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Gunther von Hagens, the inventor of “plastination”, will be remembered as the man who killed the art of the 1990s. He has built a reputation that Damien Hirst had as a deadbeat artist.
After the German scientist-turned-scientist demonstrated the circulation of blood around the world in the late 90s, Hirst was still collecting sheep, sharks and pigs and displaying them as models of genius. Other artists, too, have played with animals and horror, from endoscopy videos to scenes full of Nazi brutality. But it was just art. Then came Von Hagens and his Body Worlds exhibits, using plastic to better preserve dismembered bodies. They did what Hirst and co never dared to do: they showed human corpses as something disgusting but eminently educational.
Edmund Burke, the 19th century politician and decorator, said that if you tell the audience of a tragic play that there is a group of people hanging outside, everyone will flock to the gallows. In other words, the art of fear is a race to the bottom. When Von Hagens offered real dead people to look at, opened and preserved in blood-red flesh, they drew crowds from all over the world, leaving Hirst’s generation looking like an elite. He also staged a televised autopsy in London in 2002, reviving scenes from William Hogarth’s The Reward of Cruelty, showing the dismemberment of a hanged criminal.
The difference is that Hogarth sees something terrible in the cold eyes of the anatomists as they cut up a executioner and let a dog eat his entrails. That is the difference between art and plastination. Von Hagens did not invite thoughts about death. Rather, he viewed the human body as a cheap and meaningless object described in ancient anatomy books. To be honest I found Body Worlds to be a drag.
Von Hagens, however, had a fine streak in what he did: he was a professor with a long association with the famous Heidelberg University in Germany. And of course the limits of art and science that they used have a long and terrifying history. Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo both dissected their human bodies. Michelangelo wanted to understand the muscles in order to depict the naked bodies better: the existing records of his bodies are paintings. Leonardo, however, had a real passion for science and was years ahead of university doctors in his amazing paintings and writings that dig into all aspects of the human machine from the brain to the genitals, the fetus to the eye. Her subtle vision makes the body’s worst secrets beautiful.
A close example of Von Hagens is Andrea Vesalius, the first “modern” astronomer whose 1543 book Fabrica is illustrated with notes thought to have been made by Titian’s pupil. His juxtaposition of sculpture and visual horror is very similar to the Universal: In the foreground sits an enthusiastic (male) audience while Vesalius calmly cuts up a (female) corpse.
Later, the art of anatomy became more “real” and confusing. In the 1800s and 1900s, Italian artists created unusual figures of human bodies made of wax, accurately copying colors and textures, which they claim is a work of science. La Specola, the historical museum in Florence, lets you visit hyperreal bodies to see and study until you’re sick.
Gunther von Hagens brought this tradition into our time and made it seem very natural, as if death could be done away with. At La Specola, these surprises are well known – you know these are the odd, macabre things you have to see. Body Worlds have a false acceptance that takes death as something to be concerned with.
This acceptance of death also has its artistic examples, especially in the use of bones to create impressive skeletons in many parts of Europe. In the church of Santa Maria della Concezione in Rome you can see the bones of thousands of Capuchin monks arranged in an artful way that would make Ed Gein ashamed – there are skulls, a room of thigh bones. The Marquis de Sade was surprised. You leave in disgust and confusion, wondering why he did it, and why you left.
On the other side is Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson by Dr Nicolaes Tulpas the body is torn apart it appears as an eternal mystery, the gray soul of us all. Artists, from Leonardo and Rembrandt to the younger Hirst, have seen a glimpse of life in the remains of death. But Gunther von Hagens was not an artist.
