Comments on: I see dead people

By: Stephanie Wells

Stephanie Wells — Mon, 07 Aug 2006 18:06:40 +0000

I saw the “Bodies” (as opposed to “BodyWorlds”) exhibit in Atlanta this spring, and to corroborate the distinction between the “good” and “bad” origin of the bodies, several of the museum visitors I saw were absolutely begging to sign up somewhere to donate their bodies to the exhibit after their deaths–but the curators flat-out refused, repeatedly, insisting that it was not only logistically absurd to presume that in 50 years these donors would be living at the same address, but also legally and even ethically problematic to sign up for something so controversial that might not come to pass until the volunteer was five decades and who knows how many generations of moral reconfiguration away from the day he or she signed up. Apparently the “BodyWorlds” people had no such qualms if they were takin’ names. High-minded as the “Bodies” curators may have thought they were, though, they didn’t hesitate to trot out cultural stereotypes of body norms by putting on display a woman (why not a man? all the athletes they displayed were men) to demonstrate “obesity.” Okay, she was a little thick in her spliced-open middle, but she had maybe an inch of an extra layer of the yellow fat around her–max. Is this really “obese,” docta?

And did anyone else find it creepy that although all of the bodies are clearly Chinese, which the exhibit itself declares, they jammed blue glass eyes into some of them?

By: Bryan Waterman

Bryan Waterman — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 23:36:17 +0000

Maybe it’s more appealing to be flayed and in public forever (a nice metaphor for celebrity) than to be moulderin’ in the grave. Maybe it’s better to lose your skin than to decompose.

I think BodyWorlds is technically a different exhibit, but it’s the same basic principle. BodyWorlds is in Philly now, I think. These guys tried to make themselves into the “good” exhibit–BodyWorlds, they implied, were the ones with the corpses of really mysterious origins.

By: Rachel

Rachel — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 22:45:24 +0000

This exhibit came to Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry last spring under the title BodyWorlds. Besides being an excellent big-city attraction for my visiting family (something for everyone!), the show seemed to be the perfect mixture of aesthetics, science, and ‘ick factor.’ It was like a collaborative fever dream of Damien Hirst and Thomas Harris. In addition to lots of segmented and flayed humans, visitors could see anatomized animals–including a massive horse rearing on its hind legs, frozen for eternity.

At the end of exhibit there was a little table where you could sign up to donate your own body to the polymerization process. When I looked at the list, about a hundred names were on it. Weird.