Bodies’ exhibit draws criticism
By Monica Chen, The Herald-Sun
September 1, 2007
A half-dozen Duke University professors staged a protest of BODIES… The Exhibition at The Streets at Southpoint on Saturday.
Holding signs in English and Chinese reading “Real People — No Consent” and “For money and gold, abuse human rights,” the protesters handed out leaflets by the ticketing booth as doors to the exhibit opened at noon.
Produced by Premier Exhibitions of Atlanta, the BODIES exhibit displays more than 200 preserved organs and dissected bodies with their muscles, blood vessels and brains exposed. The company and many of its customers have defended the exhibit, which debuted in 2005 in Florida, saying it is educational. Critics say it is deeply unethical.
BODIES will finish its five-month run at Southpoint on Wednesday, but the protesters hope they will make a lasting impression, here and at the traveling exhibit’s other destinations.
“It’s a freak show,” said protester Robin Kirk, director of the Duke Human Rights Center. “How would people feel if these were American cadavers?”
“I had a visceral reaction to it. I started to ask myself, ‘Where did they get those bodies? Who are those people?’ ” said Sarah Redpath, a mother of three from Cary and organizer of the event.
According to the BODIES’ Web site, the unidentified, unclaimed corpses all died of natural causes. They were obtained from the Dalian Medical University Plastination Laboratories in China.
But Redpath and others are not convinced the bodies came by entirely legitimate means.
“We’ve got the Chinese system, which as we know is compromised and putting questionable products into America,” Redpath said, referring to the recent lead scare with toys and concerns about tainted food. She also said the profits involved in the sale of cadavers were “incentive for lots of people to do lots of bad things.”
Redpath, an interactive designer with IBM, had already protested at Southpoint twice since the exhibit opened April 4. She handed out leaflets for No Bodies 4 Profit, a local group she and other Triangle residents started to protest the exhibit. She got banned from the premises for six months last weekend.
“Just because this is being consumed by the public … doesn’t prove to me that there isn’t something shady going on here,” she said.
The controversial exhibit has triggered protests not only in Durham, but in London and cities from Florida to Pittsburgh, where an education coordinator with the Carnegie Science Center quit over the exhibition in July.
Pamela Nickell, manager of BODIES at Southpoint, declined to comment on the protest or customer reactions.
“It’s an educational exhibit,” she said. “Everybody pretty much likes it.”
Most of the passersby and people seeing BODIES ignored the protesters on Saturday, but Megan Moodie, a Durham resident who went to the exhibit, stopped and took a flyer.
“I think they’re right,” she said afterward. “I think the way it’s set up, it really makes you forget they’re people.”
The protesters were disbanded by mall security and a Durham County Sheriff’s deputy shortly after they began. Two were given citations by the deputy for trespassing, they said. The information could not be confirmed with the Sheriff’s Office.
Kirk said that although BODIES was closing soon, the protest would raise awareness of the questionable ethics of the operators.
“It’s now a permanent exhibit in New York,” she said. “This will be back.”
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4 responses so far ↓
According to N&O reporter Craig Jarvis, the security team at Southpoint shut down the protesters in 4 minutes. How’s that for free speech?
Pic here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/hal990/1297382066/
Why would someone protest this show? For us who would take it strictly educationally, I don’t believe it is fair to shut it down based on a small groups “morals” (a term loosely applied and thrown around by most people today, irritatingly). Michaelangelo dug up cadavers and studied them, only to yield great anatomical and medical knowledge. I am a figure drawing major, and I wish to see the bodies for what they are; HUMAN bodies. To forget that they are human is nonchalant and ignorant of the viewer.
And as for American vs. Chinese cadavers, I would actually suggest having different ethnicities of bodies used (for anatomical difference of races studies). Their ethnicity doesn’t matter, and the fact that they didn’t consent doesn’t matter either, because they are dead. They have no will. So it really doesn’t matter that they had no intention on being displayed, does it. This show is being used as a positive force of education, showing cadavers to people who wish to see them (just as medical students must look at cadavers). Anyone who finds “unethical” or perverse qualities probably is an “unethical” and perverse person his/herself.
I think you misunderstand and misrepresent the objections. If you do some more reading into the controversy it will reveal to you why people would protest. Its not because they’re trying to ‘cramp your style’ with their moral convictions, or to rob you of educational opportunities. Although, from medical professionals I’ve spoken to, these exhibits are a disappointment in that regard, and Grey’s anatomy provides more richness of anatomy information. But, those opinions aside…
The fear is that because of the conditions in China real, living, desperate people are being exploited for money. The fear is, that with no regulation and 2 billion dollars in profit, these exhibits are actually encouraging unethical behavior in the treatment of the poor and voiceless. Michaelangelo may have dug up those who had already been already given proper burial, but he didn’t murder people in the streets for the pursuit of his own ego and to line his pockets. I don’t imagine that you would want to ‘educate’ and ‘inspire’ yourself NO MATTER the cost.
The production companies bear the burden of proof. It is a valid question to pose whether they have taken advantage of the multiple opportunities for horrific behavior. The equation of : Highest execution rate in the world + prisons+ 11 body processing plants both in Dalain China + documented organ harvesting in the same province, + 2 billion in profit on this new entertainment industry + NO US regulations on bodies displayed for commercial display = a need for more than the ‘word’ of some profiteers that they are ‘confident’ of the ‘ethical’ behavior of their ‘friends’ in China. Don’t’ you think they should be responsible to prove it to US standards we require for other things? At least to prove it to the level of say, importing sausage? Or dogfood? These bodies don’t even comply with the minimum required for bodies to be displayed by family members for funeral services. There are no death certificates, no consent forms, no proof of identity, no health inspection, no guidelines for embalming, no licenses required for handing these bodies…etc etc. Bodies in San Francisco were leaking and the health department found ecoli. Still, school children are touching these things. Everyone thinks there is oversight and all there is a wide open money machine.
The thought that some mother is out there searching for her son who could be labelled ‘unclaimed’ because he had been abducted and imprisoned in another provence, and that Americans are getting so much decadent entertainment and ‘education’ from his beautiful bones ….haunts me. Because of the lack of regulation, this is a real possibility.
So, education with ethics and regulation – absolutely!
High profit, sensationalistic eductainment without proven ethics or any regulation? NO WAY.
It is important that the objection is not to the bodies themselves — of course, the human body is beautiful and merits study, appreciation and celebration. The question I raise is different. How were these bodies acquired? Did these individuals agree to be used in this way, for the profit of a private company? I don’t think that anyone argues that the “morals” of Michelangelo’s time should be imposed on today’s society. We don’t torture and execute people for heresy; we allow women to own property; we prohibit children from working; we celebrate democracy, unknown in the great artist’s time. The point is that you can’t take this “strictly educationally” without asking where the bodies come from. To ignore that is to say that nothing about the provenance of the bodies matters. Would you buy a lamp made of human skin harvested from Holocaust victims if it were beautiful? Would you accept “plastinated” Americans executed on Death Row (and without their permission)? You can practice your art of drawing human bodies on people who give their permission, either as live figures or as cadavers donated for such a purpose. But to take the Bodies freak show just as “education” is shallow and dangerous. We have to ask hard questions about how the world works and not take things — like the Bodies exhibits or torture practiced in the name of the “war on terror,” among other things — at their face (pun intended) value.