Here's a link to an article in Salon (site pass required) to what is one of the most morbid sounding displays I've ever heard off. Imagine an art gallery where people's bodies (which could in fact be people who haven't given their consent, say, like, executed chinese prisoners whose organs may have been illegally harvested by their government?) are posed on things like bicycles with their skin peeled away and various organs displayed.
Personally, I feel you can call anything art, but just because someone takes a crap on a cinder block and call it art doesn't really mean it is.
June 05, 2005
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Well, setting aside the issue of where the bodies came from (and I'll admit that is some cause for concern), I think these exhibits sound absolutely fascinating. The author of the Salon article compares them to sensationalist sideshow displays, but I'm thinking more of the illustrations in Grey's Anatomy and surgery programs on the Discovery Channel. To those of us who aren't particularly interested in anatomy, these works lead us to think about ourselves as mortal, physical bodies -- a perspective Western civilization has often avoided emphasizing. And what else is good art supposed to do but lead us to consider the usual in unusual ways?
I admit, I am interested in the show, if I could get over the grotesque nature of it. Personally, I have trouble seeing it as anything more than a circus sideshow, as sozialismus mentions, instead of as a clinical study.
What unnerves me is the ethical problem of whether or not we are "respecting" the dead here. It's not a case of scientific study, or of remains that have been preserved so you can hold them and see them, but we are taking the bodies of dead people and posing/cutting/peeling them in such a way as to provoke a reaction in people.
If these people who were on display volunteered to have this done to their bodies after their death, I would not have a big problem with it. But the article certainly begs the question as to where these bodies came from.
After all, how would you feel if somebody took one of your dead relatives, plasticised them, sawed them in half, and posed them to look like the two halves were shaking hands with themselves?
I was going to say that a corpse is just that, but there *are* some things I would consider inappropriate, so I'll concede that. Still, this isn't like they're playing with the bodies, there's a purpose, and a useful one there, and I think that differentiates it.
"Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter." - Yoda
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