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Brian Sewell

Art critic

Anatomy is an ancient science, Greek in origin in the Western world, though the evidence of human sacrifice and body conservation suggests that in some elementary sense it was known in primitive societies elsewhere. It was – with art, architecture, philosophy and literature – revived in the Renaissance, then as much the province of the painter and the sculptor as the surgeon, and so it remained into the 20th century (the Royal Academy of Art in Piccadilly still appoints a Professor of Anatomy). There is thus some arguable foundation for Gunther von Hagens' claim that his work as an anatomist is both art and science, both aesthetic and educational in purpose.

There are precedents. Leonardo's drawings of bared bones and sinews, the penis and the womb, the skull and heart, are undoubtedly science as well as art. The 19th century Italian wax models of the human body, stripped of the surface seductions to reveal the soft organs in the cavities, in taking on the classical idioms of sculpture are undoubtedly art as well as science. But von Hagens goes much further, perhaps indeed too far, in using the real body for his models. If his work is to be interpreted as art, then von Hagens must do more than present us with the real body ingeniously preserved in the attitudes and relationships that we recognise as the formal language of past sculptors; and if his work is to be interpreted as scientific demonstration, then the facts of anatomy should not be obscured by that heightened and exaggerated, indeed artificial, formal language. His arguments that he is both artist and scientist are false justifications for what, at base, is nothing but showmanship.

What we have in von Hagens is a technician who has discovered a means of perfectly preserving the body, human and animal, so that it is virtually indestructible, inviolate to the normal processes of decay. As an anatomist his work is unremarkable: he has discovered nothing, identified nothing that we do not know already of the function of the body, contributed to no cure or remedy. His only contribution to the science lies in plastination, which renders the body rigid enough to display in attitudes that show muscles, tendons and bones in action. These, it might be argued, if owned by every medical school or art academy, render further anatomy all but superfluous – except that it is essential for student surgeons to learn the smell and feel of bodies, to practise enough to overcome revulsion and taboo.

It is with revulsion and taboo, however, that von Hagens defeats his defence that he is a scientist demystifying and democratising science, that the layman without a tutor can learn anatomy from his plastinated cadavers and become an expert. He depends on revulsion and taboo to marshal his audience. The presentation of his bodies – in living colour, so to speak – in the nightmare poses and conjunctions of the horror film, does not touch on the calm spirit of enquiry, but on the powerful, even overwhelming, instincts of aversion and disgust, repugnance and revulsion, that in the human nature run hand in hand with the irresistible fascination of things gruesome, vile and terrible.

Two or three centuries ago this work would have been perceived as of the Devil. We are now well beyond such perceptions, but there is something in the bizarre and perverse presentation of these corpses that appeals to that part of our natures that would still draw crowds to public executions, that enabled Andy Warhol to make art of the electric chair, that fascinates us with instruments of torture, that makes a good murder, and keeps Jack the Ripper still a man of lively interest. Von Hagens offers us the ultimate in freaks, the monster, the man-made mutant and deliberate deformity; he plays the circus barker, 'Roll up, roll up!' and we willingly pay £10 to experience a bout of nausea.

There is something peculiarly medieval and German in von Hagens' mind; tapping deep into the German psyche so evident in terrifying fairy tales. He is a Pied Piper of today, followed by Germans clamouring to surrender their bodies to him, a hideous reminder of Hitler and his rallies, the same magnetism, the same ability to banish all rational objections. He has in the past depended on lost and nameless bodies passed to him by states that felt no respectful obligation to bury them. To some of us this is a deplorable matter, for no human body should be a tradeable commodity simply because it has lost its identity – even a tramp deserves that small respect. For the future, however, he has an ample supply of willing donors – 4,000 under contract, another 2,000 to sign before he has enough. If people are willing, having seen his cadavers, to donate their bodies rather than be burned or buried, they do so in full knowledge of how they may be presented to posterity – it is their decision and we must respect it, no matter how macabre it seems.

Objections to an exhibition of his work in London have already been voiced in Alder Hey, never to be forgotten as the Liverpool hospital that collected for scholarship and research the organs of children who had died in its care. It is a superstitious and sentimental objection inspired by the Roman Catholic belief in the bodily resurrection of us all at the Last Trump. The parents of these children complain that they are 'insulted' by the exhibition. This is hysterical nonsense and must be ignored. We cannot have censorship by a small lobby driven only by emotion; nor should censorship be imposed by the Government or the police. The only valid censorship is refusal to attend – and even that undermines, indeed wholly removes, the foundation of all contrary argument.

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