Featured Articles

On such topics as politics, sports and fitness, art, food, fashion, and social issues from our 2008 Spring Semester Issue.

El Amor, Francia

Words & Photography: Victoria Livinski

A League Of Their Own

Words: Alex Murphey | Photography: Coastal Carolina

Corpse Pose Juxtaposed

Words: Donald K | Photography: Bodyworlds.com

There is a new medium that may straddle the borders of scientific research and art: animal tissue. National Public Radio recently reported on the University of Western Australia’s artistic laboratory, SymbioticA, which considers itself a recognized leader in the field of biological art. Run by Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, they offer courses and open workshops that cover breeding, principles drawing with micro organisms, tissue and culture engineering.

As NPR reported during a workshop in Los Angeles, Zurr did some “painting” with the femur of a freshly slaughtered cow. He sawed open the femur and “painted” the marrow onto a degradable polymer. Over time the cells will grow over the polymer and create a “sculpture” of living tissue. To date they have grown an ear with living human skin cells, miniature wings with pig cells and a tiny leather jacket from mouse cells. One of the group’s recent projects involved growing frog tissue in the shape of a steak. Catts fried the steak and ate it, commenting afterwards, “It was like eating jelly on plastic.”

Body Worlds is an exhibition that features 200 plastinated human bodies displayed in a variety of poses, some of them intentionally humorous. The doctor who created this technique, Günther von Hagens, initially used the plastinated cadavers for medical school instruction. The exhibition is reported to have a bright and cheerful tone, with amusing poses to set the visitors at ease. The technique of plastination creates a dry glossy coating, leaving no sign of putrefaction often associated with corpses.

Are these creations of artistic expression or scientific research? Stanford bio ethicist Hank Greenly describes the legal separation as, “murky in several directions” and forebodes that most artists are likely ill-advised. Tissue culture and engineering are biomedical research techniques that open a new area for “painting” degradable polymers. Plastination of corpses, originally for medical students, is now being used for expression of the human body. Growing tissues into ordinary objects and arranging corpses in jovial poses reflect scientific understanding of the body and nature.

As revolutions and discoveries in science unravel nature, our changing perceptions of nature is displayed in the synchronous artwork. It is regarded by most that somehow thinking about science and art is separated into the left and right sides of the brain. Some people are left or right brain sided in their thinking, just as people are right or left handed. A left-right brain misconception places them on opposite ends of the spectrum, making membership to both camps that much more exclusive. It shouldn’t be so. Both science and art value creative thinking and a desire to introduce change and innovation. Art and science value the careful observation of nature to gather information through their senses.

In the 15th century, Filippo Brunelleschi completed the mathematical formulas for perspective drawing. His calculations enabled diagrams and pictures to look more realistic. Diagrams for the assembly of machinery, such as the printing press, could be easily understood, encouraging their production across Europe. Paintings could capture a landscape almost imperceptibly different from the real thing. By developing a scientific approach to drawing, artists displayed nature more accurately.

A signature of the Renaissance was its art. It stressed proportion and realism. Anatomists, such as Andreas Vesalius, could publish and circulate their observations and theories throughout Europe. Artists need no longer rely on the authority of the ancients. Instead many of them sought to do their own observations and experimentation. Leonardo Da Vinci may be considered the first great anatomist. He involved himself heavily into dissection of cadavers in order to understand the human body. His “Vitruvian Man” displays his interest in proportion and the body. Realism, not appearance, is also stressed in the sculptures by Donatello and the painter Jan Van Eyck. The realistic visuals of nature aided the scientific study of that beauty. In contrast to the metaphysics of the Middle Ages, Galileo and Francis Bacon drastically improved the scientific method in the 16th and 17th centuries. The scientific method was now based on the reproducibility of observable physical phenomena. Galileo, like Brunelleschi, reaffirmed that science is written in the language of mathematics. Equations like the description of a cannonball’s path as a parabola. Newton took it further; with inertia and his discovery of gravity, he developed a new math to explain and predict bodies in motion—calculus. William Harvey discovered the closed circulatory system and the role of the heart. The laws of nature were being transcribed in the language of mathematics and the corporeal hydraulics of the body was being unearthed.

During the Enlightenment, the scientific method was applied to human behavior and society. The value of the individual was stressed because the power of a single human mind was demonstrated during the Scientific Revolution. With emphasis placed on the extraordinary ability of the mind, our bodies became more fragile as they seemed to submit to the forces of nature as it aged. This led to a perspective that all processes and phenomenons can be explained as a result of matter, called materialism.

A dispirited and a vulnerable nakedness became a standard aspect of 19th century art. Thomas Eakins’ portraits of surgeons and educators display his personal experience with cadavers. His subjects were often displayed in their working environment, categorically displaying the twitches and slouches associated with being subjected to the mechanical forces of nature. Eakins’ utter lack of idealism is the expression of our knowledge of the body and the forces it is subject to.

The work of James Maxwell and Wilhelm Röntgen describe light and allow us to peer inside the body. Maxwell’s Equations are four elegant equations that explain how an electromagnetic field varies in space and time. They unify electricity and magnetism with geometry and physics. They are essential to understanding the world and took science on the first step towards a unification of the fundamental forces of nature. Following the work of his predecessors, Röntgen developed a cathode ray tube that emitted a new type of electromagnetic radiation. When the tube was discharged in the absence of visible light, Röntgen observed that a barium coated piece of cardboard began to glow in the dark. Through repeated experiments, he concluded that the glowing had to be the product of a new type of radiation. He called them X-rays. The name stuck and Max von Laue proved soon after that X-rays are of the same electromagnetic nature as light, and can be described in the language of mathematics by Maxwell’s Equations.

Maxwell and Röntgen didn’t know it then, but they heralded in a new age of peering inside the body. In 1953, Rosalind Franklin used X-rays to elucidate the double helix of DNA. By exposing a crystal of pure DNA to X-rays, the X-ray image of DNA can be captured on a photographic plate, producing a diffraction pattern. Using geometry and physics, she discovered the two-stranded helical structure of DNA. The discovery of the base pairs, the key to heredity, inside the helix was for Watson and Crick. More recently, radio waves and magnetic fields create MRI imaging to reveal the dark core of the body three dimensionally.

The body has always been of special interest to artists. They have studied and portrayed the body and nature throughout history. Western science has also studied nature and the body, seeking to understand its functions and theorize its secrets. Science today has raised the image of a universal diaphaneity of the body. Painlessly exploring the morphology of the body, coupled with the malleability of digital images, MRI imaging allows doctors instant access to the anatomy and physiology of a patient. Unraveling DNA has spurred an explosion of research in microbiology and genetics. Now we can view the body down to the smallest detail, our genetic code. Reducing the body to smaller and smaller fragments, a mechanical view leaves little to chance. If SymbioticA and “Body Worlds” works display our perception of nature and the body, the human element seems distant.