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(Body Worlds and the Brain is currently at Telus World of Science, Vancouver, end date unannounced.)
This is a wonderfully educational exhibit – for someone who has never opened an anatomy book or looked at pictures of our insides. That rare person, if adult, should not only hanker for the third anatomical dimension, but be willing to part with the outrageous sum of $26.00 for admission (your reviewer didn’t blanch at the innards on display, but nearly fainted at the price).
“Body Worlds and the Brain” follows up the 2006 exhibit “Body Worlds”. It features preserved and odorless human bodies and parts thereof with associated educational text. “Plastination” is the repellently modern name given to the tissue preservation process patented by anatomist, multi-millionaire and showman Gunther von Hagens, originator of this odd exhibit, whereby plastics are injected into human tissues after the water and fat are removed. It allegedly takes up to 1,500 man hours to plastinate a cadaver. You can sign up to donate your body for this rapt post-mortem attention. And you can buy a fully plastinated corpse if you have a great deal of money and can prove you’re engaged in science and not a less noble pursuit.
Some controversy, but no charges or convictions, has attended Herr von Hagens because of a public autopsy he performed, against the law, for an audience of five hundred in Britain, because of the nature of the exhibits, and because of snags encountered while procuring corpses from Kyrgyzstan, Siberia and China. He is permanently attached to his black fedora, even during autopsies, and, appropriately, a hemophiliac.
It’s difficult to categorize this odd parade of muscles, bones and viscera. While advertised as a sort of science education, it achieves more than that: for viewers stuffed with images from history, films and television, some very unfortunate, indeed ghastly, associations will likely be made. It is as bizarre as it is instructive. Add to that the little pre-admission speech visitors receive about maintaining an atmosphere of quiet respect (“please turn off your cell phones….”) to honour who have gave their bodies for this exhibit, and the viewer may well wonder whether she is in a morgue, a mausoleum, a museum or – considering the crowds attending -- a freak-show midway.
Some bodies in the exhibit are dramatically posed (baseball hitter, pair of skaters, footballer, etc). One has little drawers cut into the torso for the pop-up book effect.
The exhibit is advertised as focusing on the brain, and yes, there are brains and slices on display. Yet the theme seems half-hearted, perhaps because the brain is visually boring. The lurid has more eye appeal, and you could just as easily conclude that the exhibit’s theme is smoking (the obligatory comparison between the lungs of smokers, non-smokers and, for added horror, coal-miners) or cancer (tumours in situ and in wild metastases abound).
Plastination has a way to go. Anyone who’s boned a chicken can attest that giblets, sinews and muscles have a damp, engorged quality. Even the gristle gleams. Of that vital sheen and colour you will find little here. The preserved sinews and tendons look as dry as turkey jerky, the bladders and esophagi as brittle as paper lanterns. Muscles have lost their meaty heft. Plastination, as an esthetic enterprise, seems to have fetched up in a desert. Playwright Jean Kerr’s line comes to mind:” I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That's deep enough. What do you want, an adorable pancreas?” Well, yes, we would like those organs to look adorable, or at least lustrous, if we must delve below the epidermis. What awe might be provoked in viewing our inner selves is vitiated by this eerie dryness.
“Sensitive” visitors are warned that eyeballs and genitals “remain”, yet surely the eyeballs are not real. The penises are, however, and one in particular, even though it’s skinned, will cause a sense of inadequacy in most male visitors. But the glans is a dry as parchment and about the same colour, so that’s some consolation.
Penises and spectacle aside, arguably the most fascinating exhibit is also one of the tiniest: a four week old fetus complete with minute, gauzy umbilicus and placenta. White, gelatinous and no bigger than a grain of rice, it nevertheless has infinitesimal buds that, in a living fetus, will become arms and legs. It reveals life as utterly implausible, magical; no plastination needed. It was impossible to look at the fetus, and then at the crowd and not think “This becomes that?”
Further to that: no review is complete without some comment on the people attending the exhibit – you won’t be there alone, will you? It was a Saturday, and the exhibit was running at full capacity. Overfull, in fact. Most of the crowd was hushed, whispering. Was it awe, respect, repugnance, confusion -- or was it the search for significance in something popular, like attending a performance of “Phantom of the Opera”?
All were not hushed, though. Because of the exhibit’s traffic flow, be warned that you are more or less forced to stick with those admitted at the same time, no matter how bad their manners. Despite the funereal atmosphere, one man talked non-stop, airing his alleged anatomical expertise, and read all the signs out loud to a girl he was with -- who, one assumes, could read -- in a particularly penetrating voice. Inevitably, another was bellowing on his cell phone: “Oh, you’re through? Are you through? Do you want to get a bite at Subway? Oh? Huh? I said do you want to get a bite at Subway?” and so on. You can bet your reviewer had a hitherto oblivious guard shut him up, but not before it occurred that the cell phone talker might be skinned, defatted, drained and plastinated, then mounted, complete with his phone, in a cautionary tableau, similar to that about the evils of smoking.
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