What an animal
The opening text of the new Animals Inside Out exhibition at the Natural History Museum tells the visitor that anatomy is beautiful. The displays have been constructed by Gunther von Hagens' team that created the infamous Body Worlds exhibition, and so much controversy along with it, which I am sad to say I have never seen. Yet, there is indeed both grace and grandeur to the multiple animals which form the show.
From giant squid to elephants, with rabbits, frogs, pigs and fish in between, the displays take you on a journey through the intricacies of animal anatomy. Hagens' trademark plastinated cadavers are set aside striking photographic cross-sections of various animals. You are shown musculature, skeletons, vascular and nervous systems, hearts, reproductive organs and hooves. They are beautiful and thought-provoking. The sheer quantity and intricacy of blood vessels in a horse's head or duck's foot are set beside the startlingly tiny brain of a hare and the bulging shoulder muscles of a gorilla. Most awe-inspiring, at the centre of the show, are the huge size and strength of an elephant's musculature, and a giraffe sliced into over a hundred wafer-thin transverse cross-sections.
Given the furore surrounding Body Worlds, I expected to find the show disturbing and/or tasteless but, apart from a sheep cadaver displayed standing on its own skin in rug form, I found it quite the reverse. I came out both educated and edified, a marked contrast, I was struck to realise, to my emotions on leaving Damien Hirst's much feted retrospective at Tate Modern a couple of weeks ago. Much like von Hagens, Hirst has sought both to instruct and emote with his whole or cross-sectioned animals preserved in formaldehyde. Most famous are his shark, The Physical Impossibility in the mind of someone Living, and cow and calf, Mother and Child, divided. These I find simply sad. The shark floats, slowly decomposing, in his tank, the raw edges of his gills emphasising his lack of motion. These art works don't inspire me with awe or fear, merely with a sense of a wasted life.
I learnt at the NHM yesterday that sharks have to maintain constant motion in order not to sink. It seems to me that in Hirst's work their meaning has been removed, their motion arrested, where in Animals Inside Out they have been given both an aesthetic and educative dignity. Art requires both of these. I wonder what would happen if the NHM attempted to submit von Hagens for the next Turner Prize?