The whole person, covered with smooth skin, is too much like a god, too familiar, too beautiful, too untouchable. The skeleton, as well as the red muscles and shiny internal organs, mean death when they are exposed - so they hide shyly under the skin like under clothes. But in our school, all these treasures of the human body's internal structure were stripped of anything that hinted at a secret. We were counting and memorizing bones and muscles, clean and tidy, because we were going to make them into a general mechanism with a "flaming engine" inside. Our study of plastic anatomy was carefully separated from real life, so we were not afraid of the "insides". We drew the structure of the human body according to a realistic norm - the normal should not frighten.
One day, I secretly took a human leg skeleton home because I didn't have time to finish drawing it at school. I was carrying it hidden in a roll of paper that I was going to draw on. Suddenly, the subway train slowed down, and what had once been a human leg fell out of the roll and onto the carriage floor. The people standing next to me recoiled in horror - for me, this fragment of human skeleton did not look scary - it was an everyday object, a boring nature.
The system of teaching plastic anatomy in academic art education certainly avoids this quite natural urge to mystify the human internal structure. The black-and-white photographs of naked people in the Bummes anatomy textbook we studied were also somewhat detached and seemingly genderless. In art school, the gap between discovering the secret and terrible internal structures that govern life and death and the everyday study of these structures through anatomical models, which made humans look like eviscerated objects that were not worthy of pity, like a calf carcass in the market, had not yet begun to open up before us. At that time, the human body was just a distant object for us to study, in which a complex structure of bones and muscles determined only its wonderful plastic possibilities. There was no room for mystery either on the surface or inside the body.
Now, in a fresh take on my plastic anatomy assignment, I have drawn seven anatomical tables, but I have adjusted the images to reflect a confusing and contradictory set of personal and societal experiences and knowledge about life and death, shame, trauma, illness, love, sex, and war. The academic drawing we were taught was deliberately devoid of any influence of such experiences. The anatomically correct body had to be separated from life, because there was a threat that life's influences could transform, distort, disfigure, or simply change it somehow. The body had to obey certain rules, i.e. be correct, exemplary, because it was the divine body of the Soviet man, inherited from the ancient and Renaissance hero. We learnt to draw a body whose proportions and possible variations were approved by the regulations, by the artistic council. Thus, this regulation prevented us from feeling the connection between the discipline we were studying and the mystery we had the opportunity to join.
So I painted the characters of the anatomical tables, who are amazed by the mysteries of their own structure.
(Vlada Ralko)