« Los Angeles, 3/24/05 - 3/28/05 | Main | Steamboy at the Arclight in El Ley, 3/29/05 »
March 30, 2005
Bodyworlds II, L.A. Science Museum, 3/25/05
Wow. I'm not sure what to say about this display. Gunter van Hagen has perfected a process that turns the flesh of dead bodies into plastic, so he's used the process to make these crazy statues. It's not too disgusting at first because the process makes the body look rather waxy. Most of the displays show organs and explain function. There's also a sizable number of diseased and injured organs. After seeing so much that can go wrong with the body, I started to feel really fragile.
The really disturbing part of the display was the full scale bodies in all sorts of strange poses. I remember Vesalius's illustrations of the body in rather fanciful poses, but some of these are really scary. One of the displays is actually cubist. The artist has pushed cross-sections of the body forward through the skin, so you can see each layer of the body. The subject is actually opening up his abdomen with his hand pulling back his skin. This one was so disturbing because you could actually tell what this man must have looked like in life. Worse, there's still some tattoo on his hand which has to make him a recognizable human to someone.
The full body displays usually depict all sorts of fanciful athletic poses with some muscle or organ moving away from the body so you can see other organs underneath. I'm not sure why we need to see a body on skis or skateboard for all eternity. It's actually very unnerving.
Nearing the end were exhibits on pregnancy showing the fetus in various states of development. Apparently someone stole one of them later that day.
The very last display showed a lateral cross-section of a fat person. I guess he wanted to show what the body looked like with all those layers of fat. It was strange to have those sections so polished that it looked like slab you could use for a table. I'm sure most people wouldn't quite recognize what it was for a long time.
Posted by deaconmf at March 30, 2005 07:03 PM
Comments
Post a comment
Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)