Body Works Exhibit Controversy

Body Works Exhibit

Gunther Von Hagen's Body Works Exhibit

The Body Works exhibits have attracted large crowds wherever the exhibit has traveled. They have been considered quite education and compelling. They are certainly captivating and do more than just show the “insides”. Body Works exhibits, which have traveled all over the world, have depicted the preserved bodies doing everything from just sitting in front of a computer or playing cards to doing sports, like playing basketball, a couple ice-skating together, a man riding a horse, etc. Body Works exhibits have included displays of body parts, including a comparison of a smokers' lung to a non smokers' lung. You can also see a pregnant woman stretching the skin of her abdomen revealing the fetus. Some pieces show how particular muscles work while they are doing exercises.

Body Works Exhibit

The Body Works exhibit, developed by the German “scientist” Gunther Von Hagen, displays more than 200 “specimens” – all of them actual human bodies, organs, parts, or slices. These were real people, who had signed consent documents to donate their bodies for scientific purposes and to be displayed in this fashion. They have been  preserved through a process called plastination. The technique involves replacing body fluids and soluble fats with special plastics. In this way the dead bodies are preserved with muscles, nerves, and tendons exposed.

In some areas, however, Von Hagen’s Body Works Exhibit was called thoughtless, pornographic, and dubious psychotic. Some cities refused Body Works Exhibit  because they consider it as immoral and a defilement of the human body. Such an exhibit is disgusting and reflects an heightened moral corruption. The Body Works exhibit is considered by some to promote sadism and even more macabre things.

Body Works Exhibit

Body Works Exhibit

Greater protest came when the exhibition was featuring a man and a woman who are having sex.  Death and sex are both taboo topics. When sex and death are brought together, then inevitably people will say that it is a kind of necrophilia and it is considered a kind of gross. This display is not only denounced as being pornographic but as an "insult to the dead."

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