Doggedly searching for the crux of the biscuit.
I've had a fairly long-running fascination with German artist Gunther von Hagens, who takes human corpses and "plastinates" them in varying stages of disassembly. The process is described here and you can donate your body here but the website somehow doesn't quite impart the full creepiness of his vision. However, if you do a google image search on his name, you'll get a better feel for it, particularly the mother/fetus piece.
Anyhow, von Hagens pops up in the news every so often because, predictably, somebody gets freaked out by his exhibitions and raises a stink. The latest dust-up, though, is a bit of a sticky situation.
Controversial German artist Gunther von Hagens, known for his displays of preserved human corpses stripped of skin, wants to build a factory in Poland to mass-produce his art, local officials say. Von Hagens, whose exhibitions made out of human and animal remains have attracted millions of visitors around the world, has already bought land and industrial buildings in the western Polish town of Sieniawa Zarska, near the German border.
[...] The scandal around von Hagen's plans spiced up further when Polish and German press said his 89-year-old father, Gerhard Liebchen, who represents his son's businesses in Poland, is suspected [of] carrying out crimes against Poles in World War Two.
"We will probe if Gerhard Liebchen cooperated in sending 60 Poles to concentration camps, which would give reasons to launch an investigation for participation in genocide," a state institute set up to examine wartime crimes said on Monday.
Well, given the history between the Germans and the Poles, you could see how they might object to a German setting up a corpse rendering factory on their soil.
TrackBack"Artists" who present gross outs as thought provoking have been made redundant by the guy in China who videoed himself eating a dead (human!)
baby.
Pornography is gratuitous and calling it art is a post- modern scam.
There have also been allegations that at least some of the corpses he's used have been those of Russian and Chinese prisoners.
I don't know it that's ever been confirmed, but if you were going to buy a corpse to mess around with, I know that at least China would probably be a pretty cheap source. They have lots of executions, and there have been confirmed cases of Chinese prison officials making money by selling off executed prisoners' organs and bodies.
Posted by: Mitch Mills at February 28, 2005 10:07 PMI remember seeing this stuff for the first time on some some-what dopey special on the Discovery Channel and was more impressed how not shocked and disgusted I was actually seeing the stuff and that Discovery would attempt to show it (they hardly show Zebras getting killed).
Just the idea of a Factory for this stuff is creepy though as is the baby thing...
Posted by: Hanke at March 1, 2005 03:24 AMIf one accepts that the purpose of art is to provoke emotion then I can understand some of this stuff as "art."
I think some negative emotions are easy to evoke, if one has the stomach for such things, and they are certainly less represented by artists than the positive emotions, so there would be less competition for the artist.
I can't imagine there would be much market for such material, but I suppose a true artist would not be interested in market-share.
Posted by: Tripp at March 1, 2005 09:56 AMMy old man used to say if the Government put a license to shoot Aborigines there'd be a line outside the office door the next morning. If art has no boundaries, some nut will post pictures of himself (in a mask) shooting peoples brains artistically over a wall.
Posted by: waldo at March 1, 2005 08:46 PM