The Synthetic and the Tasteless: Caz Rodwell reflects on the activities of Gunther von Hagens
I became a fan of Gunther von Hagens in 2006, when his TV program Anatomy for Beginners, a grisly fusion of Grand Guignol spectacle, self-promotion and serious scientific discourse, hit the small screen on SBS. Surrounded by a studio audience, the lugubrious Professor and crew, the flayed, dismembered and gutted products of his Plastination process, and their naked live counterpoints, piloted me through a choppy sea of earnest narration and skin to skeleton dissection.
However, mine is not a single-minded fandom that sees no flaw, nor admits no criticism of the love object. As a woman of wide ranging fancies, my heart is not exclusively his, and whilst eagerly anticipating his new show Gunther's ER, I entertained myself with Roland Barthes and his Mythologies. I feel no shame; the 1950s essayed reflections upon both popular French culture and the nature of myth, is a feast of small literary delicacies, appropriate for the cocktail hour of the mind. On its back cover, John Weightman readily proclaims it to be 'a fascinating book which sticks in the mind and can lend itself to all sorts of applications'. I should have taken more note of Weightman's assessment. Mythologies lured me away from a straightforward romp through von Hagens' world, into the more shaded territory of Barthian critique, and framed a coincidental site of confluence between the wryly perceptive Gallic essayist/semiologist and dogged, Teutonic anatomist/Plastinator.
It is difficult to make written description of the phenomenon of coincidence, without it seeming an arch contrivance on the one hand and being a dull, long winded account on the other, so I'll keep it snappy. I picked up the book and it opened at page 97. The essay Plastic began deliciously thus:
'Despite having the names of Greek shepherds (Polystyrene, Polyvinyl, Polyethylene) plastic, the products of which have just been gathered in an exhibition, is in essence the stuff of alchemy. At the entrance of the stand, the public waits in a long queue in order to witness the accomplishment of the magical operation par excellence: the transmutation of matter...At one end, raw, telluric matter, at the other, the finished, human object.’
Plastination, if this were straightforward description, would be seen to possess alchemic properties located in its ability to transform the base matter of earthly corporeality into a state of odourless incorruptibility, and its role as universal solvent giving explanation to the nature of bodily structure. Von Hagens certainly takes his process and its purpose very seriously, and his grandiloquence around the subject asserts near metaphysical attributions: 'I want to bring the life back to anatomy. I am making the dead lifeful again'. Barthes cocks an ironic snook at all such pretensions, cheekily endowing the humble material, its products and the reactive reverie of the audience with mock auratic magic: 'And this amazement is a pleasurable one, since the scope of the transmutation gives man the measure of his power and since the very itinerary of plastic gives him the euphoria of a prestigious freewheeling through Nature'. By transference Von Hagens has been encompassed by the ironic coils of Barthian critique.
And so to Gunther's ER and its detailing of the trauma inflicted by the sudden onslaughts that often finish people off. On board are the same familiar figures and format, and earnest narration still travels alongside the living and the dead protagonists. But despite the addition of a gargantuan cutting machine and a cheerful young Red Cross woman, it is a more muted spectacle than its flamboyant predecessor; gory dissection and hale plastinations have been sidelined by the segmentation of grayish foil wrapped mummies and the abjection of pallid dead flesh. I found it a tad disappointing.
Contemporarily, snide barbs, insinuating tawdry Frankensteinish tampering and Rocky Horror Show high camp-ness, as well as darker accusations regarding the sourcing of his cadavers, have been directed at his black hated head. It is an intense passion that drives Von Hagens' shamanic mission to deliver enlightenment about the workings of the human body to his huge and enthusiastic audience, but obsession can, and often does, lead to transgression.
He has denied the murky finger-pointing, instead emphasising consent, and seems quite insouciant about such criticism and its effects. Ever the showman, von Hagens assured a Guardian journalist 'it is an honour to cause this controversy...I don't mind if you are controversial in your article...More people will come if you are'. And come they certainly do; for instance, the 2002 globe-trotting The Body Worlds exhibition at the Atlantis Gallery in Brick Lane, London drew huge crowds. Though strictly speaking not art, Gunther von Hagens' spectacles have aesthetic qualities that parallel modes of expression within contemporary art practice in which life, death and the body are the loci of the Grotesque, the Abject and the Bio-Genetic.
Caz Rodwell is an artist who is currently undertaking her doctorate at the Tasmanian School of Art, University of Tasmania.
Notes and references
1. 'What is plastination?' It started 25 years ago when Von Hagens, using polymer chemistry, pioneered a preservation technique that replaces water in cells with plastic material. By 1990, he had plastinated his first whole body – a process that requires 1,500 hours' work and costs up to £25,000. The result is an odourless, dry, realistic-looking corpse that endures'. -'The naked and the dead' (March 19, 2002) in EducationGuardian.com.uk, 2/5. For more information and pictures go to http://www.bodyworlds.com/en/gunther_von_hagens/life_in_science.html
2. Barthes, R. 'Plastic' (2000) Mythologies, London, Vintage Classics p.97-98
3. 'The naked and the dead' (March 19, 2002), EducationGuardian.com.uk 3/5