By Karin Klein
Late to every trend, I missed the first Body Worlds show at the California Science Center. Also the second.
It was too much for my morbid soul, this notion of bodies preserved by replacing water with polymers, flayed and partly filleted to reveal their innermost selves, then posed jauntily for exhibit. I heard that people loved it. Ugh. Some were even inspired to donate their own bodies. Lunatic.
As it happened, the media invitation to view Body Worlds 3, now on view through Sept. 7, arrived at a vulnerable moment. I was reading Mary Roach’s delightful book, "Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers." Despite the light touch that Roach applies to the sad facts of mortal decay, none of the options she outlines sounded appealing as a way to spend eternity. Cremains, mortuary customer, med school dissection subject, crash-test dummy, organ donor: The dead may contribute to the living, but life is not kind to the dead. By the time I got to the section about long-ago experiments that involved transplanting entire human heads, polymer was sounding good. Durable. Educational. Aseptic.
Sure enough, that's what Body Worlds is all about. The cadavers, (relatively) whole or in parts, are fascinating, sometimes beautiful and inspiring, and remarkably low in ick factor. They could be plastic or ceramic; when you see them, you have to keep reminding yourself that they're dead people, and then you get to pat yourself on the back for how well you're taking this. A practically skinless man is leaping over a hurdle, though given the lack of clearance, he is perpetually headed toward really hurting his private parts. His aerodynamically sliced brain, however, seems like overkill. There's no apparent educational reason for this. It is, I deduce, Art.
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