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The business of the flesh

This article is more than 21 years old
Why does the use of human body parts in art sometimes cause outrage and other times intrigue? In the wake of a series of 'body parts' scandals, society's attitude to the storage, use and display of human remains are as confused as ever, explains Jane Wildgoose in this visual essay. Click on the links below for images

Anthony-Noel Kelly
The imprisonment in 1998 of Anthony-Noel Kelly, who had used anatomical specimens taken from the Royal College of Surgeons (RCS) to make gilded plaster casts from them as sculpture, caused controversy and outrage. His conviction for theft overturned hundreds of years of legal precedent that had said the body was not property and so could not be owned or stolen. The media criticism directed toward Kelly expressed distaste that he had attempted to sell the casts in a public art exhibition, and that he had made a plaster cast (never exhibited) of his grandmother's face after she died. His credibility as an artist was also brought into question for his use in this context of plaster, regarded as an inferior and cheap material.

James Joyce's death mask
However, at other times and in different contexts, such reproductions taken directly from the dead pass without comment, even when copies are put up for sale on the open market. A plaster cast of James Joyce's death mask, made at a friend's suggestion immediately after the writer died, sold for £36,000 at Sotheby's in 2001 and was regarded as an important cultural and historical artifact. A copy in bronze - in the "superior" and more valuable sculptor's material - failed to reach its much lower reserve price of £7,000-£9,000 at the same auction. A spokeswoman for Sotheby's suggested that the plaster cast would be more attractive to a buyer because it was "more intimate".

Egyptian mummies
At the same time as criticism from the press was being heaped up Kelly for transgressing the limits of good taste in his work, an exhibition opened at the British Museum entitled Ancient Faces: Mummy Portraits from Roman Egypt. The exhibition included fascinating and haunting portraits removed from graves, displayed alongside body parts such as skulls with skin, hair and teeth still intact. One of Kelly's most outspoken critics wrote a eulogising review of Ancient Faces that made no reference to the several body parts included in the exhibition or mentioned issues of taste, consent or ownership. But these questions have been raised by pressure groups in recent years, and consequently several bodies have been returned from museums to their country of origin.

Relics in crypts
While contemporary artists with an interest in the human corpse are in general regarded as "mad", "morbid" and generally dangerous to know, many of the corpses that the public prefers to view (and often pays to see while on holiday) are displayed in respected institutions. Museums are, of course, educational, and crypts perhaps lend an aura of sanctity.The Cistercian monastery church in Sedlec, Czechoslovakia, is a popular tourist attraction and an extraordinarily high level of aestheticism is brought to the displays, which has led to their reproduction in Sunday supplements and style magazines.

Spectacular Bodies
Certainly age lends enchantment to the view of dead bodies in museums and crypts, where the public has traditionally gathered to see them. But more recently the public has been provided with exhibitions tracing the history of dissection, with a number of well attended exhibitions such as The Quick and the Dead, Artists and Anatomy (1997-98) and Spectacular Bodies (2000-01). Both exhibitions were organised by the Hayward Gallery - which is more generally associated with contemporary art - and both traced the history of art and medicine's collaborations over the human body, providing a context for work of contemporary artists, often in extremely graphic detail.

The Anatomical Works of Andreas Vesalius of Brussels
Some of the most influential images to derive from collaboration between art and medicine are the illustrations of the works of Renaissance anatomist Andreas Vesalius (1514-64). They depict uncannily calm, dissected figures apparently wandering elegantly through a pastoral landscape. The dignity and anatomical accuracy of these figures - whose realism is nonetheless distorted by adherence to classical ideals of proportion - is in direct contrast with the probable condition of the subjects during the lengthy period it would have taken to dissect and record them. This underlying frisson between clarity, idealisation and revulsion perhaps helps to explain why Vesalius's work has become not only a model for anatomical study right up until the present day - exhibits in Gunther von Hagens's Body Worlds pay tribute to Vesalius's work - but also for the iconography of horror.

Gunther von Hagens's Body Worlds
Gunther von Hagens's Body Worlds has drawn in millions of paying visitors worldwide, including in the UK, despite controversy over ownership, consent, commercialism and decency. Visitors are fascinated and repelled in equal measure, but von Hagens now has a steady supply of donors who, following their visit to the exhibition, have signed up to be added to his collection when they die. Von Hagens admits to having different feelings about working on a friend's face, than those of strangers.

Frank in Hellraiser
From Mary Shelley's Frankenstein of 1818 to Clive Barker's Hellraiser in 1987, the walking, dissected human corpse remains a powerful icon of horror imagery. Barker paid homage to his perception of Vesalius's figures as the "ultimate monsters", in the character of Frank, in Hellraiser (1987). At the beginning of the film, the late Frank is little more than a pile of slime under the floorboards. He is subsequently reincarnated cannibalistically in Barker's deliberate re-working of Vesalius's series of dissections. The enduring appeal of Vesalius's "monsters" should perhaps remind us that, however rational our aspirations may be with regard to medical advances, we nonetheless retain a profound instinctive disquiet about the investigation and appropriation of the body and its organs. Shelley's contemporary, Goethe, remarked that his experience as an anatomy student had "taught me to endure the most repulsive sights, while I satisfied my thirst for knowledge" - a predicament still faced by many medical students in their first encounter with dissection, early in medical training.

· Jane Wildgoose is an artist and writer. She is the co-organiser of a conference entitled The Business of the Flesh: Art, Science and Access to the Human Body, which takes place in Oxford on Saturday November 2. For further details contact: info@fleshbiz.fsnet.co.uk

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