On Friday evening, I visited the press opening of Bodies in Amsterdam at Beurs van Berlage. Seeing as I don’t actually have to review things in the newspaper, just preview them, here are some very loose impressions.
In case you’ve somehow never heard of it, the general idea is to find some dead bodies, preferably from China, ask as few questions about their background as possible, slice them, dice them, and hang them out to teach us how the human body works.
Getting straight to the point, I felt the exhibition was fairly interesting, but upon leaving, I didn’t feel like I was going home with a whole new understanding of how the human body works. They obviously intend it to be educational, and it’s undoubtedly very visual, but I don’t think you’re going to learn a great deal more about human biology without a lot more literature. Maybe the audio tour is much more revealing, and they did have some ‘experts’ on hand in a couple of room, but from what I saw, everyone was steering clear of them. At least all the information is presented in Dutch and English. It was just unfortunate that on all the main boards, the English text was literally round the back and virtually unlit, although the benefit of that was they weren’t crowded, so you could get in to read them.
Personally, I wasn’t shocked by any of it. There seems to be an aura of suspense around the exhibition and some people did look genuinely nervous walking into the building. I was actually more surprised by how unreal the bodies looked, and because they weren’t encased in glass, I had initially thought the bodies in the opening room were just models. It’s nice that you can get so up close to them, and many people really were, almost prodding them. But it’s weird that any curious little kid can escape the clutches of their parents and go pulling on real tendons or nerves before anyone stops them.
The reason why I wasn’t particularly shocked by it was that the ‘model quality’ made it all seem very inert to me. Previously I had watched a four-part documentary by mad German Gunther von Hagens, and having seen someone dissecting a real body on TV is a bit more intense than standing next to the treated parts. For example, the case containing a complete layer of skin was really freaking some people out, but it’s much more disturbing to watch it being peeled off in the first place.
The bits I probably enjoyed most were the room showing the arteries in various body parts, and also the foetuses. The latter comes with a warning, and I can see why some would be sensitive to it, but there’s nothing abominable in there. In fact, I probably found this to be the most educational room in the exhibition, as you really get a sense of foetal development–much more so than looking at photos in a book.
So it was good in a ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ way, because it is a pretty unique opportunity to learn more about ourselves and how fragile life can be. But if I was paying the €20 entrance fee, I wouldn’t have been so enthused. It does seem overly pricey for an exhibition you can do in an hour. Then consider they’re shifting t-shirts and memorabilia at similarly high prices, and it does make you wonder where exactly the profits all go (statements about donations to medical research seem kind of vague).