical examination.

Frankly, I didn’t really meet the bodies, which I had otherwise expected to do. With a few exceptions (the displayed cross sections of the body were pretty fascinating), I didn’t really ‘see’ or ‘feel’ them. Honestly, it felt as if they were not present at all; especially not the full body plastinates. Why?

In retrospect, keeping the earlier public debate about the authenticity of Günther von Hagens’s plastinated bodies in mind, I wonder if I could have predicted this outcome. I knew about the alleged originality and ’realness’ of the bodies on display and I knew about the plastination tecniques which leaves only some fifteen percent of the original body behind. So in principle I knew I wasn’t going to ‘see’ real human bodies. Nevertheless, I couldn’t avoid being disappointed.

Even when standing in front of a plastinated heavily pregnant woman with a nearly full grown fetus in her womb I was not particularly affected. I really made a persistent attempt to stir some emotions by repeatingly telling myself that “these are in fact REAL people”. But it didn’t seem to make any difference. I still didn’t sense the claimed realness of the real people. They all looked like plastic figures cast in all sorts of absurd postures equipped with bouffant eyebrows looking like those you can by for a Halloween party. As a result it was extremely difficult to relate to the bodies. Their artificiality actually created a perceptible distance between them and me.

And yet so alive…
Eventually, it wasn’t until I gave up my effort to get near the bodies that something happened. Suddenly I got fascinated, but my fascination was of a different kind than the one I had when I was confronted with a real body – i.e., the head of the woman mentioned above.

What altered my experience was my adjustment and change of attitude. Instead of expecting life and death on display, I began to comprehend the body statues as what they are. It is not that the bodies are not fascinating. They are, not as dead bodies though, but as a collection of écorchés (skinned musclemen statues). So, by accepting the distance between the showpieces and me (and maybe even allowing it to get bigger as I saw no point in expecting any lively humanness in them), I managed to experience them as they appeared in their artificiality. In that way they actually became enjoyable – although they did not move or touch me emotionally, they were enjoyable as painted écorchés.

In a previous post I’ve described some art works by the American artist Paul Thek which, by virtue of their playful handling of my sensous impressions, affected and fascinated me. Thek’s artificial versions of meat pieces are seductive, not in spite of, but because of their artificiality. If somebody had claimed they were derived from ‘real’ bodies, I’m quite convinced they would have immediately lost their charm; they would have been ripped of their ability to play tricks with my sensous experiences, twisting and turning my sense of what was real or not. I’m glad no one tried to claim their origin in once living bodies: if so I would have missed the excitement and I wouldn’t have felt the curiosity that grew inside of me.

Two weeks ago, I attended a one-day conference in Copenhagen entitled ”The City is the Machine: Sociological and Architectural Perspectives on Spaces of the City, Materiality and Sociality” (orig.: “Byen er maskinen: Sociologiske og arkitektoniske perspektiver på byens rum, materialitet og socialitet”).

The panel of speakers comprised two architects, a literary theorist and three sociologists, and unfortunately the debate didn’t succeed in escaping the foreseeable cliché-ridden divisions of scholarly disciplines. In his first sentence, an architect claimed he had never read a book in his life; it was followed by the small correction: “well, I’ve read one book in my life and that’s it”. It might have been an attempt at a joke (I think it was), yet an unproductive differentiation between ‘the practitioner’ (supposed to be the architect) and ‘the theorist’ (the social scientist) was settled. Personally, I do not see a point in making this division. It only makes it more difficult to reach a point where the interdisciplinary discussion can flourish.

The architects were speaking of the historical development of the city, how the size of the population has changed over time and how awareness of human life and architecture has been brought together during the last couple of decades.

The relationship between human life-world on the one hand and architecture on the other was in fact presented as yet another dichotomy which has been happily united and therefore has disappeared during the last decades. In fact this unification of materiality and life aspects was presented as a love story — thereby making a somewhat needless distinction between humans and the city; between life and matter. As I discussed with one of my colleagues: What will happen if we refrain from accepting such divisions?

The sociologists were speaking of experiences of public and private spheres, objects functioning as rites de passage, zones, in-between spaces, unfamiliarity and familiarity, density, diversity and liveability. Anni Greve from Roskilde University seemed to be engaged in an interesting research project on sanctuaries in Japan.

I was surprised by the most unsurprising speech: A textual reading of the city presented by Lilian Munk Rösing. I owe Munk Rösing my deepest respect in many fields – especially her dealing with literature, film, art and theatre. She’s a brilliant book reviewer, but maybe she should stick to literary debates? I was surprised by her interpretation (over-interpretation I might add) of the Copenhagen department store Magasin du Nord and the Jewish Museum in Copenhagen as representing the mother’s womb (the uterus) and a fling of the lacanian Real (a circumcision), respectively. I had and I still have to laugh when recalling Munk Rösings speech. Truly speaking I found the story entertaining, but it’s difficult to imagine that anybody could believe in such a traditional psychoanalytic reading of the city. I’m not sure if Rösing does (she might), but wouldn’t it be a simplistic world, if every phenomenon were causatively explainable just like that? If the world was simple and understandable, we wouldn’t keep striving for a still more accurate comprehension of what’s happening in our surroundings, would we?

”The fountain is placed on the street – not in the bedroom”. So the response from Henning Bech on Munk Rösings talk. Nothing more was said about that theme afterwards.

The final remarks were devoted to the problematization of the tendency within sociological research to follow and replicate all sorts of Grand Theory — the consequence being either to politicize the city or to explain the city and peoples’ behavior in lines of innate desires and the like.

