CULTURE SHOCK: The 'Bodies' exhibition may leave some moral questions unanswered but it also opens our eyes to the delicate beauty of human existence
JOHN KEATS famously insisted that "beauty is truth, truth beauty". The implication is that nothing can be beautiful if it is deceitful or morally compromised. One of the unsettling things about the controversial Bodiesexhibition that opened in Dublin last week is that it challenges this assumption. The questions that have been raised about the ethics of the exhibition by Muiris Houston, Gay Mitchell and others are entirely valid and have never been convincingly answered. We know that the bodies come from an institute in Dalien in China. We know that the institute says they were the unclaimed corpses of people who died from natural causes. We know that even if this is entirely true, it does not address the issue of consent. If the treatment of the dead is a mark of civilisation, there are very good reasons to feel queasy about Bodies.
Yet – and this is the source of the unease – the effect of the exhibition is not at all what you might expect from any consideration of its ethics. I went expecting and, to be honest hoping, to hate it. I wanted to hate it because the means by which it has been created and the cold language of its creators (the bodies are not people but “specimens”) really ought to result in something tacky, ghoulish and obscene. In Keats’s terms, the lack of moral truth ought to result in ugliness. But it doesn’t. In this case it creates something haunting, moving, beautiful and, strangest of all, humane.
In trying to understand why this should be, I kept thinking of the images – the terrible, unavoidable images – of the Gaza massacre. That film and those photographs – the children burned like overdone meat, the scattered limbs, the bodies heaped like rubble – are the emblems of what our culture does to the body. And of the way that obscenity is consumed at a safe distance, creating, according to taste, feelings of rage or coldness, compassion or helplessness. We may say that we treat the body as a sacred thing, and give to every death the holiness of a profound and private event, but we don’t. Our culture is awash with images, real and virtual, of the body being abused, violated, tortured and shattered.
The instinctive reaction when you hear about Bodiesis to assume that it is merely another part of this cheapening process of desensitisation. And, at first glance, it is. The bodies on show have been flayed, opened, dissected, dismembered. They have been treated, in one sense, the way a torturer treats a victim. But the effect is not in fact ghoulish or macabre or even voyeuristic.
This is partly the effect of the plastination process, which works a little like the bog water that has created such extraordinarily well preserved bodies in some parts of Europe, including Ireland. If you go see the Tollund Man in Silkeborg museum in Denmark, you are confronted with two things at the same time. One is the remains of a real and specific individual. The other is the transformation of that individual into a cipher of human immortality. The dead person becomes a mysterious survival, existing in some no-man's land between death and life. The dead people in Bodieshave this same kind of ghostly presence.
The other factor that’s at work is the sheer wonder of the body itself. Most of us know the basics of our anatomy, but to see the actual systems and networks of muscles or nerves, of blood vessels or glands, is to feel a genuine sense of awe. There are some quite dazzling exhibits, in which only the translucent blood vessels, illuminated in an eerie red, are on show. They seem delicate and exotic, like a marvellous and extremely rare plant or a weird and fabulous geological formation. Instead of being ghoulish or garish, the display is a stunning rebuke to the goriness of our culture. Who, it seems to ask, could bear to damage this staggering creation? Moving through these anatomical layers, there is an accumulating sense of disbelief that all of this complexity could not merely function, but do so for billions of people every day. You start to become conscious of your breath, of your heartbeat, of your pulse. You get a very direct sense of how remarkable it is that you, or anybody else, exists at all.
And all of this seems to me to be quite literally humanising. It provides, as no amount of abstract modelling could do, a visual and visceral sense of Hamlet’s exclamation “What a piece of work is a man! . . . in form and moving how express and admirable! . . . the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!” We have moved way, quite rightly, from the notion of our species as the lords of creation, the apex of evolution. But it does no harm to be reminded that we are pretty amazing animals.
We need that reminder because we have cheapened the human body so much through violence, pornography and cosmetic "enhancement". In a better world, where we treated human bodies with the tenderness they deserve, Bodieswould be merely a freak show. In the world we have, it works as a strange, morally compromised, but powerful reminder of what we are.
fotoole@irishtimes.com
