ABSTRACT
Professor Didier Sicard, the author of Medicine without Body argues. The tendency to compartmentalize the body is spreading rapidly, so that in the end medicine is no longer interested in the body itself, apart from the odd traumatic wound or skin eruption. Von Hagens is a medical anatomist whose work combines art with medical pathology; he obtains the material for his figural installations by searching through mortuaries. He uses entire bodies, thus adopting an ambiguous position on the border between art and science; he describes his work as both medical and aesthetic. Von Hagens therefore suggest that we should describe these figures as aestheticised dead bodies, rather than simply corpses because the process of decay has been interrupted for aesthetic purposes. Von Hagen's scientific procedure is primarily a method of embalming. However, he chooses to exhibit his plastinated bodies in artistic spaces, positioning them according to conventions that are different from those of traditional medical anatomists.
