But is it art?

“The human body is a work of art.” It’s a phrase that has been around for centuries and has now been said so often that most agree without even thinking. If you’ve ever had a hippy art teacher (yes, I am aware that adding the word “hippy” in front of art teacher is redundant) you’ve heard it a million times and nodded before going back to your pastel drawing of fruit which, for some reason, always seems to be arranged precariously on top of a Greek column. Honestly, who eats fruit like that?

But as a society, how committed are we to this premise? Once we’re dead, preserved, dissected, bisected and flayed is our form still something to be awed? For most people, I imagine, the answer would be no. Michelangelo’s David and his glorious marble abs or The Venus de Milo, whose armlessness only enhances her breast size; those are universally considered works of art. The Bodies Exhibition, under the guise of a scientific exposition, peels back the curtains (or, perhaps more accurately, skin) from our standard of the fig-leafed Adonis to show us a different side of splendor. True, those of a certain mindset will go and find themselves in a formaldehyde-soaked horror show, nevertheless I, and many others, were taken in by the fascinating displays of bone and sinew and veins. The bodies themselves are arranged in poses and with expressions they might have taken in life. Some are arranged, like the football and basketball playing bodies, to show the prowess of the muscle and ligament in action; however others are clearly put together with an almost Lovecraftian morbid sense of humor. One specimen is a man who has been severed in half vertically from head to pelvis in order to high-five himself. Another body lies in a glass display sliced up like deli meat to show every cross section of the viscera.



There is a need that is innate in people, even in those who don’t admit it, for grotesquery. Its what calls more to the freak show than to the art museum, what slows us down when driving by an accident with necks craned to the left while a garden passes by unnoticed on our right, and its why our ears prick up more to the whine of a passing siren than they do to a symphony. Our mortality is a wall that stands ahead of us. Behind that wall is a mystery and it will remain one and all we have to survive on is scraps of knowledge about death. We live for those tiny peaks through the cracks in the wall.

I am not suggesting that a violent car wreck should be considered art; I am suggesting that true art exposes something about us personally or about humanity in general even if it’s something we’d rather not see in ourselves.When you’re at The Bodies Exhibition, staring at the desiccated tissue and dead valves that was once a living human being, the question you should be asking yourself is, “Why can’t I stop staring?”


© 2010 Dan Howard.
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