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An exhibition organized by the National Academy of Sciences
Visionary Anatomies and the Great Divide
Part V: Our Cadavers, Ourselves, or the Return of the Anatomical Repressed
(from the exhibition catalogue, available for download for free)
This essay began with the assertion that we think of ourselves as anatomical beings, a self-image derived from the work that anatomists and artists have collaboratively produced over the centuries. We all have multiple identities, some loudly proclaimed, some understated or even implicit. Anatomical identity is one of the latter. It’s so pervasive, so routine, that we don’t tend to notice it. In the year 1700 most people in Europe and North America thought of themselves as an unstable amalgam of meat, spirit, reason, and corruption, or as a microcosm of the universe. Only a thin upper crust of learned physicians and gentlemen had ever seen a detailed anatomical illustration or thought of themselves as anatomical entities. That is obviously no longer the case—for many Americans, the first unit on human anatomy occurs in kindergarten—but even if we had never been taught anatomy in school, we would still see the anatomical body in the doctor’s office, magazine ads, and television shows, and see our own bodies represented in X rays, and other imaging technologies. So the subject of anatomical representation and the boundaries between art and science is not purely academic: it has reference to our own experience.
If we believe anatomy is our inner reality, then science has the most legitimate claim to be the highest authority over it. But the artist also has claims to be a privileged representer of anatomical truth. Since the advent of romanticism in the early nineteenth century, the artist has assumed the role of prophet, divinatory, a reader of augers and signs. And such is arguably still the case, even in the era of modernism and postmodernism. In traditional academic art, which still has many adherents, anatomy is the technical knowledge out of which the artist crafts representations of the human figure. The new art anatomy is more conceptual. It plays with anatomy as a vocabulary of selfhood, an emblem of human reality, the inner self.
Katherine Du Tiel for example projects anatomical illustrations onto the human body and plays with the discrepancy between the real body and the representation. Du Tiel highlights the discrepancy by making deliberate mistakes. She projects a front onto a back, a woman onto a man, a side onto a front, and sometimes she shows written labels and things out of scale, just to let us know that we’re not looking at some new technology of anatomical something else.
For the new conceptual anatomical artists, anatomy is simultaneously the icon of the body as it exists under the regime of Reason, with a big R—and the undomesticated body itself. We identify with the images of anatomy, which are fashioned from real bodies, but our identification doesn’t exactly fit, always requires adjustment. The works of Damien Hirst, Marc Quinn, and other now-fashionable anatomical artists seem to say that the self is a fragile construction, cobbled together from fallible technologies and a biological given of flesh and fluids, liable to breakage and spoilage. Hirst famously created sculptures out of actual dissections of animals. Quinn made a portrait bust of himself, using his own frozen blood. The piece, entitled Self, would have a very different meaning had it been made from stage blood instead of the real stuff. Ditto with Hirst’s animal dissections: their realness is the whole story.
Quinn and Hirst are often accused of attention-mongering, vulgarity, cheap sensationalism, and an unhealthy self-preoccupation amounting to narcissism. They were, of course, introduced to the American and British public in a controversial group show called Sensation. The charge has some justification: given the crowded cultural marketplace in art, it’s no surprise that artists and exhibitors will resort to almost any subject or medium to get attention. But let’s not forget, Vesalius and his colleagues and successors also vied for attention, for readers and students and patronage, and also depended on their ability to amaze: the science of anatomy, with its dissection performances and strange representations of dissection, was an early modern version of the “stupid human trick” (a very smart stupid human trick). It’s easy to resent and deplore the way that anatomical artists recruit our attention, and capitalize on it. Our culture privileges reason and spirit over the flesh, and substance over surface — even as it revels in fleshiness and sumptuous outer wrappings and coverings. On that basis perhaps we can indict anatomical art for bad faith. But it’s a fact of life: in our society, only the flashiest grandstanders can make themselves visible in the blizzard of competing cultural productions. The new anatomical artists try to play it both ways: they want to make us think, but also make us look. Like pornography, the viewer’s response to their body art is immediate, a conditioned response. We want to see. (And maybe also to feel superior to what we see.)
