Chicana Ways - Aletta

AnyBody's Concerns 6(2003)
little 8 cell structures, glowing, heavenly blue blooms of
hope. With the embryologist you even get to choose which of
the several to insert there and then, painlessly, back into
the womb.
16 Our human eye is offered by A.R.T. the chance to see
what can actually barely fill a pin head; what's more they are
ours, a part of us which has temporarily been removed from our
body to evolve into the pre-conditions of Life: pre-embryos at
what would be the equivalent of two days after sexual
intercourse, not a time that most women would be able to
imagine, let alone feel the experience of a pregnancy. Now,
with the latest advances in 4D ultrasound pioneered in the UK
by Professor Keith Campbell we are entering a stage when we
can spectate our fetus at six months or more, behaving in our
wombs, sucking its thumb, smiling, winking. The flesh, as the
poet Paul Valery once said, is no longer "the deepest thing."
We can see through it. We now can view our bodies as interior
spectacles in vivo where previously such visual opportunities,
if they were to be offered the layperson at all, would be via
paintings, sculptures, wax works. Today, anatomy meets art.
The magnificently curated Spectacular Bodies exhibition at
London's Hayward Gallery in 2000, the hugely popular
plastinated corpses of Professor Gunther von Hagen's
Bodyworlds seen in London in 2003 are evidence that we will
never cease to be fascinated by the explicit body, the sight
of our bodies within, preserved, bottled, flayed or simply
magnified. What we might speculate is exactly how such ever
http://www.genderforum.uni-koeln.de/anybody/furse.html (15 van 35)31-3-2005 18:21:46