The Anatomists

Academic Dr John Molyneux gives his opinions on Gunter von Hagens and Body Worlds.

Dr John Molyneux is Senior lecturer in Historical and Theoretical Studies at the School of Art, Design and Media, University of Portsmouth, art critic and historian, Author of Rembrandt and Revolution and articles on 'The Legitimacy of Modern Art', 'Young British Art', Tate Modern, Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock.

Von Hagens' work seems to me to raise issues in two distinct categories:

The first concerns the legality and ethics regarding dead bodies. How were the corpses obtained? Who consented to or authorised their use in this way? What is von Hagens' precise medical/scientific status? What is the precise status of his institution? What is their previous history? Is this primarily a profit-making exercise? And so on.

I am not in a position to investigate these issues or pronounce on them but I have to say that what I have seen in the programme aroused my suspicions, if only because these obvious questions are not answered or addressed.

The second category concerns the claims of these models to be art. There are, of course, very long-standing links between anatomy, dead bodies, death and art. One thinks not only of Leonardo da Vinci's anatomical studies, but of Rembrandt's great painting 'The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicholaes Tulp' (in which the identity of the corpse – a recently executed criminal – has been established); of Theodore Gericault, whose studio was littered with corpses and severed limbs in preparation for his masterpiece 'The Raft of the Medusa'; right down to Damien Hirst with his dead sharks, cut up cows and pigs, and a photograph of himself with a dead head (apparently taken at a morgue). Indeed, when reviewing the Sensation exhibition [young British artists from the Saatchi Collection] in 1998, I commented, on Hirst's use of real dead animals, that: 'It's purpose... is to force a face-to-face confrontation with the brute fact of death on a blasé modern audience for whom images of death are super-abundant while its reality becomes ever more removed and hidden. Short of exhibiting an actual human corpse this was about as far as Hirst could go.'

However, as far as I can see, von Hagens' plastination does not belong in this tradition at all – ie, it is not art. If we start from the way the work is positioned and the claims it makes about itself, its bid for artistic status is very tentative and limited. Von Hagens, in dress and manner, poses as the famous German artist Joseph Beuys, and there is the odd reference to anatomy art, but that is all. In the main the models are presented as educational aids, like models in a science or natural history museum. And this, it seems to me, is the category to which they belong.

The main point is they function primarily to convey factual information (like a map, diagram or illustration) not to make an emotional, moral, conceptual or aesthetic statement as art does. Of course, such models, diagrams, etc, have an aesthetic element to them but this does not make them art, because the aesthetic component is subordinate to the instructional, factual function.

As educational aids, are these models useful or necessary? This is a question I am not qualified to judge, but I don't see why the use of real bodies improves on a synthetic model.

Nor do I personally find them, as models, aesthetically pleasing. I am not shocked by this stuff but the more I think about it, the more suspicious I become that von Hagens may just be a huckster.