But to stop there is too easy. Why is anatomical art so popular in the present moment? Why does the new conceptual art anatomy speak so powerfully to us? Here’s my theory:
The anatomical identity that we carry around with us coexists with, and even infuses, other representations of the body. We swim in a sea of body representations: images of beautiful bodies, funny bodies, athletic bodies, dead and dying bodies, bodies on television and film and the web, and in newspapers and magazines. In this media multiverse, we are constantly exhorted to attend to our bodies: how we look, how we feel. And in response, we survey and shape and transform and fret over ourselves. We diet and train at the gym and do physical exercise, yoga, swing dance, martial arts, more than any other people in history. We examine ourselves for acne and breast cancer and a thousand other serious and not so serious conditions. We are continually directed to monitor our bodies, and we do.
Yet we also feel disembodied. We spend much of our lives sitting in cars, or in front of computers and television screens, doing almost nothing with our bodies. We substitute packaged versions of doing for more fully experiential activities: we open a plastic bag and feel like we’re cooking. We’re protected from the experience of pain by painkillers. Medical and funerary professionals nervously place a veil between us and death and the dead body. Not surprisingly, we feel deprived of bodily life; our bodies are absent.
And we need something strong to reconnect ourselves to our bodies, to feel contact with life and with death. An aura of realness — the real body, real anatomies, the real self — emanates from the sculptures of Hirst and Quinn, and the Mutter Museum, Hunterian Museum, the National Museum of Health and Medicine, and other anatomical displays. Art is good for you, science is good for you. So the moral justification is there, but what brings the customers through the turnstyle is the pleasure of looking at real bodies and body parts, even two-dimensional visual representations based on “the real body” — a species of voyeurism, or maybe narcissism. Anatomists, microscopists, molecular biologists, know such pleasures, but they would rather not publicly avow or acknowledge them. At least not since Govard Bidloo and his successor anatomists began to draw the line, some 250 years ago.
That refusal has a positive as well as a negative valence. We believe that respect for the dead should be a universal right: anatomy’s culture of discretion is not only a defining characteristic of the contemporary profession, it is also our version of funerary honor. And the boundary that helps define our version of human dignity and human rights. We believe that it’s wrong to sell our body parts or bodies, wrong to make shows out of the dead, or parts thereof, for strictly commercial gain.
These ideas are deeply rooted in anatomical history. For centuries, anatomists took their bodies where they wanted, and made sport of them, to the distress of a large segment of the public. In Britain and America, there was much resistance to the anatomical taking of bodies: in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, anatomists knew that transgressions might provoke a crowd of angry townspeople to storm the school and take back their dead. The profession never fully acknowledged the legitimacy of their opponents’ objections, but as their source of cadavers switched from illegal bodysnatching to legal (but still involuntary) appropriation of the bodies of the poor, a shroud of discretion descended upon the anatomical enterprise. That discretion has, if anything, deepened, now that anatomists are faced with the practical need to show respect for their cadavers so that they won’t offend the feelings of those who voluntarily donate their bodies, and the need to adhere to still the bioethical standards of informed consent that came in the wake of the exposure of Nazi and Tuskegee medical experiments. (The recent UCLA body parts scandal in the United States and Alder-Hey Scandal in Great Britain demonstrate that the older imperative also continues to motivate the anatomical culture of professional discretion: the desire to cover up the abuses of the profession.)
Not surprisingly then, the anatomical profession, and a segment of the public, is alarmed when anatomical artists rip off the shroud. They are professional provocateurs, who smuggle bodies and body parts across the boundaries of propriety, and use them as effigies to mark the spot. Vesalius and Hunter and Bidloo didn’t have this principle: they felt free to take the bodies of criminals, outcasts, and indigents and use them as they wished. The moral boundary was then still unmarked. Whereas now, the moral boundary — like the boundary between art and science — seems almost a fact of nature. And we take pleasure and umbrage when anatomical artists put on their extravaganzas, and remind us, in both cases: not so.
© 2004 Michael Sappol
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