The Art Tourist joins the fray at the blockbuster:

Body World 2 startles like Art should

by Terry Talty

Denver, CO  –  A man flayed down to the muscle poised to kick a soccer ball adorns the poster. This image hangs from every other lamp post in Denver while Body World2 lives at the Denver Museum of Science and Nature.

This isn't an ordinary art show, and you can tell by the crowds. Every weekend, tickets are sold out, and people stand in line for an hour after they are admitted by their time-appointed ticket, and inside – it's wall-to-wall spectators – every view of a work is framed by the shoulders of several someones. The large exhibition rooms are packed like I haven't seen since the giant Matisse retrospective at the Modern Art Museum in New York in the 90s.

To tell the truth, Body World2 isn't an art show at all. It's a display of sliced cadavers, flayed cadavers, flayed and sculpted cadavers preserved with injected silicon.

And the Soccer Player is one of the cadaver sculptures in this show set up like a traditional art exhibition: big pieces like the Soccer Player arranged at regular intervals for max impact, introduced by detailed work displayed in cases in each room's center, at waist height, under glass, so a viewer can spend some time getting intimate with the details, and well-planned traffic flow – move along and listen to the audio guide.

Body World2 wet our appetites for looking, with sculptural arrangement of arm and leg bones, then while we were still tightly grouped in the line of folks we've gotten to know over the past hour of waiting, we got to see the Soccer Player – who appears frozen at the apex of the motion of kicking a real ball that's frozen as well on his toe. Classic beauty. A form wearing a bodysuit of sleek musculature in a dynamic pose balanced on one leg, back and arms compensating for the release of energy from the leg swinging out higher than the eyes to launch a ball ahead. The eyeballs nakedly suspended in their orbits remind us this isn't cold stone or bronze from ancient Greece. Small bits of nerve frizz out from the body suit and make us aware that nature isn't always pretty, or cooperative, when we are looking for classic beauty. Still, this is not a soccer player standing in front of us but a sculptural form made of a human body. No real footballer would kick the ball with the tips of his toes.

When we were looking at the Yoga Practitioner, ≥Did you hear that guy answer his kid?≤one of my companions asked. ≥He said, I think it's supposed to be a woman. It's like they're at some abstract art show. It is not supposed to be anything. It is a woman, or was.≤

There was a mirror under the yoga woman, but my 10-year old companion was craning her neck to see under the sculpture. Her little sister said, ≥that's what the mirrors are for.≤ As an art critic, I'd say the mirrors give the piece a floating quality, a woman in a difficult yogic contortion floating in space above a mirror that showed an equally difficult contortion. Add dim lighting and the whole piece feels ancient, a sculpture in a old museum of another time before white walls and large Bauhaus gallery spaces. I looked around the room and there were several human forms with mirrors around them – operating room sterile mirrors. Would an art curator ever do that with a sculpture today, cram it in a space and add a mirror? But Body World2 is not an art show.

Body World2 is really a science exhibit that aims to show the structure of the human body. The large pieces are mostly-whole, donated bodies, usually with a good amount of skin removed so a viewer can see the insides. The detailed works are the slices – ¼ inch thick cross sections of a body part, preserved and displayed like an agate. I was startled by a slice of an obese person's upper arm. It looked like a really bad piece of ham. Off center is a small circle of bone, surrounded by a tiny bit of real meat, surrounded by a two- or three-inch ring of fat. Imaging that laying on your plate at LePeep next to two eggs over easy.

≥Look at Exploded Man,≤ my companion said. He was a puppet with every body part suspended from a wire, a puppet whose joints had popped and sent the descending part out a couple inches horizontally and vertically. ≥All those wires; we're a lot less complicated in the lower parts.≤

Across from Exploded Man, was a former man, cut in slices from crown to toe and fanned out like a book opened, left to stand on its covers, showing both sides of its separated pages. Sometimes a body part wouldn't cut and go with its separate page and there would be a testicle, full round hanging outside the slice, or a heart chamber, in tact, peaking out like a part from a pop-up book. Sculptural decisions.

Drawer Man is a purely conceptual sculpture. The maker of this piece chose to cut rectangles into the surface of a body part and pull out of box-like section of that part, and leave it attached like an open drawer. A viewer can see the skin on many parts of drawer man, and then see the layers beneath the skin, and those layers behind that one. This was the final sculpture of the show and so the curators had made plenty of room to walk around it, and see all the drawers.

It wasn't until we were outside of the No-Re-Admittance gate that we saw the book on Body World and saw a photo of the ultimate conception: a man flayed to the muscles again, holding out his skin at arms length as if it were a limp costume. Is is not the aim of much contemporary art to evoke the same kind of startle?

Terry Talty is the self-described art tourist, who writes contemporary art criticism in a postmodern world where anything could be good.