It’s still dark in Stuttgart, but already a line is forming outside the Hanns-Martin Shleyer convention hall for the 6 a.m. opening of Body Worlds, the startling and controversial exhibit created by German anatomist Gunther von Hagens. One promotional brochure describes Body Worlds as “a medical dictionary in three dimensions,” and no doubt a few visitors have come to see precisely that. It is a fair guess, however, that most viewers by far are here to behold the spectacle of authenticity promised in the touring exhibition’s tagline: “The Anatomical Exhibition of Real Human Bodies.”
Real human bodies. Von Hagens has invented a chemical process that effectively transforms the tissues and organs of cadavers into a lifelike, pliable plastic, which he then painstakingly dissects and places on display. His works are not pallid husks laid out on slabs. They are fleshy pink, peeled, pulled apart, and displayed in dynamic, even outrageous poses. A figure labeled Muscle Man stands upright, flayed bare and proudly dangling his full cloak of skin from one hand. “Reclining Woman in the Eighth Month of Pregnancy” is as advertised: a Venus-like figure lying on her side, gazing at the viewer and casually displaying her opened midsection to reveal a fully developed fetus.
This is not your grandmother’s funeral parlor. Von Hagens has exploded the human form, and with it, virtually every accepted convention about the proper relationship between the living and the dead. To his detractors, the result is a violation, an abomination even: Human remains deserve a great deal more respect than Body Worlds seems to confer with its pole-vaulting, goal-leaping, basketball-dribbling poses. Von Hagens has fended off Catholic picketers and accusations of grave robbing. In London, where the exhibit ran for 11 months in 2002 and 2003, tabloid headlines ranged from the hesitantly charitable (“Gratuitous gore—or the most amazing art exhibition ever?”) to the openly dismissive (“Dr. Death and his traveling freak show”). Many of his professional colleagues are especially skeptical. “It’s hotdog anatomy,” says Gretchen Worden, curator of the Mütter Museum, the Philadelphia College of Physicians’ 19th-century museum of pathology. “He’s playing with dead bodies.”
