people jerky

So I went to see the Bodies Exhibit last night at South Street Seaport, and I'll tell you what: I've never been a big meat-on-the-bone eater, but after an hour of looking at rooms full of people jerky, I won't be chomping down on anything with ligaments anytime soon.

It's a very interesting exhibit, full of, well, people. Everything in there came from somebody, or, rather was somebody. And in our world, where so many museums serve us as cultural memory centers (I'm thinking specifically here of museums like Ellis Island, the Holocaust Museum, Lower East Side Tenament Museum, etc.), museums serve as places where we can go to look at fragments from a time, or a culture, or an event, which we then use to imagine ourselves in that time, culture or what have you.

Not all museums function this way, of course. Art museums don't try to generate nostalgia for the Renaissance, or the good old days of Roman sculpture. Science museums are often more about creating a learning environment than developing the feel for an era. There are military museums, spy museums, other museums... I'm not a huge museum-goer, so I can't think of them at the moment, but I feel confident that they're out there (and probably around the corner from where I sit right now.)

Anyway, I am personally a big fan of Museum As Memory Center, probably because I'm an actor and like to imagine myself in the situations that are being commemorated, picking up the bits and pieces of research that I collect from the exhibits, and tucking them away for later use. Not exactly something I want to do with the Bodies Exhibit.

The exibit (which can be found here) is really more like a frozen zoo or aquarium, where you can go and observe things in a completely unnatural habitat. There were some really cool bits -- I liked seeing inside a spongy bone, the section with the capillaries is amazing, and I liked seeing what my spleen really looked like, but all in all, it felt cold and impersonal -- very scientific. Which is good. Because if I thought of each of these people as people... well, I'd have had an even harder time in the Baby Room.

An article from msnbc talks about how "the specimens were obtained from a laboratory at Dalian Medical University in China that preserved them using a process where water is removed and replaced with a polymer that turns them rubber-like." And they are. Very rubber-like. Which makes it even harder to see them as anything more than, well, people jerky. And, at this point, very dusty people jerky. With fannyholes, special girl-lips and bellybuttons.

"The show has come under fire from human rights advocates who charge that the bodies and organs may have been illegally obtained through the Chinese government." (more of that here) All the more reason I don't really want to think of them as people.

They're happy little giraffes living in their one acre plot. Right?