Pointing at the immanent aesthetics found in the city, Bech described the city as the sexuality par excellence. Not in the sense of a pre-shaped sexuality like the libido, which Munk-Rösing discussed, but far more like a sexuality which is created and recreated by specific spaces and places in an ongoing process. This kind of sexuality has to do with sense perceptions, moods, atmospheres, lighting, distances etc. In the city, people aesthetisize with and (in particular) for each other. People play aesthetic tricks and games with their gender, race, age and so forth. In the search of these aspects of life, the ‘world’-term used by the late Heidegger was suggested as a source of inspiration.

For me there seems to be an analytical point in heading out on a phenomenological road. It seems to offer a sensitive approach to the presence of the world. Here no analytics are prescribed and no universals are to follow. The challenging task is to get closer to the lived life – life consisting of humans, materials and all the like. Everything is existing in one big mess. In one occurance which is to be experienced in all its differences, shapes, qualities and sensous materialities.

Ugh! Last week I visited New York. What really spoke to my senses and touched my emotions in a provocative and morbid way was a toe-curling exhibition of works by the American artist Paul Thek (1933-1988) at the Whitney Museum of Modern Art. To be honest the works on display managed to freak me out a bit and that’s always a good indication of the effectiveness of an exhibition.

Even though I was quite disappointed about the architectural arrangement and the setting, which in general seemed a bit unfinished, I really enjoyed the display of works made by Thek. Especially the untitled pieces of meat from the series Technological Reliquaries made out of wax, hair, metal, wood, plaster, cord and paint presented in acrylic glass vitrines!

My first reaction: Ugh, dramatic and vulgar!

Secondly: Wow, it looks so real, although it’s not real at all!

And after that: What a delightful twisting of concepts! What a brave way of approaching the reversibility of meaning and expectation. This is real! This is more than real! Surely it’s the seduction of the hyperreal!

I think my personal fascination derives from experiencing the many different statements each item gives expression to. Each block of exposed meat, each cut of limb, hand, finger, foot, leg confused me and distracted my sense of order. Each and every one of the artworks seemed to present many conflicting layers of meaning. They have a charm that resembles Baudrillard’s conception of la seduction, and therefore they allow themselves to be grasped and described in his terms.

Baudrillard’s concept of seduction takes place on the reverse side of the logical linked terms of meaning. Through seduction mystery is raised by the blurring of every expectation and by combinations of opposite terms and relations. In the seduction, everything becomes obscure, and like a trompe l’oeil you become deluded.

Thek’s pieces of meat and his torn off limbs do not make a symbolic reading possible. There is no meaning and therefore nothing can be read. The neat surface of conceptual order is broken and we are faced with courageous juxtapositions of all kind. In some way – I would claim – the spectator is confronted with bodyparts more real than real. They are hyperreal, showing more of the fleshy matter than normally seen by the eye. This is the vulgar side of the exhibition, no doubt: blood, arteries, fatty lumps and the like are exposed right in ones face. Baudrillard would call this effect a growth of reality or a greediness of sight, which is in itself not seducing at all – very much the reverse! Yet we know that these pieces of meat are not the real thing. They are constructed. They are artefacts. They deprives reality of a dimension. They become ‘das Schein’: This is the mechanism of seduction. So, at the same time as one could say reality is exposed it is simultaneously obscured, veiled and covered up by the artificiality of the items exposed.

This seductive trick is executed on more than one level.

Continuing the theme the confusion of concepts of real and unreal is the question: Do the Plexiglas vitrines prevent the bad smell of rottening flesh? Well of course they do, at least my imagination tells me so. One of the pieces of meat has already been attacked by several of big fat flies. Yuk! My mind, my imagination of smell and my eyes tells me one thing: “it stinks!” on the other hand I’m aware that my senses could be playing tricks on me: These aren’t real flies and it isn’t real meat. Again I’m left in confusion, it doesn’t really make sense!

At many of Thek’s works a playful approach to several of our senses can be detected. Is it intended? Well, we will never find out for sure. Unfortunately Thek is long gone, but given his close friendship with and intellectual mentorship in Susan Sontag we might have a clue – at least we are allowed to make a guess. Sontag dedicated her famous collection of essays Against Interpretation to Peter Thek. I would like to round off with a quote from one of the essays titled the same:

”Like the fume of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intelllect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world […]. What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.” (Sontag 1966).

This exhibition of works by Thek seduces in a sophisticated way! It truly did mess up my concepts of reality in a fabulous way. It’s grotesque, rough, beautiful, adorable, painful and miserable. It’s unreal and highly artificial, but precisely because of the artificiality it manages to be so realistic and in touch with your feelings – mine at least!

Through the last six months I’ve been a regular visitor to the Medical Museion in Copenhagen. This house keeps collections of real flesh, skeletons, bodyparts with skin and all! Studying these objects of course has a strong impression on me as a spectator. Here I’m exposed to the real bodies, which once had a life. Yet I cannot imagine the smell of the real living flesh. It’s hard to get a grip on the realness of the real. It feels like there’s a big distance between me and the items observed. I ask myself why? Why is it easier to imagine the smell and the material consistency of the artificial flesh than the real flesh and bones? Maybe it’s because all the items on the Museion have to be understood in a different way. It’s like they almost require my empathy – or else I would be a bad and uninterested human being who didn’t care at all about lives once lived. I have to make use of my thoughts in a whole different way when confronted with the real flesh! It’s not that I don’t get seduced by exhibits of dead real bodyparts. I do, but in an entirely different way. It’s interesting how art compared to a more matter-of-fact science communication works. How might art and science communication work together? How might their synergism affect the museum visitor? These are questions which open a debate about the various forms of seduction we could expect at the museum – questions I will take up in the time to come…