Calling the Poor Taste Police
Yesterday I had one of those "I wish I brought my fucking camera" moments. I was walking home on Broadway, just a block away from the World Trade Center site and there's a poster outside the subway steps of a preserved, beef jerky looking Chinese corpse advertising the Bodies exhibit. Maybe I'm a sensitive little tulip or whatnot, but advertising a dead body show a block away from a place that was full of the dead bodies of people I and most of you knew was unsettling to me.
Actually, the whole Bodies thing is unsettling to me. I went to the seaport exhibit opening night (my wife is important and I dig open bar events) and I found it to be completely revolting. It felt like attending an execution or a dog fight or spitting on the upside down body of Mussolini. It had the artistic value of pornography and was as educational as a TRUTH commercial: smoking is bad was all I got from it.
Labels: bodies, world trade center
posted by eddie at
3:31 PM
7 Comments:
the best part is that none of those bodies gave consent for people to do this to them before they became just corpses. supposedly they are all unclaimed bodies of people who died as POWs or in police custody oe something. which begs the question; How does a pregnant woman find herself dead in polic custody or as a POW?
sketchy sketchy sketchy...
I have wondered about this and being in the field I am it is not something so macabre or revolting, but it is a curiosity. Considering this is a high tech follow up on how we as a society learned the whole of anatomy & physiology, as well as the medical we know, it can serve a purpose.
However... also considering the field I am involved in, it is indeed an unsettling thing. Mixed feelings on this one... not sure that it is right.
C~
I would agree if the plastination process was used hundreds of years ago as a means to further science and understanding. Unfortunately, we have (possibly) executed prisoners shooting hoops for people to gawk at. I'm also guilty of numerous penis jokes, but I'll attempt to use the 'I was uncomfortable" excuse rather than admit that I'm a drunk and a jerk.
How the fuck did they get away with that?
The only part of the exhibit that made me Oooh and Aaahh was the inner workings of the ear and the fact that the ear drum itself is so fucking tiny if I saw it on the floor I'd sweep it up or maybe just throw behind my couch. That freaked me out because I love DMX and to imagine never being able to hear him again made me really upset.
Oh and did you see your boy Andrew Cuomo was trying to get everyone refunds from this exhibit? What a random loon.
My route home everyday takes me by the South Street Seaport and one time I noticed a gaggle of Asian businessmen chain-smoking on a roof garden above the exhibit.
They were all fairly slight, fairly young, dressed in suits and the like, talking, smiling... living.
It looked as if they had all stepped out of a party for a smoke and to get some air.
But what I found creepy was that I knew down below in the exhibit were all men, just like them; preserved and dissected; the same size, the same build. It was like a flash from a horror movie. I saw them, clothed, smoking, talking, laughing, dressed in suits and then I saw them as a skeletal system, their muscles preserved permanently by "polymer preservation"; I saw their circulatory, digestive, respiratory systems. It was bizarre. Like I had X-ray vision.
I went with my friend Double R once to watch her do a few autopsies and I left that day absolutely believing in miracles - not of the biblical kind, but of the scientific kind.
The mere fact that the human body operates for 1 second let alone 70 or 80 years is simply astounding.
It's all so insanely intricate and so fucking fragile. I often wondered how Double R could ever look at people the same way when she knew so well what lurked right under their skin.
And that's exactly how I felt when I saw those dudes smoking on the roof. Like I knew what was inside. Like I knew how they'd end up.
But anyway, fuck it.
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The Chinese Prisoner angle was mostly a media-virus for the Falun Dafa folks to get more airtime. It later got picked up by the kook groups in Seattle that runs the Bigfoot Museum who tried spreading it everywhere they could because they felt the show was cutting into their profits.
While it is true that the majority of anatomical specimines now come from China (India used to be the main source) there is little evidence that most or even much of it comes from sources that would make Human Rights folks freak out.
Not to say that this exhibit, or most of the plastination shows, are done with much tact or grace, either in presentation or advertising.
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