Not even par for the corpse

Dead bodies: ooh. Dead bodies: yuck. That sums up the appeal of Gunther von Hagens's new show, Body Worlds.

Von Hagens is the German anatomist who invented a process called plastination, in which water is removed from the cells of corpses and replaced with plastic. The resulting stiffs are more or less indestructible and can be bent into any shape, just like a Barbie doll. Thus one of von Hagens's flayed artworks is playing chess, while another is riding a skinless horse. The most famous (or notorious) is a pregnant woman, her abdomen cut away to expose her plastinated child. All can be seen in a redundant London brewery, peering through a forest of potted palms like a Columbia Road market for zombies.

So here's the strangeness of it. Anyone who visited the Hayward's Spectacular Bodies show will know this type of thing has been around for 500 years. There was a long tradition of members of the public being able to attend dissections, while Honor? Fragonard's flayed figures were the toast of pre-Revolutionary Paris. In our own, more enlightened times, though, von Hagens's ham-coloured stiffs have been accompanied on their world tour by shivers of horror and howls of protest. It's difficult to see why, since they are about as interesting as shop dummies, and about as real-looking.

Even more peculiar is that anyone should think of them as artworks, and pay £10 to see them. My only explanation for this is that art has become so bound up with shock that anything disturbing is now automatically counted as art. Dead boring, I'd say.

Body Worlds is on until Sept 29, Atlantis Gallery, Old Truman Brewery, 146 Brick Lane E1, daily 9am to 9pm, £10, £8 concs.
Tel: 020 7053 0000
www.bodyworlds.com
Tube: Algate East

Gallery: Corpse close-ups
Comment: Moved by mother and child