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Saturday, April 19, 2008
“Bodies” in Cincy: Kinda creepy
Had a free afternoon on Saturday, and so my son and I went to see the “Bodies” exhibition at the Museum Center in Cincinnati. To tell the truth, I’m not quite sure what I thought of it.
It’s expensive, for one thing ($23 for adults). For another thing, I didn’t really learn that much. Apparently, I paid more attention in high school biology class than I thought.
I mean, sure. I learned some things from “Bodies.” Like how tiny the pituitary gland really is (dime-sized, apparently), and what a breast-cancer tumor looks like. As an ex-puffer, it is interesting to see what blackened lungs really look like, and as a jogger it’s fascinating to see the tendons, joints and sinews in the legs and feet, and wonder how they put up with all that pounding. But overall, my general knowledge of the body and how it works wasn’t really vastly increased. My son had pretty much the same impression.
I was impressed, however, at how interested people seemed to be in these dissected, plasticized corpses. They wanted to be close to them, to nearly touch them, to look inside and also stand back and marvel at the complexity and beautiful intricacy they revealed. To see a healthy young person examining a body and watch them figuring out what makes their own physique work was rather satisfying people-watching of a rare and truly unique sort.
But there was something also not quite right. An itch. A metaphysical stone in my shoe that kept me from fully plunging in and enjoying the show.
Namely, that it was a show. Maybe it was the fact that my physician father spoke often to me over the years about the sanctity of the body, and the awe-inspiring mystery of its workings… but there was, it struck me, simply something not right about this exhibition.
Who were these people? Whose bodies were we looking at? Whose flesh had been flayed and flouted for my — for my what? Education? Insight? Not really. As I said, beyond the first blush, there is fairly little the average educated person will learn about the body from “Bodies” that they did not know before.
So, then … for my entertainment? Yes, I’m afraid so. I go to a museum to be entertained, friends, and if it’s by art or photography or sculpture or dinosaur bones or historical artifacts, then fine. But should the human body, the thing that once held a life, be turned into a mere artifact? Or displayed like a sculpture?
It all felt so … Victorian. Like the Elephant Man put on display in a parlor. So Ancient Roman. So … uncivilized, even in its glossy sheen of arm’s-length professionalism.
Sorry, but it didn’t feel right.
