The embodiment of sensation

Body art, the display of preserved human anatomical parts sounds like a Victorian freak show. Body Worlds, an exhibition currently showing in London is both controversial and popular, writes Aidan Dunne.

Anatomy has tended to occupy an ambivalent position in both the popular imagination and medical practice. We need the information but we're uneasy about the means of acquiring it.

This has partly to do with the still-thorny question of the supply of suitable human subjects, and partly with the ethical question of cutting up bodies, something that some civilizations, regardless of their excesses in other areas, ruled out - including the Romans. The Greeks, on the other hand, eventually thought they would learn more by setting about dissecting the bodies of condemned criminals while they were still alive.

The notorious Irishmen Burke and Hare didn't help much, either. In response to the demands of the anatomists, they took to murder when grave-robbing didn't provide enough cadavers. Anatomy has also straddled the worlds of science and art in a unique way, artists and scientists consistently learning from each others' work and sometimes, as in the case of Leonardo and George Stubbs, their anatomical pursuits have been both art and science.

Prof Gunther von Hagens's Body Worlds exhibition, which is subtitled The Anatomical Exhibition of Real Human Bodies, has generated a huge level of interest since its inauguration in Germany in 1997, attracting large, paying audiences at every venue. It has also kindled a debate as to whether the exhibition should be regarded as art, science or just plain show-biz. Inevitably, there has been some negative critical response, most recently from a disapproving visitor wielding a hammer. But on the whole there hasn't been as much criticism as you might expect. Certainly people are turning up in droves to pore over his displays of organs, limbs and entire bodies in various stages of disassembly.

Gunther von Hagens owns to being eccentric and he looks the part of the mad scientist. A bit of a showman, he seems to have modelled himself on the German artist Joseph Beuys, whose uniform of a wide-brimmed hat and a fly-fisherman's vest he emulates (with a leather jerkin in place of the vest), with perhaps something of Klaus Kinski's mad-eyed stare thrown in for good measure. He is also evangelically passionate about what he is doing.

Body Worlds will be in London throughout the summer, and if early indications are anything to go by, it is going to be an incredible draw for tourists and Londoners alike. Appropriately enough, it is installed in the Atlantis Gallery in Brick Lane, an area with its own prior morbid associations, close as it is to the haunts of Jack the Ripper. He would find it a bit too crowded for his liking at the moment, as constant streams of visitors converge on and disperse from Atlantis.

Body World's unique selling point is the "Real" in the title. It hinges on an innovative plastination technique developed and patented by von Hagens at the University of Heidelberg between 1977 and 1982. A decisive moment, he records, came when he watched a sales assistant putting bacon through a slicer at the local butcher shop. Quite. He provides a reasonably detailed account of his several standard procedures, which he refines continually. They are hard to follow, particularly for a non-chemist, though it's easy to get the general point.

That is his exploration of the hitherto neglected potential of plastics in the preservation of anatomical specimens. The usual way of seeing preserved specimens is behind glass in formaldehyde. His method bypasses this by working from the inside out rather than vice versa. Bodies are, despite their apparent solidity, primarily composed of fluids - we are mostly water. von Hagens's technique is to allow acetone to replace these fluids and then - the crucial and original part of his achievement - to replace the acetone with liquid plastic by means of a vacuum process.

The result is a kind of fast, forced equivalent of what happens in the case of molecular replacement fossils. Effectively, the solidified plastic replaces the fluid.

Because this happens on an incredibly intricate, cell-by-cell basis, the plastic effectively becomes the form. What we see is, then, the real thing in so far as that is possible, but it does have a plastic look to it, because it is plastic. An added advantage is that, to put it bluntly, in place of "wet, dripping" corpses lying inertly on the table, plastination lends hard, durable form to the spongiest tissue.

In visiting Body Worlds, I never felt for a minute that I was looking at works of art. It is only fair to point out that von Hagens says that he does not regard his plastinated specimens as works of art, primarily because he takes Kant's view of art as exhibiting purposiveness without a purpose. His purpose is the revelation and communication of anatomical fact. He sees himself as a "skilled labourer," an artist only in the Beuysian sense of social artist - that is, in the sense that everyone is or should be an artist, or in the sense of being "an anatomy artist". Because, that is to say, in terms of the skills involved, it is reasonable to speak of the art of anatomy.

Yet what might be called von Hagens's aesthetic judgements are the aspects of his exhibition that are probably the most open to criticism. It's not just the grisly humour of the theatrical tableaux he devises for his specimens - the man holding his own flayed skin, the skeleton holding its suit of muscles, the body with exposed brain and nervous system poised over a chess board - its the heavy-handedness of the humour and the circus side-show quality of the set-ups.

Like the Greeks who preferred their specimens still breathing, von Hagens argues that conventional means of presentation do not adequately convey a sense of living bodies. In this, it must be admitted, he follows an old tradition in anatomical illustration, and there is the perennial association between death and jokes. Not for nothing are medical students known for their bleak sense of humour.

Other exhibits, such as those treating the body as a kind of chest of drawers, with various bits and pieces opened out, or all too literally "exploded" views, do tend to bring the butcher's shop to mind, as if the limits of precision of the technique cannot quite clean up and control the sheer meaty stuff that we are. The sections and segments are engrossing, providing an opportunity to glimpse at first hand common pathologies as well as healthy organs and limbs. You can follow a foetus through every stage of development. Several abstractions of the cardiovascular system are quite stunning. And, incidentally, nothing ever looked less likely to produce a thought than the brains on view.

No-one is going to feel short-changed by Body Worlds. It is an enormous, endlessly detailed exhibition that could absorb hours of your time. If anything, there are too many specimens, too many jokey tableaux, which is where the slight doubts as to whether edification or entertainment is the most important consideration, come into play. But, as embodied beings, embodiment is surely a legitimate object of curiosity for lay people as much as for medical professionals.

Apart altogether from the many prostheses included, mechanical considerations figure large. Leaving aside skeletal hinges and muscular levers, peering into the abdominal cavity is alarmingly like lifting the bonnet of a car to reveal a network of sealed units packed within. At this point it's customary to wonder at the marvel of natural engineering and design that is the human body. You do wonder and it certainly is a marvel but, in terms of engineering and design it is also, one is inclined to think, very strange indeed.

It is an organic machine that has evolved to cope with a specific range of environmental conditions. But, given a clean sheet of paper and a clear brief, is that the route the "intelligent designer" would have taken? Looking at the tangle of interlocking systems one can't help thinking more of Richard Dawkins's "blind watchmaker", or geneticist Steve Jones's description of the "make do and mend" characteristic of evolution. That is, evolution's relentless expediency, which leads to any useful mutation being thrown into the fray of survival. "It explains," he wrote, "why no creature is a beautifully economical solution to the problems of its own history and why life is, basically, such a mess." He's right.

Body Worlds: The Anatomical Exhibition of Real Human Bodies, is at the Atlantic Gallery, The Old Truman Brewery, 146 Brick Lane, London E1 until September 29th, 2002. Daily 9a.m.-9p.m. Admission £ 10 sterling (concessions £8 and £6 sterling) Until April 19th, Monday-Friday admission £6 sterling