“A controversial exhibition featuring preserved corpses having sex opened Thursday in Germany’s capital. Part of his traveling ‘Body Works’ exhibition, ‘The Cycle of Life,’ is showing at Berlin’s Postbahnhof and features 200 human bodies at various life stages — from conception to old age, including embryos and fetuses taken from historic anatomical collections. In one exhibit a male body is lying on his back with a woman sitting astride him with her back towards his head. Torsten Woehlert, spokesman for Berlin’s Culture Ministry, told CNN that there has already been a number of complaints from the public in the press, though none have come to the ministry itself. He said: ‘As it is not against the law, only against good taste, there is not much the government could do anyway.’ Conceived by Gunther von Hagens — dubbed Dr. Death in Germany — the exhibition displays the bodies with their muscles, nerves and tendons on show using a preservation technique he pioneered called plastination. This process involves replacing all body fluids and soluble fat with specially manufactured plastics…. When asked about the coupling of sex and death, von Hagens told Germany’s Bild that ‘death and sex are both taboo topics. I’m bringing them together. Death belongs to life.’ He added that ‘without sex no life would exist.’” — CNN (US)

For those who haven’t yet been exposed to the marvelous, provocative work of Gunther von Hagens, here is a picture of the man with a bare-breasted cadaver. You can learn more about “Dr Death” and his plastination process at his website, bodyworlds.com. Astonishingly, PervScan was unable to come up with an image of the copulating corpses. Here is an image of two other dead bodies in a similarly intimate posture. This 2006 work is titled The Juxtaposed Couple. Isn’t it strange to speak of it as having a date and a title, like a sculpture? It’s made of dead bodies. But then, that’s what it is — a sculpture.

Even when it hasn’t involved sex, the work of Gunther von Hagens has stirred up plenty of controversy in the past. Critics consider his exhibitions lurid and exploitative. Von Hagens argues that they educate and demystify — that he does not show anything a medical student doesn’t see in an anatomy lab. Of course, one presumes that the cadavers in a gross lab don’t copulate… Anyway, all the controversy is silly. The plastinated cadavers are both lurid and educational, and that is precisely whey they are so compelling. Meanwhile, the thing that really ought to scandalize is not when dead bodies assume the postures of living ones, but when living ones go through the motions of life with all the enthusiasm of cadavers.

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