Bodies in Plastic Remain in Plastic

Hello, Everybody—nice seeing you again.

I had a birthday last Friday (1/27), which brought up a lot of morose reflection about aging, decline, and my inevitable demise—maybe not the best state of mind for viewing a show of preserved corpses. But as a nostalgic gesture to the time when I was the little News of the Dead girl on WFMU, I decided to go see “Bodies: The Exhibition” at the South Street Seaport as my birthday treat. Tickets to “Bodies” are expensive—about $25—which meant that Sluggo couldn’t go with me, but D.J. Kelly kindly came along. This turned out to be a really good thing, in that I had company without having to listen to a lot of griping about the South Street Seaport, and long lines, and tourists.

The South Street Seaport is heinous, though. It’s the little corral where they send tourists who are most comfortable in a mall just like the mall back home, but with boats. As we got in line to buy tickets for the exhibit, I was thinking I’d made a bad mistake. There were a lot of tourists. If you don’t want to stand in line to buy tickets at the door, you can get them in advance online [www.bodiestheexhibition.com] or by calling a snotty French-speaking woman in Montreal. But those tickets are for timed entry, and between the various New York transit systems and D.J. Kelly’s very special space-time continuum, I knew timed entry was not an option for us. As it turned out, the exhibit is very well run and the lines moved quickly. We were inside within 20 minutes.

There were three very interesting things about “Bodies:” 1. The human body. It really is an incomprehensibly amazing thing. 2. The respect shown by the crowd of viewers. The only time I heard anyone make any jokes at all was at the vitrine with the bladder specimen—“No wonder girls have to go all the time!” (But that was D.J. Kelly and me talking, and everyone else there was pretty good about it.) 3. The incredible preservation process used for the specimens in the show.

I’ve always been interested in the various methods that have been used to keep bodies around after death (not to mention why anyone would want to)—embalming, mummifying, freezing, freeze-drying, throwing someone in a peatbog for 2,000 years—which has led me to a tangential interest in the different ways that medical specimens have been preserved and presented. I think the Mutter Museum 
in Philadelphia is the best place to see a little overview of that. But plastination has got ‘em all beat. Basically, plastination involves replacing all bodily fluids with plastic polymers. But of course it’s sort of complicated, or else everyone would be doing it. The people in Brooklyn who do things like putting dead Grandma out on the corner in a shopping cart would be plastinating dead Grandma into a lifelike TV-watching posture and using her as a decorative element in their home.

Plastination was developed in 1977 by Professor Gunther von Hagens, who figured out how to get around the fact that body fluids and plastic polymers are chemically incompatible. First, he used acetone, the stinky solvent used at nail salons, to replace all the water in a specimen. Then he put the specimen into a vacuum chamber and lowered the air pressure until the acetone boiled. At the instant it vaporized, the acetone was sucked out of the specimen and the resulting vacuum sucked in some kind of plastic goo. Then the specimen was posed, and the plastic was allowed to cure until it hardened, and —Voila!—a flayed and filleted corpse going up for a jumpshot.

Since he first came up with this process, Herr Professor von Hagens has set up several plastination facilities around the world and produced a series of exhibits of his work called “Body Worlds.” As I understand it, “Bodies: The Exhibition” is the work of some plastinator-come-lately, but is very similar to von Hagens’ shows. “Body Worlds” is in Philadelphia until April 23, and “Bodies: the Exhibition” is in New York (if you count South Street Seaport as New York) through April. I don’t think it matters very much which one you see, although if you go to the one in Philadelphia you could also visit the Mutter Museum while you were there and make a little Gothy weekend out of it.

Considering how morose I was feeling about my own mortality, I was sort of surprised at how hard it was to remember that the exhibits in “Bodies” were, in fact, human corpses. They just looked so plastic—because, of course, they are. I tried reminding myself that these were once-living people and, although the nice young lady standing at the exit answering questions and letting people hold a plastinated human brain told me that all the people involved had donated their bodies to science
and were okay with having me stare at their plastinated naughty bits, I wasn’t sure. I don’t think I would want to end up demonstrating the prosopagnosic fusiform gyrus or anything, but maybe these folks would be proud to know how much they’ve done to educate the general public about anatomy. People spent hours looking at “Bodies;” I’m pretty sure that if the same information had been presented in a book, they wouldn’t have bothered reading it.

My thuglife friend K-Lubb went to see “Bodies,” and complained about the general lack of supercreepy messed-up specimens, but that was one of the things I liked about it: It’s not exploitive, it’s not a freak show. Mostly, it reminded me of art, like when I saw Damien Hirst’s cut-up cow. I did hold the plastinated human brain on my way out, but it didn’t do much for me—it was smaller and heavier than I thought, but otherwise it was pretty much like any other hard plastic ball. The frozen head that artist Marc Quinn made out of his own blood was a whole lot creepier, which I guess is kinda what makes that art and makes “Bodies: The Exhibition” more like science.

Thanks for reading my really late blog posting this week, and may God bless.

Comments

[SA]

Hi iowa.

I liked your article on the freak show.
I use the term as it fits the show, as it’s a ‘for profit’ show, purely entertainment, it’s not for education because it is not some kind of public service. The publicity makes you think its done to make you aware of the damage done by life’s little choices, but seriously posing plastic stiffs as athletes… come on! Surely that means to exercise will make you stiff, na mate the show is a disgrace.

Von Hagan is neither a Dr or a Proff, in the authentic use of a degree, he has got a diploma, but it came from the same factory as ‘Bodies’ got their stiffs. He’s a fake, while the bodies use to be Real Chinese political prisoners, they were executed and processed in one of the three Von Hagan factories, two in Dalian China and one in an Ex Russian state ( Ktycoanastane or somewhere).

China executes 3 700 prisoners a year, plenty of organs for transplants and plenty of fresh stiffs for Von Frankenstein to plastinate.

Sorry to break this to you like this, no one likes to be fooled, and plenty have been, but you saw that they were all Chinese right? All male Right? And they were all under thirty, how closely did you look?.

How many bodies get donated here by the under thirty?

Aside from the ones you saw at 'Bodies' there are others Scope Fantastic and Amazing etc all with a catalogue of 20 souls all Chinese and all under thirty and all the exhibitors all say the bodies were donated, it’s a lie.

However Its not the only way Von Hagan deals in death, he also supplies museums and medical research, but a set of stiffs for the freak show market is his best con yet.

He tried showing them as art. But no one wanted to have them in a gallery

Now that you know all this and just to confirm your impression, you now know they were Chinese and you now know they were all men now you have to realize they all come from a country that has a one child policy.

How do you think we can get them back to their grieving parents for a decent burial?