Anatomical Drawings: Interiors with Faces.

Yes, as I admited at the Scientific Communications course in Banff, I really do love anatomical drawings. Here I discuss some of my favourites.

To begin: I discovered Fernando Vicente just yesterday while perusing illustration books at proQM, a bookstore that I found out about via momus, who is now my unofficial Berlin bookstore guru (as an aside, I highly recommend this gem of an art-illustration-design-architecture-fashion-magazine-city-culture bookshop). This is why I got so excited about Fernando:

Those are from his Vanitas series. He has some other anatomical based drawing on his website/blog, but Vanitas is definitely my favourite. He's really taking anatomical drwing up a notch, but it is very much in keeping with the theme of dissection in situ, so to speak. For instance, of having models cadavers, dissected and in place within a scene. You can see some of these in Taschen's Encyclopaedia Anatomica which is basically a catalog of the Museo La Specola in Florence (I also recommend a visit to the museum if you are ever in Florence, it's worth it!). In that instance diaoramas of the four horsemen of the apocylapse are displayed in all their horrid waxy glory (not literally, but representatively - Think a gaggel of diseased corpses strewn about a cityscape). Ok, but that may be a strecth, because the four diaoramas are not that spectacular, but many dissections are presented like a window into the interior, for instance this woman:

and the book cover itself:

There are no flaps of skin and blood streaks to suggest that the people are dissected. There is certainly something disquieting to see a recognizable person and look right into their insides. All the women and men in the above pictures are not in pain or even discomfort, the wax figure looks even quasi-euphoric (that or she's having a bout of indigestion, she is after all, missing her intestines). So in both instances we see internal organs out of their usual context. That is, we don't see the usuall marks of dissection, which let's us know what has happened and yet there is the rest of the body, looking like nothing in particular has happened. Both the comfort of context and the abstraction of a medical image is taken away when we see such images. We are looking into a special kind of mirror.

Ok, so far I've ignored Gunther von Hagens' Body Worlds. I saw his "Cycle of Life" exhibit when it came to Berlin this summer. And although he most certainly does qualify as removing the abstract from the medical image, I had some problems with his presentation. If your not familiar with his art of plastination, there are enough videos on YouTube. The "Cycle of Life" is notable for displaying very early stages of humn embryogenesis, which is simply facinating, but that's about all there is conerning the cycle of life, there are no displays of children, adolescents, seniors, there is now typical diagram of changing bodies over time, so I'm not sure why it was called "Cycle of Life" if they werent going to show it. Another item that disturbed me was the Santa Claus exhibit, it was pretty tasteless. there was a sleigh, reindeer (also plastinated) and the fellw who was Santa complete with fake white beard. He was basically exploded and suspended from the ceiling so you could see every intimate detail, but still it was tasteless. The captain of the pirate ship, complete with parrot, was not a strong point either, nor was thr "rugby player" holding an American pigskin. Both had their muscles obviously pumped up. But perhaps the most disappoingint part was the sex scene. You knew there had to be a sex scene, and there is was in the last room before the exit. There sat upon a chair was a man with a woman proped upon his lap. For her part she was cut in half so when you went around the back side you got a glimpse of intercourse from the inside. The disturbing part is that she was wearing really cheap black leather boot and black nail polish and he had a black mohawk, all of which was thoroughly off-putting and unnecessary. My favourite pieces, aside from the embryos, were the placenta, a remarkably interesting temporary organ that is much underappreciated, and the head of an obese man cut in half. There you got to see all the fatty bits in situ that were mysteriously abscent from all the other (supposedly) lean, muscular models in the exhibit (sorry photographs were not allowed).

So although he shows us an entire cadaver, and would be a perfect example of this window to the interior, I wasn't as excited. I know I should feel bad to say that, but maybe it was even too realistic, or I was just so caught up in the details of the bodies and imagining preparation artifacts, that I didn't get the right impression. I think in the end the advantage of the above two examples is that art can portray life in a way life itself, ironically, can never do.

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Here is the mouse pad that I couldn't resist buying:

It's covered with a clear plastic layer and in the jelly layer in between is a blood coloured fluid that swishes around as you move your mouse.

Oh, and apparently Body Worlds in coming to the T-dot in October with the "Story of the Heart" exhibit. Expect lots of blood vessels! and you can probably pick up the mouse pad there also.