Out of Skin: At Three Gravesides

Abstract

The article discusses three markers of the body limits of beings: the burning bodies of Banaras at the Manikarnika Ghat (the ancient living funeral pyre), the plastinated clean dead body of prosector /plastinator Gunther von Hagens’s Body Worlds exhibition, and the semi-living, partial body/body parts of tissue-engineered life forms in the work of bioartists Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr. It does so by addressing the fundamental question of philosophy: What is Being, applying the perspective of Heidegger’s understanding of artist-philosophers who have developed and use radical new technologies in art to produce new art forms that remove the distance and distinction between art and science. In the idiom of performance philosophy, the article concludes that the new beings subvert time in life and death: Von Hagens and Catts and Zurr in their artwork reveal new understandings of Being through the creation of new techno-bodies (the plastinated body and the meta-body) and new techno-beings: the post-mortal, the semi-living, and the partial life. Von Hagens does so through the action of freezing time; Catts and Zurr do so through the action of growing beyond, surpassing time.