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.

[Exhibition website]

Gala Bent is a mother-artist-teacher living in Seattle who enjoys, among other things, this thought: between thesis and antithesis arcs the ever-loving synthesis. www.galabent.com

Oakland Museum of California http://www.museumca.org
Description of 1906 Earthquake Exhibition

About 100½ years ago a 7.8 magnitude earthquake (with some estimates placing it as high as 8.3) shook the San Francisco Bay Area, toppling buildings in what was then the American west coast’s largest city. Even worse though, a fire broke-out that ultimately devastated 80% of San Francisco and killed at least 3000 people. To commemorate this disaster, the Oakland Museum of California held an exhibition this summer from April through August. I was able to ride my bike over there and participate in the exhibit during its final week.

Unique displays included:
* Old tents that families had lived in after their houses had been destroyed.
* A shaking platform “ride” that simulated a 4.5 quake that half-tempted me into thinking that earthquakes are “fun.”
* Trolley transfers from 5:12am April 18th 1906 (the exact moment of the quake).
* A display titled “Make Your Own Seismogram” which involved something that looked like a large weighing scale, an invitation to jump on it, and a read-out at eye-level that indicated the “magnitude” of your jump on the Richter Scale. (I didn’t get to try this—some hefty people were hogging it!)

Some reasons why the fire got out of control:
* The water mains that supplied all the fire hydrants were broken during the quake. Only one at the top of a large hill (corner of Church & 20th St.) worked. Because it continued to work, some consider it a miracle, and each year descendants of the firemen hold a ceremony in which they spray-paint this “miracle fire hydrant” golden.
* The San Francisco fire chief was killed during the initial earthquake—a building collapsed onto the fire department’s roof as the chief and his wife slept in their bed.
* This fire chief was one of two people in the entire city that had access to dynamite, but he was the only one who knew how to use explosives in order to set-up proper firebreaks. Supposedly, the other guy with dynamite access started detonating explosives sort of randomly which did more harm than good (it caused the fire to spread and people were even thrown into the air!). It turned-out he was drunk. Eventually, someone sober and qualified was given access to the dynamite—an effective firebreak was finally created by dynamiting the entire street of Van Ness!