Tuesday, January 2nd, 2007
Knit together in your mother’s womb. The phrase is full of intricate wonder, but also cozy, domestic warmth. A walk through the touring exhibit “Bodies,” explores the knit-together wonder that is the human machine, but in a fashion that keeps cozy or sentimental feelings at arm’s length. The big draw is that real human bodies have been used to display the interlocking systems of the body. They’ve done this by replacing the water that makes up such a significant portion of human anatomy with a polymer that allows them to keep their form miraculously (and also without scent or risk of decay).
Physically, the exhibit is a spot lit, plexiglass cased, notated museum set-up, designed to allow viewers to feel safely distanced from what could be a spookily gory affair. On one figure, all of the individual muscles are splayed off of arms and legs, with the resulting appearance of a set of whirring fans. On each figure with a head, eyebrows, lips and eyelids have been carefully replaced over the sinews of facial muscles, to make them a bit more readable, a bit less gruesome. Two figures pull away from one another, holding hands so that they can lean out like John Travolta and his co-star spinning in “Saturday Night Fever.” It turns out that this is the skeleton and musculature of 
the same man—a doppelganger dancing with itself. This, and many other poses, are intellectually beautiful, as they break into the background of all of the workings that we take for granted as we walk, run, stretch and jive with our unbelievable bodies. The visual/aesthetic effect, on the other hand, is still uncomfortably close to… well… meat. Anyone who is sensitive to suffering and has made the choice to continue to eat meat knows the tension of preparing food from the bodies of animals. I felt this tension, strangely, as I walked through this exhibit. I could choose to think about the lives and deaths of the real people standing flayed and dissected before me, or I could casually dismiss these thoughts, and imagine that they were just illustrations—models disconnected from actual living and breathing creatures.
The only reprise from this mild but persistent battle was the room of veins and arteries. A slightly different process is used—the vascular highways are filled and the tissue itself is taken away, casting in space the paths of blood through various organs. Floating branches glow as if lit from within. One viewer saw bronchial tubes cast in clear white-blue, and sighed, “It’s like Christmas!” And my response, which I’d been waiting for throughout my time in the exhibit, was awe. Somehow, removing more of the “meat” allowed me to be captivated by the delicate beauty of the human body… a beauty that shows up again and again in interactions with the living and breathing specimens that we walk among every day.
