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I was in London a few weeks ago, and I was very impressed with the Tate Modern, London's newest major art destination. But that was before I saw Body Worlds, an exhibit of plastinated dead humans currently showing in a converted brewery in London's East End.
The abstract expressionists I had seen nary an hour earlier were beginning to feel rather flat by the time I saw the man with his skin draped over his arm like a wetsuit. And Damien Hirst's cut-up cow proved no match for the man sliced up like so much mortadella.
To quote AbFab:
"It's a dead body, Pats."
"Patsy: Yeah, but is it art, Eddie?"
It's a valid question. The exhibit is careful not to bill itself as an art show but as a scientific exploration of the human body. The first plastinated people encountered are indeed displayed in scientifically credible waysósmokers lungs are interspersed with metastasized organs and brains with strokes ("Ooh, that's what it looks like inside Margaret Thatcher's head," I found myself thinking before I perished the thought.) Standard high school science lab fodder.
As the exhibit progresses, though, variations on a theme emerge: A man sitting down to play chess has his spinal cord is exposed; a man riding a plastinated horse holds his own brain in his right hand, the horse's brain in his left; A pregnant female nude reclines, fetus exposed, striking a pose; and another man's organs are stacked vertically in a manner reminiscent of Francis Bacon's Triptychs.
In these cases it is clear to me that Professor Gunther von Hagen, the inventor of the preservation process and the creator of this exhibit, is making artistic claims, even if he is not claiming to be an artist. And here we can ask, how good is the art?
The British, whose modern artists have a fine infatuation with death, decay and the macabre, are flocking in droves to see it. But the reality of the exhibit is a lot more palatable than it sounds.
First off, the plastinated people are anonymous; their facial skin is stripped away, and underneath, it turns out, we all look rather similar. In this respect the exhibit is somewhat tamer than the Warhol images of accidents and suicides on show at the Tate, where the identities of the dead are clearly visible. If it is voyeurism, Body Worlds' is a more innocent variety, akin to that of a documentary where the heads of the participants have been blurred out.
And for me, at least, Body Worlds fulfilled its role as art by forcing me to re-view the world around me; I began observing the live human visitors as much as the dead exhibits. That cute woman in the halter-top leaning over the chess player, how many chemical processes is she from being the art? How beautiful would she be if stripped down to her organs? Beauty seemed not so much skin deep as just skin, at times, but then near the end of the exhibit there was a complete set of human blood vessels suspended in clear liquid, and that too was undeniably beautiful, if not exactly in the you're-cute-let's-have-a-drink sense.
The impression that I am a walking collection of body partsóall of which have ample opportunities to failóbecame rather inescapable. It's a novel way to identify with the art, and it sets this exhibit apart from its freak show cousins. Circus sideshows endeavor to accentuate the strange and the abnormal for the sake of a cheap thrillówe try not to get too close, and are encouraged to recoil uneasily, guilty for feeling lucky. In Body Worlds, on the other hand, we are encouraged to take long, close, well-lit if not lingering looks, and the diseases on show are for the main part a checklist of all the banal ways we'll die.
How to outdo this? Dead people have long been on showówitness the mummy Queens in the British Museum and Westminster Hallóbut never, I think, has exhibitionism been taken so literally. I predict celebrity plastinations. Might Damien Hirst decide that the only thing more precocious than living for his art is to become it? Maybe plastination might not be Hirst's preferred medium for conveying the transience of identity. All this recent toying with rotting animal carcasses will seem so bourgeois by the time he throws himself to the lionsóliterally, this time. Starving artists, anyone?
Continue reading "But is it Art?"Finally, after much delay (all of it my fault), the pictures I took at Ayse and Cemo's wedding in Istanbul last year are up on the photos page.
Successful conspiracies require means, motive and opportunity.
Successful conspiracy theories require only creative thinking about means, motive and opportunity. Conspiracy theorists have stock candidates for these components, and the mixing and matching need not be particularly imaginative for a new permutation to hit the meme market.
But successful conspiracy theories do have to find nourishment in a pre-existing mass psychosis. This makes them powerful cautionary talesóarticulations of prejudices and fears that do not otherwise surface. And it makes them dangerous, because in the global democracy of ideas successful memes become historical facts.
The most successful recent conspiracy theory posits that the September 11 attacks were in fact orchestrated by Mossad, which warned 4,000 Jews not to go to work in the World Trade Center on the day of the attacks: A poll taken late February 2002 shows a good majority of citizens of predominantly Muslim countries now take it for the truth; less than one in five thinks Mohammed Atta et al did it, at least not without brainwashing help from Mossad.
Bear in mind that the idea being promoted can be only one of these three things:
A) A deliberate piece of disinformation planted by Osama Bin Laden's ilk in the more extremist Muslim media, which in turn somehow manages the extraordinary feat of simultaneously applauding an act of violence against the United States that it insists was carried out by Israel's secret service in order to set the US against Islam.
B) A slightly more benign version of (A), which borrows the concept of natural selection to the extent that a conspiracy theory can evolve from a spate of sloppy, tendentious reporting and Op-Ed pieces masquerading as fact.
C) A horrendously well-kept secret involving foreknowledge by thousands of talkative New York Jews who nevertheless managed not to blab to their goy husbands, wives and waspy work buddies until the crime was perpetrated, because all Jews represent a monolithic front of hatred against Muslims.
The means, motive and opportunity proffered for scenario C are simple. Mossad provides the means, because--like the CIA--it is commonly ascribed by its enemies with the godlike qualities of omniscience and omnipotence. The technologically illiterate have no means of differentiating science fact from science fiction; Scenario C requires 20 Manchurian Candidates ready to crash planes and an efficient means of tracking and secretly contacting 4,000 Jewish employees in the World Trade Center. How hard can that be if these agencies have satellites that read license plates?
The ascribed motive betrays severe prejudices against Jews, because a central assumption of the conspiracy theory is that a secret and silent mass of Jews would be willing to condone the killing of thousands of innocents in order to effect a hardening in US policy towards Muslim countries. You have to buy into the most virulent of anti-Semitic constructs before this becomes plausible. Yet often these are the only constructs available to citizens of countries whose governments and clergy have long gained currency at the expense of Judaism.
Even worse, a tendency to believe conspiracy theories may be a healthy instinct in countries where conspiracy is the modus operandi of rulers. Predominantly Muslim countries, on the whole, have not had transparent and democratic government, and often these local autocratic regimes have been propped up with the support of the West. If the house of Saud is underhanded in its grip on power, its Western backers are seen capable of the same by implication.
And as for opportunity, why not throw in a little cooperation between elements in the CIA and Mossad? After all, Jews, more than likely, have infiltrated the CIA. And surely the CIA would know which weaknesses in domestic security to exploit?
Enough. Why am I riled up? Because nothing good has ever come from a situation where a significant portion of the worlds population have had their capacity for rational thought so brutalized that they believe something so patently false.
The two immediate situations that come to mind are German and Austrian support for their Fuhrer, and Stalinism. But other mass "errors in judgment" litter history, all the more densely the further back you go: McCarthyism, the Dreyfus Affair, Catholic anti-Semitism, the CrusadesÖ
Continue reading "Conspiracy for idiots"