Taking art right to the limit

I once had a fight with Damien Hirst. It lasted a day or so, and we soon made up, but the moment of conflict taught me that there were limits to what was possible, and acceptable, in a work of art. I had been editing a book bringing together the Young British Artists of the early Nineties, long before they became voguish. Each artist was offered six pages to fill as he or she saw fit. When Damien's work arrived, it consisted of a contact sheet of photographs, featuring a teenage Hirst and a pal at play in a mortuary full of corpses and body parts. For Damien it was a rite of passage. I don't think he enjoyed it - he confessed to me that the experience of invading the mortuary had terrified him - but he felt compelled to do it, perhaps for a purpose that is close to the impulse of art-making.

The images were unprintable, I thought. They upset me deeply, and I could not come to terms with how they had come about. But I knew that was not reason enough to stop them appearing in the book. After all, freedom of expression was an absolute with which I had grown up. But I grew up a bit more that day, first by seeing that such images could exist, and second, by learning that freedom is, and must be, relative. Where would it leave the question of freedom for every other contributor, if, say, the book was removed from shelves in the shop? And then there was an obligation to every reader.

I called the British Medical Association for advice. There was a scream of panic and outrage at the other end of the telephone line. How did I have such images? Did I realise that it was an offence even to be in possession of them? I cut the call short when the speaker insisted I send the images over to the BMA that afternoon, or legal action might be taken.

In the end, Damien and I reached an elegant accommodation, which made it into print. The images were doctored by him (with black gaffer tape, I recall) to hide any inanimate organic matter. His mediation, for me, made these images much more powerful, charged and mysterious.

I learned from Damien that there is a limit beyond which art should not go, and just how difficult that limit is to define. It is the artist's job constantly to test that limit, but always to be answerable should he or she cross the line.

This week I questioned again my own limits while walking through Gunther von Hagens's Body Worlds exhibition at the Atlantis Gallery in the Old Truman Brewery in the East End's Brick Lane. Here is a professor of anatomy who has found a method of preserving corpses in such a way that they retain many physical characteristics that define them as "human". They look like bodies. At times they look like people. But despite the body count, this is a startlingly dehumanised display. Professor von Hagens lets me see inside the body, but that's not enough. There's the flayed figure holding his own skin, there's the reclining woman with her womb opened up to reveal an eight-month-old foetus. But there is no sense whatsoever here as to why these figures are on display. They are posed in a classical artistic style - the horseman on his rearing horse, the thrusting swordsman - as if making pseudo-statuary were enough to suggest art.

It is not, and we can learn this from any serious contemporary artist who chooses to address precisely this limit between what is acceptable and what is not. Often that line is drawn on the cusp between life and death. Video artist Bill Viola's Nantes Triptych, for example, projects images of a woman giving birth and another woman dying simultaneously. This is not play-acting - it's the real thing. Yes, it's dangerous, and as a viewer it puts me on the line, but I feel that my understanding of that limit is being tested, stretched, but not abused. Photographer Nan Goldin's pictures (in a stunning installation at the Whitechapel Gallery until the end of this week) explore a similar vision of life at the edge. Here are those people who live on the border of life that we might never encounter - drug addicts, drag queens and people dying from Aids. Where Viola and Goldin are to be trusted (and trust is a key term here) is that their work, in all events, is about love and faith in the processes of humanity.

When artists make work, they put themselves on the line. They give of themselves, as much as they can give. But the artist's eye is on just how much we can take. This is not the case with von Hagens and his cadavers. When he sections a body, the documentation that accompanies the display lays claim to something informative, educational - isn't it interesting and beautiful, he might be saying, to see a section of cancerous breast tissue? But it is not interesting, simply because he has not considered any meaning or effect beyond what it looks like, beyond the "decorative".

Walking past body after body, I can't help but feel diminished by the experience. Von Hagens has made me a voyeur upon a scene I should not have witnessed. And I feel abandoned as I move through the grizzly tableaux. Von Hagens's so-called "plastination" process appears to be able to preserve some semblance of the living body after death. But in that process, he's lost all of those stories that make up the person in life and allow us to hold on to something of them after they are gone. Although this is a gallery of human bodies, there is no humanity left here at all.

? Andrew Renton is Slade Curator at University College London.

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