|
4
Nerd-Its
|
|
current event
by Art - just what is it? Gregor Schneider finds all sorts of things artistic, even death. The artist is conducting a search for a participant on the brink of death that is willing to die on exhibit in an art museum. Gregor defends that his planned piece is not exploitation, "The dying person would determine everything in advance, he would be the absolute centre of attention .... Everything will be done in consultation with the relatives, and the public will watch the death in an appropriately private atmosphere." It's not without precedent that people will pay to see death as the Bodies Exhibition has toured the globe using the plasticized organs and tissue from cadavers as its attraction.
Add a Comment (4)
Email This
Message Author
I saw the Bodies Exhibition in Houston and really enjoyed it. I had to keep telling myself "these are real human (or horse) body parts" as they were deceptively plastic-looking. They were also very much "art-like" in they were often arranged to be visually appealing/engaging.
Much of the exhibit focused on the effect of various diseases and abuses on the body. The contrast between a healthy lung/liver/heart/intestine/etc and an abused/diseased one was amazing. I wonder if the "artist" set out with that goal in mind or if it was only after delving into a few innards that his attention shifted/focused in the health direction...
In any case, I've thought about writing him to see if he'd be interested in plasticizing me after I die. His exhibit could use a "how a body recovers after being run over by a bus" corner.
I saw the Bodies Exhibit in Manhattan and was equally amazed at how they did some of the things they did. Particularly amazing was the extraction of the complete nervous system or the circulatory system and then suspending it ... crazy.
If you want to donate yourself, just go to China this year for the Olympics and be a political dissident. You'll be one of the "Bodies" soon enough after that.
I guess somebody was bound to do something like this eventually. I just can't wrap my head around it though. Death seems like something far too personal--and dare I say, magical, to be put on display for the price of an admission ticket. I guess it's the personal choice of the dying person, but it seems to me like needless exhibitionism. Then again, I guess people will have sex on stage for money, too... It just seems rather different than the bodies exhibition--where the people were already dead.
RSS
Artifice by anthonyanthony :: NR5 :: on 25 April 2008
Art and Artifice are not far apart if in case that was not a rhetorical and you are looking toward a definition. Plato's Ion dialogue between Socrates and the rhapsode, Ion is another great place to look at how the West began tacking the issue of art and its "is-ness".
All I can say about this is "wow". I do not know if I would want to see that or not, which may be the point: Schneider would be confronting spectators with the Kantian Sublime in its purest form.