The funny thing about cadaver art is that nobody claims to make it. Those responsible for the exhibitions of corpses that have labelled by the media as “cadaver art”, say they are educators who create scientific exhibits. Their aim is to educate audiences by offering spectators an inside view of the human body. They might arrange the cadavers with an aesthetic sense but they don’t make any claim to be artists, or that their exhibits contain works of art. So why have they been labelled as such?
One person embodies cadaver art more than any other, Gunter von Hagens. In 1978 the German anatomist, working out of a laboratory in Heidelberg (Germany), developed a technique known as plastination. The process replaces water and lipids in biological tissues with plastic polymers to produce an odourless and preserved specimen. It allows the anatomist to skin, dissect and then contort the body virtually any way he likes before putting it on display. And display them he has.
