What if they held a protest and no one came?
“Body Worlds 2,” the wildly successful touring exhibit that opens Thursday at the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, is one of three traveling “Body Worlds” shows that features displays with more than 200 preserved bodies and body parts. And at nearly every stop, the anticipated controversy surrounding “Body Worlds” shows has inspired intense public interest rather than actual protests.
More than 425,000 visitors attended the “Body Worlds 3” exhibit at the Arizona Science Center in Phoenix during its six-month run earlier this year. At the Montreal Science Center, “Body Worlds 2” sold out a month before it closed Sept. 16. About 23 million people have attended a “Body Worlds” show since the first exhibition opened in Japan in 1995.
Representatives of cultural and religious groups at various stops have raised questions about the displays – their belief in the sanctity of the human body also prohibits autopsies and cremations – but the brainchild of German anatomist Gunther von Hagens has become a star of science-center circuit.
The arrival of “Body Worlds 2,” which also includes the premiere of “The Three Pound Gem” show on the brain, comes a year after the Tech Museum reported a $2.5 million debt. Under the leadership of museum President Peter Friess, the Tech Museum now has a $1 million surplus.
“We are not doing this exhibit to be financially healthier,” says Friess, whose museum operates on a $12 million budget. “We are doing it because we want to fulfill our mission. I talk to people on the street and there are a couple of them who are telling me they will not go there because it’s taboo, but there are a lot of people who can’t wait to get into it.”
Friess experienced the impact of “Body Worlds” firsthand in 1998 when he attended an exhibit at Mannheim, Germany. The display of the blackened lung of a smoker, also included in the upcoming Tech Museum exhibition, inspired his wife, Birgit, to give up cigarettes.
What made the “Body Worlds” exhibits possible is the plastination process von Hagens began developing 30 years ago. Bodily fluids are extracted from cadavers and replaced with such substances as silicon rubber and epoxy, which results in pliable, rubbery forms. With wire, foam or needles, bodies can be put into fixed poses. One of the signature “Body Worlds” pieces not included in the Tech Museum exhibit, a man atop a horse, demonstrates the possibilities of the plastination.
The success of “Body Worlds” exhibits has inspired numerous knockoffs, which have generated much of the controversy often associated with the original. “The Universe Within,” which outraged members of the Chinese-American community when it was at the Masonic Center in San Francisco in 2005, featured the cadavers from China. Protesters questioned if bodies were acquired from consenting donors.
All displays in “Body Worlds” are made possible by donors who have consented to have their bodies in the exhibits, says von Hagens’ wife, Angelina Whalley, the conceptual and creative designer of “Body Worlds” and the director of von Hagens’ Institute for the Plastination in Heidelberg, Germany.
Von Hagens and the other “Body Worlds” organizers say that the exhibit follows in the tradition of pioneering Renaissance anatomists Leonardo da Vinci and Andreas Vesalius, who not only dared to cut open human cadavers for study but illustrated their findings in highly artistic, stylized drawings.
Though the bodies in the exhibit are artfully displayed and opened to reveal everything from the nervous system to how an artificial knee attaches to the bones of a leg, the motive behind the exhibits goes beyond artistry, says Whalley.
“Like good literature and art, the exhibition invites visitors to reflect on their lives,” she says. “By showing how fragile the body is and how beautiful it is, it invites people to think about their lifestyles and encourages many people to care better about their body.”
Contact Mark de la Viña at mdelavina@mercurynews.com or (408) 920-5914.
‘BODY WORLDS 2’ & ‘THE THREE POUND GEM’
Where: Tech Museum of Innovation, 201 S. Market St., San Jose
When: Opens Thursday; 9 a.m.-9 p.m. Tuesdays-Sundays, through Jan. 26, 2008
Tickets: $8-$22; (408) 294-8324, www.thetech.org
More info: events.mercurynews.com
